Stonewall Day + Congrats to Reggie H. + OBAMACARE #WIN! + Sullivan Back at U.Va. + Euro 2012

What a day! First, it's Stonewall Day; on June 28, 1969, the multi-day uprising in New York's Greenwich Village that marked a turning point in the burgeoning gay rights movement began. In today's Huffington Post, Scott G. Brown, one of the oldest surviving veteran of the event, offers some thoughts on what happened and guides readers toward his memoir, Confessions and Diaries of a New York Veteran of the Greenwich Village Stonewall Inn Raid of June 28, 1969: Souvenirs.  I have not read it but I intend to. Scott is black and gay, and approvingly quotes Edmund White's delightful memoir City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s, to underline the reality of that landmark event: "And it wasn't all those crew-neck white boys in The Hamptons and The Pines who changed things, but rather the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the Subway, the 'A-Trainers,' who made the difference!" As the children would say, "Yes, ma'am huntee!" Happy Stonewall Uprising Day, and do seek out Mr. Brown's book if you're so motivated.

***

Reggie H. (overjoyed)

I often mention Mr. Reggie H. on here, as he is a dear friend and brother/brotha writer and the only human being I know who is on top of everything. He is. He knows all kinds of things, intellectual, political, gossipy and otherwise, can be bitingly funny, but rarely if ever says a bad thing about anyone. He reps for Baltimore and Maryland (a state in which we have ancestors in common, his more recent than mine.) He also does his thing at Poets House, blogs at Noctuary, keeps lots of poets on their toes, advocates for and works with some of our societies most vital people, librarians, and listens politely to all my BS. He even comments on this blog from time to time (thank you!). And Mr. Reginald Harris Jr. is now the winner of the 2012 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Second Book Prize! His first, moving book 10 Tongues (Three Conditions Press, 2003) is one I urge you to familiarize yourself with; his second, titled Autogeography, is forthcoming next year, and on his blog he features one of the poems from it, about which I will say only that when I first saw it, I thought: "He's got it--down." He does. And will soon have a new, wonderful book of poems to show for it. Congratulations, Reggie!

***

President Obama
(thinking: "Whoo,
these Repubs
are going to
be salty tonight!")

As the morning unfolded and I was preparing the final stages of clearing out my apartment and waiting for UPS to come collect more boxes--which did not happen well into the sweltering evening here in Chicago--I heard the news that the United States Supreme Court had voted 5-4 to uphold the Affordable Care Act, the Rube Goldberg-style, neoliberal, Heritage Foundation-birthed insurance reform program that became the signature piece of legislation President Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats passed during the last 4 years. Faulty as the legislation is, it possesses many major benefits for a large swath of Americans, and will result in an increasing push towards universal care in a way not foreseeable before its passage. I am not a lawyer so I cannot ascertain all the angles on the majority opinion, which conservative Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote, but it appears that he originally was going to side with the other four right-wing justices (Antonin Scalia, who gave a Scalimbaughish rant the other day in his dissent against the striking down of 3 of 4 provisions of Arizona's draconian anti-immigrant law, SB 1070; Clarence Thomas; Samuel Alito; and Anthony Kennedy, often though to be a "swing vote") who deemed the law "invalid."

Instead, having declared unworkable the argument that the Commerce Clause gives the government the power to impose the Affordable Care Act's Individual Mandate, decided to vote with the four more moderate-to-liberal justices (Ruth Bader Ginsