"Laws are the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape. -Solon (a Greek lawgiver, c.600 BC)"

I saw this quote in a Tweet.

I thought the quote descriptive of what generally happens in the US justice system.  Poor people get sent to prison for years for minor crimes while rich and famous people are much more likely to get much shorter terms, or no terms, for more egregious crimes.  The Sacklers, for instance, are still enjoying their billions out of prison.

The Tweet was a reply to a video showing the most well known unindicted Jan 6 conspirators.

But I try to always check on quotes - they are often  

• bogus 
• misquoted
• attributed to the wrong person.

This one is genuine, and while it's reworded, it conveys the meaning of the original, and while it cites the right source, it gives credit to Solon rather than to Anacharsis.

But it's calls attention to a truth that's been articulated 2600 years ago.

From Tufts: 

"5.

In particular we are told of private intercourse between Solon and Anacharsis, and between Solon and Thales, of which the following accounts are given.¹ Anacharsis came to Athens, knocked at Solon's door, and said that he was a stranger who had come to make ties of friendship and hospitality with him. On Solon's replying that it was better to make one's friendships at home, ‘Well then,’ said Anacharsis, ‘do thou, who art at home, make me thy friend and guest.’ [2] So Solon, admiring the man's ready wit, received him graciously and kept him with him some time. This was when he was already engaged in public affairs and compiling his laws. Anacharsis, accordingly, on learning what Solon was about, laughed at him for thinking that he could check the injustice and rapacity of the citizens by written laws, which were just like spiders' webs; they would hold the weak and delicate who might be caught in their meshes, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful. [3] To this Solon is said to have answered that men keep their agreements with each other when neither party profits by the breaking of them, and he was adapting his laws to the citizens in such a manner as to make it clear to all that the practice of justice was more advantageous than the transgression of the laws. But the results justified the conjecture of Anacharsis rather than the hopes of Solon. It was Anacharsis, too, who said, after attending a session of the assembly, that he was amazed to find that among the Greeks, the wise men pleaded causes, but the fools decided them.

1 In Plut. Sol. 5 and Plut. Sol. 6.

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. 1.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy."

I'd note that The Real Harry Ripcord profile says, "CEO of Urban Dictionary"

What's The Big Deal About 2022? It's An Arbitrary Number. Think Bigger

A goal of this blog is to get people to break out of patterns of thinking so they can see the world or some portion of the world differently.  To step back and recognize '"truths" they believe as actually just one way of knowing the world.  

So New Years Day seems a good time to meddle with our concept of being in 2022.  Because for Jews New Years happened several months ago and it is 5782.  For Chinese, New Year is a month off and it will be 4730.  For Thais the New Year will begin in Aril and they will usher in the year  2565.

It's good to have rituals around time.  They help us step back and think about what we've done over a period of time. Teaching is a great profession because you get to start fresh with each semester - it's not just one continuous long slog.  Birthdays help us reflect as do anniversaries.  Or the changing seasons.  

But it's also important to remember how arbitrary the numbers can be.  There is some connection to the natural world.  365 days is close to how long it takes the earth to revolve around the sun.  But other cultures pin their years to the moon.  But much about time is a human decision about how things should be.  

Calendars Through The Ages tells us:

Before today’s Gregorian calendar was adopted, the older Julian calendar was used. It was admirably close to the actual length of the year, as it turns out, but the Julian calendar was not so perfect that it didn’t slowly shift off track over the following centuries. But, hundreds of years later, monks were the only ones with any free time for scholarly pursuits – and they were discouraged from thinking about the matter of "secular time" for any reason beyond figuring out when to observe Easter. In the Middle Ages, the study of the measure of time was first viewed as prying too deeply into God’s own affairs – and later thought of as a lowly, mechanical study, unworthy of serious contemplation.

As a result, it wasn’t until 1582, by which time Caesar’s calendar had drifted a full 10 days off course, that Pope Gregory XIII (1502 - 1585) finally reformed the Julian calendar. Ironically, by the time the Catholic church buckled under the weight of the scientific reasoning that pointed out the error, it had lost much of its power to implement the fix. Protestant tract writers responded to Gregory’s calendar by calling him the "Roman Antichrist" and claiming that its real purpose was to keep true Christians from worshiping on the correct days. The "new" calendar, as we know it today, was not adopted uniformly across Europe until well into the 18th century.

The same site tells us about the beginning of counting the years.  

"Was Jesus born in the year 0?

No.

There are two reasons for this:

There is no year 0.

Jesus was born before 4 B.C.E.

The concept of a year "zero" is a modern myth (but a very popular one). In our calendar, C.E. 1 follows immediately after 1 B.C.E. with no intervening year zero. So a person who was born in 10 B.C.E. and died in C.E. 10, would have died at the age of 19, not 20.

Furthermore, as described in section 2.14, our year reckoning was established by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century. Dionysius let the year C.E. 1 start one week after what he believed to be Jesus’ birthday. But Dionysius’ calculations were wrong. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus was born under the reign of king Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C.E.. It is likely that Jesus was actually born around 7 B.C.E.. The date of his birth is unknown; it may or may not be 25 December."

 I'd note for those Christians who feel they are discriminated against, most of the world uses the Western calendar that is roughly based on the birth of Christ.  Even if they also have calendars based on other events.  

Let's look at some other New Years from different cultures.

Indian New Year Diwali

"One of the most celebrated Indian New Year is 'Diwali' ', which means 'the celebration of lights'. Deepavali symbolize the starting of the Hindu New Year which is generally the main holiday of India. This festival is celebrated in the month of Kartika, which generally falls in the October. Diwali is an holiday in India, Nepal, Guyana, Malaysia and Singapore. Even though, it is a Hindu festival and has deep Hindu mythology connected with its origin, people from different religions also celebrate Diwali. As the name implies, Diwali is celebrated with lights, lamps and fireworks. The main reason behind Diwali celebration is to get away of the evil, which is symbolized as darkness, and to follow the paths of virtue."

From The Heart of Hinduism:

"Various eras are used for numbering the years; the most common are the Vikrami Era, beginning with the coronation of King Vikram-aditya in 57 BCE and the Shaka Era, counting from 78 CE. In rituals the priest often announces the dates according to KaliYuga, (see Kala: Time). For these three systems, the year 2000 corresponds to 2057, 1922, and 5102 respectively, though the last figure is subject to some debate."

Telugu New Year

"is known as Ugadi, which is derived from "Yuga Aadi" means New Age. According to the Hindu mythology Lord Brahma has created universe on Chaitra Shuddha Prathpade thus Telugu New Year is celebrated on Chaitra Shuddha Prathipade which is also first day of the lunar calendar. Telugu New Year is bright full moon day of the first month of spring."

Enkutatash – Ethiopian New Year!

"Every year on September 11, Ethiopians celebrate their New Year. The holiday is called “Enkutatash,” which literary means the “gift of jewels.” This naming came from the legendary visit of the Ethiopian Queen Sheba to that of King Solomon of Jerusalem back in 98 BC. During her visit, this famous queen of Ethiopia brought the king a collection of “jewels.” Upon her return home, the queen was restocked with a new supply of “enku” (jewels) for her treasury.

Ethiopians called the New Year “Enkutatash” because the period the queen arrived back to Ethiopia coincided with the New Year’s celebration in September. Celebrating the New Year in September, however, is originally connected to the Bible as it is the period that God created the Heavens and the Earth and so this period should be the beginning of a New Year."

Songkran - Thailand  From a post I did in 2008 when we were living in Chiangmai.

Chiang Mai.com gives an overview of the holiday of Songkran (the link is no longer any good)

"The family sprinkling scented water from silver bowls on a Buddha image is a ritual practiced by all Thais in on the third day of Songkran, known as Wan Payawan. This is the first official day of the New Year and on this day people cleanse the Buddha images in their homes as well as in the temples with scented water. The family is dressed in traditional Thai costume and wearing leis of jasmine flower buds. The water is scented with the petals of this flower."

I'd recommend visiting the post this comes from to see how it goes from a reverend washing of Buddhas to a free for all water fight in the streets.  

She knows I have a camera, so she's offering to douse me just a little bit.  It ended up down my back.  There are over three posts on our Songkran in Chiangmai.

And there's a Part 2 and Part 3 as well that go into different aspects of Songkran.

This year in Thailand the new year will be 2565

The Burmese New Year is related to the Thai New Year.

"Burma’s most important festival

Taking place from April 13 to 16 each year, the Buddhist festival of Thingyan is celebrated over four to five days, culminating on the Lunar New Year Day.

Water throwing is the distinguishing feature of this festival, and you’ll find people splashing water at each other almost everywhere in the country.

Thingyan traces its roots back to a Hindu myth. The King of Brahmas called Arsi, lost a wager to the King of Devas, Thagya Min, who decapitated Arsi. Miraculously, the head of an elephant was placed onto Arsi’s body, and he then became Ganesha.

The Hindu god was so powerful that if his head was thrown into the sea it would dry up immediately. If it were thrown onto land it would be scorched. If it were thrown up into the air the sky would burst into flames.

Thagya Min therefore ordained that Ganesha’s head be carried by one princess after another who took turns for a year each. The new year thus has come to signify the this annual change of hands."

Chinese New Year:  (This is a great site, with almost everything you could want to know about Chinese New Year)

"Chinese New Year is celebrated by more than 20% of the world. It’s the most important holiday in China and to Chinese people all over. Here are 21 interesting facts that you probably didn’t know about Chinese New Year.

1. Chinese New Year is also known as the Spring Festival

In China, you’ll hear it being called chunjie (春节), or the Spring Festival. It’s still very wintry, but the holiday marks the end of the coldest days. People welcome spring and what it brings along: planting and harvests, new beginnings and fresh starts."

This year it begins on February 1, 2022 and it will be the Year of the Tiger.  It will be the year 4720.

Jewish New Year - The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are very holy days - time to reflect on one's failings and to ask for forgiveness from God and from those you have wronged.  It's also a time to forgive those who have wronged you.  It's currently the year 5782.

You can see more here.

So let's not get so hung up on 2022.  Today is just another day, following yesterday.  Let's be sensible in dealing with COVID. 

1.   Let's work hard to preserve the US democracy - with time and with money. Write your members of Congress.  Help those organizations fighting voter suppression.  And figure out who is doing Stacy Abrams work in your state.  And if nobody is, find some partners and do it yourself.   

2.  And let's also do everything we can to take national and world action to minimize the impacts of climate change.  For that, I'd suggest connecting with Citizens Climate Lobby, the most focused and efficient organization I know of.  

3.  Be kind, but not a sucker.  Know your power - don't underestimate it or overestimate it - and stand up to bullies when that's feasible and protect others who are targeted.  Take a self defense class if you feel threatened.  Our former president has given his followers to act on their worst impulses.  But don't give up.  The super power I wish on everyone is the power to make everyone around you feel loved.  

 

" . . .it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair"

This book was published in November 26, 1859.  It takes place from 1775 through 1793 in Paris and London.   Dickens wrote about a period that began 85 years earlier and ended 67 years earlier.  He himself wasn't born until 1812, nineteen years after the end of the time he wrote about.  

Today, that would be like writing about the period between 1936 and 1954.  There are folks alive today who were alive in that period who could be consulted.  

Looking ahead, it would be like a writer in the year 2093 writing about events between 2008 and 2026.  How much of today's social media posts and videos will be available to that writer?

A Tale Of Two Cities  begins with this single sentence paragraph.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,  it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on being received for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

 

It does seem to describe the times we're living in.  

And many of us might see similarities between the inside cover illustration and January 6, 2021.

It's still less than a year since that infamous day. But quickly it will be further and further behind us.    Most of us see it as a day of infamy when Donald Trump hoped to overthrow the election and install himself permanently in the White House. A troublingly noisy and large minority see it as a day when patriots tried to overthrow a democratic election.  I'm hoping it's the worst Trump legacy, but I worry there will be more and worse.  

How many years will it take for historians to give the verdict?  And how long will that verdict stick?

"

The National Archive Has Released 1491 Documents Related To JFK Investigation

 There are 150 pages of titles and each title (at least on the pages I looked at) were linkable. These were made available yesterday.  What I saw were reports of investigations on people that someone thought was suspicious.   For example there's a document on a Gilberto Portocarpo Lopez, who had the misfortune to return to Cuba to visit his ailing mother immediately after Kennedy's assassination.   The document seems to clear him of any connection to the assassination.  

page 7 of the document

Also interesting to some, might be 

• the editing notes on the document.  
•  the notes about how the CIA didn't share information because they didn't want to reveal how they got the information.  
• the names and bits of information on the people investigated, questioned, and the investigators might be of interest to people who are related to them

I also looked at testimony by William E. Colby, Director of the CIA before US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activity.  I would guess that most of this is already known or suspected.  This time I was smarter and included page numbers.  

 I suspect there isn't anything too interesting hidden in these many documents.  But I'm not a JFK Assassination buff. 

Here's some questioning about other assassinations.  

I get the sense that Colby is good at evasive answers and the Senators are good at knowing when they shouldn't press for better answers.  Of course I could be wrong, but that's what it feels like to me.  

The next two pages are about a meeting with Robert Kennedy where the CIA was practicing the live editing I felt in the previous page.  

If all this is top secret and being made public for the first time, then was was it marked "Photocopy from Gerald Ford Library"?  But I'm not going to nibble that bait.  

This trove of documents is a rabbit hole I really don't want to pursue any further.  There's a whole JFK assassination industry ready to do that.  But it was a good excuse to put off redistricting board lawsuits.  And to give readers an alternative time waster to Twitter.  And this blog.  

The Man From Porlock

 Indulge me as I borrow this poem from the Poetry Foundation website.  Coleridge was born in 1772, which means he was three years old when Paul Revere made his famous ride.  Four years old when the Declaration of Independence was written.  Nine when the Articles of Confederation were written.  How much would a child of that age have been aware of the momentous events that were taking place then?  He was 11 when the Treaty of Paris ended the war in 1783. 

This poem was written in 1797 when Coleridge was 25, when John Adams was succeeding George Washington as the second president of the United States.  And, a note to give poets and other writers hope, it was published in 1816, a year after Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo.  

You can't read it like a tweet.  You have to slow down.  The words flow in a different rhythm.  Let yourself relax and get caught up in that rhythm. 

Kubla Khan

BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

So why have I introduced this poem here tonight?  In part because the post I was writing just isn't ready yet and I thought I shouldn't let too many days go by.  But that's not why I offer Coleridge.  Coleridge comes courtesy of Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winning Turkish novelist.  In his incredible book Snow, poet Ka goes to Kars, a town in the northeast of Turkey, as a journalist.  It snows the entire time he's there.  Ka has lived in Germany and is a famous Turkish poet and while the people of Kars have different suspicions of why he is in Kars, they know he's a famous poet and he's been asked to recite a recent poem.  

Just before his public recital, Necip, a local youth who has aspirations to be a poet as well, corners Ka and tells him about a landscape that appears to him when he tries to imagine a world where God does not exist.  Pamuk writes:

"He thought about Necip's landscape - he could remember his description word for word as if it were already a poem - and if no one came from Porlock he was sure he would soon be writing the poem in his notebook."

The reader of Snow is just as surprised and puzzled by the reference to the man from Porlock as you might be.  But Pamuk continues:

"The man from Porlock!  During our last years in school when Ka and I would stay up half the night talking about literature, this was one of our favorite topics.  Anyone who knows anything about English poetry will remember the note at the start of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."  It explains how the work is a 'fragment of a poem, from a vision during a dream";  the poet had fallen asleep after taking medicine for an illness (actually, he'd taken opium for fun) and had seen, in his deepest sleep, sentences from the book he'd been reading just before losing consciousness, except that now each sentence and each object had taken on a life of its own in a magnificent dreamscape to become a poem.  Imagine, a magnificent poem that had created itself, without the poet's having exerted any mental energy!  Even more amazing, when Coleridge woke up he could remember this splendid poem word for word.  He got out his pen and ink and some paper and carefully began to write it down, one line after the other, as if he were taking dictation.  He had just written the last line of the poem as we know it when there came a knock at the door.  He rose to answer it, and it was a man from the nearby city of Porlock, come to collect a debt. As soon as he'd dealt with this man, he rushed back to his table, only to discover that he'd forgotten the rest of the poem, except for a few scattered words and the general atmosphere."

What does this have to do with anything?  I suppose someone could use it to interpret what is happening in the US today, but for me it's just an interesting, unexpected pleasure of reading Snow.

Though we all get visits from the man from Porlock at the most inopportune times.  

 

Oh, and it began to snow about the time I was reading tonight.  

You can learn more about Coleridge's contributions here.

POP. 1208 - Small Town Texas Around 1917 As Described In 1964

 

I'd have never read this book if it hadn't been one of the book club choices.  Chosen by a member who is also an author.  As I read the book, I did think about why an author would pick this book. And at the book club meeting, he said he read it because it was on a list of books given to him by another author.  The 25 books that most influenced him as a writer.  And he also acknowledged some hesitation about recommending it to our group.  It was a test, of sorts, of us.  

It begins like this:

"Well, sir, I should have been sitting pretty, just about as pretty as a man could sit.  Here I was, the high sheriff of Potts County, and I was drawing almost two thousand dollars a year - not to mention what I could pick up on the side.  On top of that, I had free living quarters on the second floor of the courthouse, just as nice a place as a man could ask for, and it even had a bathroom so that I didn't have to bathe in a washtub or tramp outside to a privy, like most folks in town did. I guess you could say that Kingdom Come was really here as far as I was concerned.  I had it made, and it looked like I could go on having it made --being high sheriff of Potts County --as long as I minded my own business and didn't arrest no one unless I just couldn't get out of it and they didn't amount to nothin'.

And yet I was worried. I had so many troubles that I was worried plumb sick."

That really is a good way to start this book.  It foretells lots of the troubles without giving nothin' away.  Whoops.  It's catching.   

So what's wrong with this book?  Well, it's narrated by the main character, a very small town Sheriff, who is more than flawed.  It's all from his point of view and it's all in his colorful language.  The most difficult parts for me were the vivid descriptions of the town's black population.  

Why did that bother me?  Yes, of course, the N-word liberally spit out in some parts of the book.  And the disgustingly racist attitudes and situations portrayed.  But it was published in 1964 (and so written before the Civil Rights Act passed) and those were different times.  White folks still were the only editors of public speech back then.  And it describes a time almost 50 years earlier.  We shouldn't censor history because we don't like the words and situations that existed then.  We should learn from them and not in cleaned up versions.  And, if I recall correctly, Leonard Pitts' The Last Thing You Surrender - a 2019 novel by a black author - uses the N-word - and includes a very troubling lynching.  

But I'm not using that word in this post.  Mostly because I'm thinking of one particular friend who would probably be disturbed -rather than offended - seeing me spell it out.  

And I think that's what disturbed me about reading this book for the book club.  I didn't ask the man who recommended the book this question:  "If we had an African-American in our group, would you have recommended the book?"  The fact that the book club is all white men over 50 means that we can read a book like this without any of us personally feeling demeaned by the language and situations.  None of our families were the subject of this particular kind of inhumanity.  And the fact that the things done in the book to blacks was done by whites, adds to the awkwardness.  Women weren't treated well either.  Actually, no one was treated well in this story

Yet, I find that I can pretty much tell you the whole story, though not in quite the same colorful language as the high sheriff of Potts County.  

And the subject matter of this book seems to come from personal experience.  From Wikipedia:

"Thompson's father was sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma. He ran for the state legislature in 1906, but was defeated. Soon after he left the sheriff's office under a cloud due to rumors of embezzlement. The Thompson family moved to Texas."

Also from Wikipedia:

 Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the foregoing: He let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."^[2]

There's no doubt that Thompson was using the sheriff to shine light on everything that was wrong about small town life in Oklahoma and Texas.  

Talking about his (the sheriff's) father:

"But that's the way my daddy was -- like those people.  They buy some book by a fella that don't know a god-dang thing more than they do (or he wouldn't be having to write books).  And that's supposed to set 'em straight about everything.  Or they buy themselves a bottle of pills.  Or they say the whole trouble is with other folks, and the only thing to do is get rid of 'em.  Or they claim we got to war with another country.  Or . . .  or God knows what all."

Seems those folks are still with us today.  Lots of them.  These are the folks who went to lynchings.  These are the folks who stormed the Capitol on January 6.  And the folks who rather take advice from Tucker Carlson that Dr. Fauci.  

I guess there was a lot in this book.  I think I knew it when I was reading it.  I just didn't like any of the people in the book.  Yes, there was probably something decent in them all, but the Sheriff was focused on the other parts.  If you asked me if would recommend the book, I'd answer using the sheriff's favorite phrase: "I wouldn't say that I would, but then I wouldn't say that I wouldn't."

Afghanistan Takes Over NPR's Morning Edition, With Brief Nod To Haiti Earthquake

Afghanistan has been a disaster waiting to happen for the last 19 years or so.  The English has to give up and leave Afghanistan and then later, so did the Russians.  

The US didn't learn from these examples, or from Vietnam.  We think of ourselves as exceptional and above history.  

Now NPR is struggling to figure out what is happening today. The line up of stories today was pretty much all Afghanistan, plus two segments on the Haitian earthquake.  It's what you'd expect of coverage in the middle of a crisis - lots of random comments, some blame game activity, and lots of opinion, most of it focused, without context, on right now..  The basic impression is disaster, failure, catastrophe.  

Of the NPR segments I heard two people who seemed, at least in part, clear headed:

• Former U.S. Ambassador To Afghanistan Comments On Developing Situation In The Country Ronald Neumann served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007   He said, in various ways, "I really don't know enough to say."  That's probably what many others should have said more.  He also said that Biden's decision to pull out was a correct decision, but the execution of that decision has been absolutely disastrous.  I think that's probably the clearest and most accurate assessment I heard.  

KEITH: The Biden administration has essentially indicated they don't see this as all their fault. You know, this was two decades in the making. The Afghan military was trained by the U.S. and equipped. And in a way, it's like President Biden does not want to own this. Do you think that that is possible?

NEUMANN: Short answer is no. The long answer is you need to distinguish between the decision to withdraw, which I didn't like but is arguably correct, and the manner of implementation, of execution of that decision, which has been an absolute disaster from beginning to end. They could have taken more time. They had no plan how to support the Afghan military that they were leaving. We built an air force that depended on contractors for maintenance and pulled the contractors. Supply system - ditto. And we profoundly shocked the Afghan army and morale by pulling out and pulling our air cover when we trained them.

[I'd note that Neumann served as the Ambassador to Afghanistan under Bush/Cheney.] 

But the US has been training the Afghan army for 20 years.  How we're getting out is, the problem, but is there a different exit available.  Neumann complains that we pulled out the contractors who maintained the equipment.  Should we have left them in there?  Many of them were highly skilled whites from around the world.  Others were low skilled laborers hired on the cheap from poor countries.  Why hadn't we trained Afghans for those positions?  Surely in 20 years we could have.  There are many highly educated Afghans.  They aren't incapable of learning those skills.  

The specific disaster he and others are speaking of is the failure to get out all the interpreters and others who helped the US.  And all the women who are in jeopardy of a Taliban patriarchal dictatorship.  But the Trump State Department and Homeland Security had been holding up those visas for years.   Biden announced, in the end of June, that he was relocating tens of thousands of Afghans out of the country.  But bureaucratic obstacles have held many of these up.  

But realistically, how many Afghan women would the US take and how long would that take?  My sense is that this was a disaster that was going to happen eventually and up to now, no president was willing to let it happen on their watch.  

If, indeed, the women of Afghanistan have the most to lose from the Taliban, maybe the US should have trained an all women Afghan army that would have fought as hard as the Taliban.  

But maybe even that wouldn't have been enough.  

The other interview that I thought made the most sense was an Army vet. Mike Jason.

• A Vet Formerly Deployed In Afghanistan Shares His Perspective On The Chaos In The Country   -  "JASON: We're all trying to process that, right? Like, 20 years - $89 billion, 300,000-some odd Afghan security forces. How is it collapsing as we watch? And so all I can write is my own little corner of the global war on terror. You know, Afghanistan - righteous anger and indignation over the 9/11 attack. And we went in with a light footprint and took the country over, like, lightning quick. And then what? What was the next step? And all of a sudden, we turn around, and two years later, we're in Iraq, and resources start flowing over there.                    And the question is, what was the strategy and policy for what the military should be doing with regard to security forces in both theaters? We didn't fight a 20-year war. We fought 20 individual wars incoherently, kind of without a policy strategic direction. So at the same time, the Afghans who are the recipients of this training, advice and equipment also know the clock is ticking and making their own calculus for their own safety and the safety of their families, while never really tackling, you know - all this cash is flowing in, the corruption, the drugs, the morale, the logistics. Why weren't we able to ever address these really problematic institutional issues?                  We voted - we, the American people - we voted for four sequential administrations that campaigned on getting out of this operation. The intent was clear. But I look back on the presidential debates over the last several elections. I mean, Afghanistan may have gotten seconds or minutes of debate. It was always in the background. But why didn't we debate it more? Why didn't we discuss it more forcefully? Why didn't somebody make the case to the American people clearly and forcefully why we should stay or go and why the sacrifice is or is not worth it?"

His take makes a lot of sense to me, as a former Peace Corps volunteer, who knows how much being able to speak to the people in their own language matters. It means you don't have to depend on interpreters, and it means you have a much better understanding of the culture and the differences between yours and theirs.  Your struggle with their language means you understand your own ignorance and appreciate when they speak your language much better than you speak theirs.

I also did research in China, using my own Hong Kong students to help me out with interpretation.  They would tell me when the official translation was not what the Chinese speaker had actually said.  They told me about unspoken cues such as when the Chinese speaker's response was a non-sequitur:   it meant, "Drop this line of questioning because I don't want to answer these questions."  My students even took advantage of my foreignness and apologized for my ignorance and sometimes were able to get answers they themselves, because of culture, would never had asked.  In other situations I had just one Hong Kong student acting as my interpreter and I could negotiate with him to ask the question a different way that sometimes gave us break throughs.  I learned a lot about the politics of translations. Interpreters are human beings with egos.  My students had to be sure they were respectful to the official interpreters and avoid making him look bad.  And my Peace Corps experiences in Thailand helped me understand that I knew nothing and which made it easier to be humble and respectful. 

I'm sure, from the fervor some US vets are showing in their efforts to get their Afghan interpreters out of the country, that many of them, if not most, had very close bonds with the interpreters.  But I also suspect there were interpreters whose motivation for being their friend was a visa to the US, while others were passing on information to the Taliban.  We all want to be liked and even knowing the culture and language, we get taken in by people who see us as a ticket to their freedom - whether that be financial, political, or professional.  

We Didn't Learn From Vietnam

The basic justification for getting into Vietnam was the Domino Theory, based on how the Soviet Union took over the countries of Eastern Europe after World War II.  The politicians and the military leaders in the 1950s and 1960s had been part of WWII and didn't want to repeat the mistake of trusting the Soviet Union.  Thus we had to hold Vietnam lest China and the Soviet Union use Vietnam as the stepping stone to take over the rest of Southeast Asia.  One domino falling after the other.  

It was the wrong model.  In Vietnam we were fighting a battle of independence from colonial masters.  The French threw in the towel, but the US stepped in to take France's place.  The US backed the Catholic (learned from their colonial conqueror) faction in the South and spent years trying to train the ARVN- the South Vietnamese army - so it could defeat the North.  In that war, we had a conventional military mentality fighting against an army that used guerrilla tactics.  The US troops never really knew who was one of our Vietnamese and who was one of theirs.  We were fighting on Vietnamese land against an enemy that wanted to rule its own country.  We were supporting the remnants of the colonial rulers.  And we had the same problems with corruption because of the massive amounts of supplies and money coming into the country.  

You'd think that the military and political leaders - again, many of whom had fought in Vietnam - would have learned from that war.  But again, we went into a country that had thrown out two world powers - first the British and then the Soviet Union.  Again, most of our soldiers knew nothing about Afghan culture or language.  Again, there was an assumption that "the greatest country in the world" knew better.  There was an assumption that modern weapons would defeat a guerrilla army.  

A couple aspects of Afghanistan today are quite different from Vietnam in 1975.

• Afghanistan has been fought with an all volunteer army and extensive use of contracted labor.  Since only those who wanted to serve (or saw the military as a way to get a job and education), the rest of the country could ignore the war.  With all 18 year old men eligible to be drafted, the anti-war movement had a much more vocal and aware support to end the war.
• In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military had more control over what battle field footage the US public saw in the evening news.  Embedding journalists with units had much different results than the way journalists and photographers were assigned in Vietnam.  (See Embedded Journalism and the Forward of The Military and the Media 1962 - 1968)
• As Kabul falls, modern technology - phone cameras and social media - mean that we're seeing civilian created content and people are talking by phone live today and putting video on social media.  For Vietnam we only saw or heard what the news media offered us.  

Finally, Jason mentioned $89 billion.  There's another way to look at this war. 

💯As @attackerman has written, the GWOT was a historic transfer of public wealth to private hands. https://t.co/YqgFW2PF1K

— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) August 14, 2021

Not Learning From History. Not Knowing Statistics

 The Anchorage Daily News headline today:

"Sicker and younger:  Unvaccinated people drive new trend"

I couldn't help but mentally edit  Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous quote about the Nazi's victims.

First they [it] came for the socialists [nursing home residents], and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.[a nursing home resident]

Then they [it] came for the trade unionists, [other seniors and immuno-compromised] and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.  [a senior or immune-compromised]

Then they [it] came for the Jews,[unvaccinated] and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. young

Then they [it] came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

A major problem driving all this is STATISTICAL IGNORANCE.  People simply don't understand statistics, so terms like 'flattening the curve' or 'cases per 100,000' don't really mean anything.  The graphs are just pictures of curves and straight lines.  

And newspaper headlines and Tweets don't help.  Either the writers and editors don't understand statistics or they are intentionally trying to mislead.  (Sure, it's rarely either/or, they might just be rushing and not thinking)

Do I need to explain these Tweets?  Yeah, I guess, some folks won't get this.  

The original tweet (Ken Dilanian) highlights that 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans tested positive for COVID.  There's no mention of: 

1. what the time period was
2. how many of them were asymptomatic
3. how many had minor symptoms
4. how many were hospitalize
5. how many needed a ventilator
6. how many died

And Derek Willis also points out that if you realize that this was .08 percent of all the 164 million people who have been vaccinated, the amazing effectiveness of the vaccines are highlighted instead of making it sound like the vaccinations are ineffective.  

One last thing that I've mentioned before, but isn't talked about enough.  The longer the virus is able to find refuge in human hosts, the more potentially deadlier and more contagious variants can evolve.  (And you have to understand and believe in evolution to understand that point.)  So, the more people who are vaccinated (locally, but also world wide, cause people travel and virus hitchhike on those travelers) the fewer refuges there are for virus to mutate.  

It seems to me we're all in a leaky boat together in the ocean.  The water is up to our ankles.  A small but vocal group of the passengers want to drill holes in the bottom of the boat to let the water drain out.  Those are the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers.  

The Eight Pillars Of Caste And The Fight To Hide Truth

  The critics of "Critical Race Theory" are out in full force.  Today (I started this Friday) I heard Ted Cruz attacked CRT with lots of venom and no facts.  I read a piece by gay conservative Andrew Sullivan give a more nuanced description of 'liberal' defenses of CRT.  And I read about how the Southern Baptist Convention, while managing to elect a new president who promises a thorough investigation of sexual abuse complaints among Southern Baptists, also 

"approved a consensus measure regarding critical race theory that did not mention it by name but rejected any view that sees racism as rooted in 'anything other than sin.'"

[I read the AP article in the Anchorage Daily News, but getting a link now directly from AP, I see the handling of CRT by the Baptists was more complex than just this quote suggests.] 

I wrote a letter to the editor almost two weeks ago, because I think it's important for people to understand that this is a cynical ploy by conservatives to do two things:

• make people associate any talk of race with anti-white, anti-American, anti-capitalism
• supercharge an issue to rile up whites to vote in 2022 

In any case I've been wanting to add more information from a book that documents systemic racism and thus would be caught up in the very big net being cast by the anti-CRT campaign) to show how much this CRT and discussions of race are NOT what the conservatives claim.  CRT is based on well researched, factual evidence that the attacks make no effort to disprove.  Rather they have created a bogey man they call CRT without actually defining what it is.  They just list their supposed  dangers.   

I'm almost finished with  Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, she argues in this book that caste is a bigger factor than race in the subjugation of Blacks in the United States.  Though, of course, skin color is the critical marker of caste.  

She compares the caste system of India - the most clearly articulated caste system - to the systems in the United States and Nazi Germany.  In the US she says the two castes are White and Black with a gray zone in between.  In Nazi Germany she looks at how Jews were systematically dehumanized and treated as a subordinate caste to Aryans.  She compares the lowest class,  Untouchable class - the Dalits - to African-Americans.  

To make the comparison she identifies The eight pillars of Caste.  I'll describe the a little further here (Wilkerson takes 60 pages so my quick summary will be just that, a quick summary.  But first I'll just offer the list and let you speculate what each might entail.

• Pillar Number One:  Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
• Pillar Number Two:  Heritability
• Pillar Number Three:  Endogeny and the Control of Marriage and Mating
• Pillar Number Four:  Purity vs. Pollution
• Pillar Number Five:  Occupational Hierarchy
• Pillar Number Six:  Dehumanization and Stigma
• Pillar Number Seven:  Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a means of Control
• Pillar Number Eight:  Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority

That all makes sense, right?  I'm assuming mostly US readers here, though folks from India drop by as well regularly.  This list probably is easier for the lowest classes - Dalits and Blacks - to relate to than members of other castes, particularly the highest classes.  

1.  Divine Will and the Laws of Nature - The key point here, if I understood this right, is that opposing the caste system is to oppose the will of God, to attack the laws of Nature, because, according to caste upholders,  Caste system are not created by humans, but by God(s) or nature.  

She tells us about Manu, "the all-knowing" explaining the origins of the world 

"and then, to fill the land, he created the Brahmin, the highest caste, from his mouth, the Kshatriya from his arms, the Vaishya from his thighs, and from his feet, the Shudra, the lowest of the four varnas...

"Unmentioned among the original four varnas were those deemed so low that they were beneath even the feet of the Shudra.  They were living out the afflicted karma of the past, they were not to be touched and some not even to be seen.  Their very shadow was a pollutant.  They were outside of the caste system and thus outcastes.  [How many of you had ever considered 'outcastes' so literally before?]  These were the Untouchables who would later come to be known as Dalits, the subordinate caste of India."

Christians, Wilkerson tells us, also justified their treatment of Blacks with their holy book.  Going to the story of Noah.  Noah got drunk of the wine from his vineyard.

"The wine overtook him, and he lay uncovered inside his tent.  Ham, who would become the father of a son Canaan, happened into the tent and saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside."

Shem and Japheth went into the tent backwards and covered Noah without seeing his nakedness.

"When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what Ham had done, he cursed Ham's son, Canaan, and the generations to follow, saying, "Cursed be Canaan!  The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers."

"As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them.  From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah's curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God's emissary, Noah himself." 

How does she know this?  She's quoting Thomas R.R. Cobb who wrote a history of slavery in the mid-1800s.  In the endnote she writes:

"This interpretation of Genesis was debated, oddly enough by some who were even more hateful of blacks than most enslavers.  They argued that this interpretation could not be true, because Africans were not human, they were beasts and therefore could not have descended from a son of Noah, cursed or not"

Okay.  Clearly I can't go into so much detail for each of the eight pillars.  But knowing about the Indian caste origins is probably not something most US readers know.  I also wanted here, at least, to show that these points are documented.  The other seven pillars are treated the same way.

I'd note that I haven't heard any CRT critics dispute facts like these.  They merely dismiss CRT as un-American and as attacks on whites, while I see it as offering us a factual counter-narrative to the history written by the victors - the people who enslaved Blacks and forcibly removed the Indigenous people from their land.  

Each of the pillars has the same kind of examples and documentation.  I won't go into as much detail because I think they're relatively easy for people to understand.  And those who can't, can borrow a copy of the book from the library or even buy one.  

2.  Heretibility-

"You were born o a certain caste and remained in that caste, subject the high status or low stigma it conferred, for the rest of your days and into the lives of your descendants."

Which requires the next pillar.

3.  Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating - Engodogamy is the restricting of marriage to people within the same caste.  Wilkerson documents the many laws in many states that prohibited marriage between Blacks and whites.  

Which is also required because of the next pillar.

4.  Purity versus Pollution - This one is particularly obnoxious.  She talks about the extremes required to keep Dalits from (in some cases, even being seen by) the higher castes.  

"A person in the lowest subcastes in the Maratha region had to 'drag a thorny branch with him to wipe out his footprints' and prostrate himself on the ground if a Brahmin passed, so that his 'foul shadow might not defile the holy Brahmin.'"

The notion here is that the lowest castes can pollute the higher ones by their mere presence.  And if the Hindu example above seems extreme, Wilkerson talks about the sanctity of water and the near universality of US Blacks not being allowed to pollute the water that whites drink or swim in.  Separate drinking fountains and bathrooms in the South.  But bans of Blacks using white swimming pools and even beaches throughout the US. 

"In the early 1950s, when Cincinnati agreed under pressure to allow black swimmers into some of its public pools, whites threw nails and broken glass into the water to keep them out.  In the 1960s, a black civil rights activist tried to integrate a public pool by swimming a lap and the emerging to towel off.  'The response was to drain the pool entirely,' wrote the legal historian Mark S. Weiner, 'and refill it with fresh water.'"

Then she talks about blood quantum. 

"Arkansas first defined Negro as 'one in whom there is a visible and distinct admixture of African blood.'  Then in 1911, the state changed it to anyone 'who has. . .any negro blood whatever,' as it made interracial sex a felony.  The state of Alabama defined a black person as anyone with 'a drop of negro blood,' in its intermarriage ban. Oregon defined as nonwhite any person with 'with 1/4 Negro, Chinese or any person having 1/4 Negro, Chinese or Kanaka blood or more than 1/2 Indian blood.'"

5.  Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and Mudsill - Wilkerson explains 

"When a house is being built, the single most important piece of the framework is the first wood beam hammered into place to anchor the foundation.  That piece is called the mudsill. . . In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon."

That explanation is needed by most of us today to understand the point of this US Senate speech from 1858: 

"'In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,' Sen. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina told his fellow senators.  'That is a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.  Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity.  Such a class you must have. . .  It constitutes the very mud-sill of society."

In India the castes themselves define the kinds of work caste members are allowed to do, but in the US it's less explicit.  Nevertheless,

"In 1890, '85 percent of black men and 96 percent of black women were employed in just two occupational categories,' wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, 'agricultural and domestic or personal service.'  Forty years later as the Deression set in and as African-Americans moved to northern cities, the percentages of black people at the bottom of the labor hierarchy remained the same, though, by then, nearly half of black men were doing manual labor that called merely for a strong back." 

I hope you are getting the idea.  She's offering us the characteristics of caste and then example after example of how each characteristic plays out.  It's not some fictional narrative as critics of CRT argue.  It's not a screed against white people.  It's simply a factual recitation of the many ways that our law, regulations, and customs separated (and in many cases still do) whites from blacks.  

I haven't seen critics of CRT dispute facts like these.  Rather they make broad accusations of CRT being an anti-white attack on US democracy.   

Michael Harriot, mocking the claims of CRT detractors, started a Twitter trend today posting:

"CRT took my guns away and gave them to the transgenders.  How did CRT ruin your life?"

We only have three more pillars of caste.

6.  Dehumanization and Stigma - I think this is obvious enough.  Wilkerson gives examples of how the Nazis treated Jews as they arrived at concentration camps and the conditions they were forced to live in.  She writes about African slaves in the US South.  After a list of dehumanizing actions, she writes:

"Beyond all of this, the point of a dehumanization campaign was the forced surrender of the target's own humanity, a karmic theft beyond accounting.  Whatever was considered a natural human reaction was disallowed for the subordinate caste.  During the era of enslavement, they were forbidden to cry as their children were carried off, forced to sing as a wife or husband was sold away, never again to look into their eyes or hear their voice for as long as the two might live. . . Whatever humanity shone through them was an affront to what the dominant cast rep telling itself.  They were punished for being the humans that the could not help but be."

You might pause and say, well this is interpretation, not facts.  Yes, in this case I left out the facts - you can find a copy of the book and read them yourself.  This is, indeed, interpretation of the intent of those facts.  One can dispute the interpretation, though I find the context and the facts make this interpretation seem quite reasonable.  Especially given the many similar interpretations by contemporaneous observers.  What are some other interpretations?

I think about meeting a nicely dressed, very gracious, middle aged white man in Vicksburg, Mississippi who told me that they hadn't needed the  'Northern, communist, hippy agitators' who came to Mississippi in the 1960s to march for civil rights.  "Our Negroes were happy with how things were down here." That was in the year 2000.  

7.   Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a means of Control - 

"The crimes of homicide, of rape, and of assault and battery were felonies in the slavery era as they are today in any civil society.  They were seen then as wrong, immoral, reprehensible, and worthy of the severest punishment.  But the country allowed most any atrocity to be inflicted on the black body.  This twelve generations of African-Americans faced the ever-present danger of assault and battery or worse, every day of their lives during the quarter millennium of enslavement."

The book gets much more graphic. 

8.   Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority - Wilkerson writes about Hollywood's portrayal of whites in superior positions and Blacks as servants (not simply in portrayals of the South), and then about how rigidly that was actually enforced in the South.

"Years after the Nazis were defeated across the Atlantic, African-Americanswere still being brutalized for the least appearance of stepping out of their place. Planters routinely whipped their sharecroppers for 'trivial offenses,' wrote Allison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner in 1941.  A planter in Mississippi said that, if his tenant 'didn't stop acting so big, the next time it would be the bullet or a rope.  That is the way to manage them when they get too big.'  In 1948, a black tenant farmer in Louise, Mississippi was severely beaten by two whites, wrote the historian James C. Cobb, 'because he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill.'"

This is not "an interesting side topic."  

This issue is already a major thrust of the Republican effort to retain the House and the Senate, as well as winning local elections.  It's part of the current effort to disenfranchise lower caste voters and to pass laws that give Republicans the power to decide whether elections are fair and who the winners are. 

Trump is teaching them that refusal to abide by the law and facts is a winning strategy.  It didn't quite work this time, but it was a good trial run.  Next time, they'll fix the parts that didn't work for them.    

This is about the ability of democracy to survive in the United States.  Republicans are hoping that fear of losing their superior place in the US caste system will mobilize enough votes for Republicans to hang on.  For those of us who can see that strategy clearly, it's time to educate ourselves and everyone we know. And then to find those folks who, for various reasons, don't vote and help them understand what their not voting can lead to.  

". . .forced labor camps that were politely called plantations," From Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

As I'm reading Caste I'm struck by so many things I never saw before.  The title quote is probably the most profound.  Of course, plantations with slaves were forced labor camps.  The workers had no choice of anything - when to work, what work to do, how hard to work.  They had no control over their own bodies or their spouses or children.  All those decisions were made by their owners.  And, of course, they didn't get paid.  How come I never thought of that before?  But our history books never use that description.  Plantations are such genteel places with pretty green lawns, magnolia trees,  white columns and mint juleps.  But that was all cover up.  But Wilkerson rubs off the cosmetics our historians have applied to what happened in the United States.  

This is an important book.  I'm not yet finished, but I've already been changed.  This is one of several posts I expect I'll do on the book.  For those who haven't read the book, consider this an appetizer.  

I'll start with some quotes from the early part of the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.  After researching and writing a previous book, she decided that focusing on race doesn't capture the extent of the conflict that's usually depicted as a racial conflict in the United States.  Race is relevant, but the real issue, she tells us convincingly,  is CASTE.    

"Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone based on their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." (p. 70)

The rest of the book defines caste, looks at caste systems in India, the US, and Nazi Germany.  Outlines the 'eight pillars of caste' and more.  It's a very thorough explanation of how the hierarchy - with white on top and black on the bottom and shades of gray in between - permeates how we think even if our caste system is not explicit like the Hindu one.  

In this post I want to look at a few quotes from the beginning and relate them to police treatment of African-Americans.

"The slave is entirely subject to the will of his master," wrote William Goodell, a minister who chronicled the institution of slavery in the 1830s.  "What he chooses to inflict upon him, he must suffer.  He must never lift a hand in self-defense.  He must utter no word of remonstrance.  He has no protection and no redress," fewer than the animals of the filed.  They were seen as "not capable of being injured, "Goodell wrote.  "They may be punished at the discretion of their lord, or even put to death by his authority."

"This fact is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict," wrote the sociologist Guy B. Johnson, "for it means that white people during the long period of slavery became accustomed to the idea of 'regulating' Negro insolence and insubordination by force with the consent and approval of the law."

The vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.  

I think these quotes should help us understand some of the videos we've seen in the last couple of years of police beating and killing Blacks who have done little more than ask questions about why they were being stopped, who have hesitated when told to do something by the police.  If you watch many of those videos again, you'll see cops who totally lose it the moment there is any resistance whatsoever by the person they've pulled over.  There is little or no tolerance for the slightest disobedience.  

"He must never lift a hand in self-defense.  He must utter no word of remonstrance.  He has no protection and no redress."

That was the rule throughout slavery and very much the rule in the post civil war South.  Whites expected blacks to be polite, to get out of the way if they met on the sidewalk, to accept what the whites told them without question.  To not even question the change they got from a white cashier.

Studies of why people become police officers show that " social-capital motives (i.e., power and authority, prestige, influence by media & friends)" (from Motivations for Becoming a Police Officer)  regularly play an important role. 

I would argue that for a number of police the authority of the badge and a gun plays a big role.  And for them, respect from suspects - obedience and subservience - is important.  And if these people come from families that have historically expected such obedience from Blacks, then their behavior can be better understood.  

Just watch this video of how these officers speak and act compared to the black man they have stopped.  It's consistent with the expectation that Wikerson says whites had for Blacks during slavery and Jim Crow.  

This is a black military officer who has not actually stopped until he's pulled into a gas station nearby so that there would be light and other people around.  While the cops seem to be reacting to his not instantly getting out of the car, the suspect is clearly worried he's about to be killed by out of control white cops.  

As long as the judge or jury only had the word of the cop versus the word of the suspect (just the word suspect raises questions about the person's truthfulness), officers could pretty much do what they wanted with impunity.  The rapid growth of small videos recorders and then phone cams, changed all that.  And that's where we are today.  

These behaviors and reactions are probably unconscious for most cops.  They haven't been aware that they were treating white and black traffic stops differently.  Or if they were, they believed that the blacks they were stopping were more of a threat and thus justified being tough or pulling out their guns.  

So I urge people to look at the videos - old ones, and ones that will be shown next week and beyond on social media - to see what triggered the cop to become violent.  And compare that, if you can, to how cops treat whites.  

That's the key connection I wanted to make in this post, but I offer some other quotes from this same section - pages 44 or so to 49, where Wilkerson is trying to demonstrate the extent to which Blacks were considered a subservient class, lesser human beings, than whites.  

"What the colonists created was "an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world," wrote the legal historian Ariela J. Gross.  "For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the 'human race' and into a separate sub-group that was to remain enslaved for generations in perpetuity."

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium , the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, soon in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate.  They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them.  Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil."

"Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement.  Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations."

"The slave is doomed to toil, that others may reap the fruits" is how a letter writer identifying himself as Judge Ruffin testified to what he saw in the Deep South.  

"As a window into their exploitation, consider that in 1740, South Carolina, like other slaveholding states, finally decided to limit the workday of enslaved African-Americans to fifteen hours from March to September and to fourteen hours from September to March, double the normal workday for humans who actually get paid for their labor.  In that same era, prisoners found guilty of actual crimes were kept t a maximum of ten hours per workday.  Let no one say that African-Americans as a group have not worked for our country."

"For the ceaseless exertions of their waking hours, many subsisted on a peck of corn a week, which they had to mill by hand at night after their labors in the field.  Some owners denied them even that as punishment and allowed meat for protein only once a year.  "They were scarcely permitted to pick up crumbs that fell from their masters' tables," George Whitefield wrote.  Stealing food was 'a crime, punished by flogging.'"

"Your slaves, I believe, work as hard, if not harder, than the horses whereon you ride,"  Whitefield wrote in an open letter to the colonies of the Chesapeake in 1739.  "These after their work is done, are fed and taken proper care of."

"Enslavers bore down on their hostages to extract the most profit , whipping those who fell short of impossible targets, and whipping all the harder those who needed them to wring more from their exhausted bodies."

"Whipping was a gateway for of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism," wrote the historian Edward Baptist.  Enslavers used "every modern method of torture," he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding.  

"Slavery made the enslavers among the richest people in the world, granting them "the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice."  But from the time of enslavement southerners minimized the horrors they inflicted and to which they had grown accustomed.  "No one was willing," Baptist wrote, "to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture."

Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of the subordinate case seem normal and righteous.  "In the gentlest houses drifted now and then the sound of dragging chains and shackles, the bay of hounds, the report of pistols in the trail of the runaway," wrote the southern writer Wilbur J. Cash.  "And as the advertisements of the time incontestably prove, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron."

"The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners who's crime was that they were born with dark skin.  Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally inflicted gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings." 

"This is what the United States was for longer than it was not.  It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United states that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil.  No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaed.  That will not come until the year 2111."

Another example of this still today, Blacks are considered inferior, less mentally capable, we have this recent story From the AP:  Retired Black players say NFL brain-injury payouts show bias

"PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Thousands of retired Black professional football players, their families and supporters are demanding an end to the controversial use of “race-norming” to determine which players are eligible for payouts in the NFL’s $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims, a system experts say is discriminatory.

Former Washington running back Ken Jenkins, 60, and his wife Amy Lewis on Friday delivered 50,000 petitions demanding equal treatment for Black players to Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia, who is overseeing the massive settlement. Former players who suffer dementia or other diagnoses can be eligible for a payout.

Under the settlement, however, the NFL has insisted on using a scoring algorithm on the dementia testing that assumes Black men start with lower cognitive skills. They must therefore score much lower than whites to show enough mental decline to win an award. The practice, which went unnoticed until 2018, has made it harder for Black former players to get awards."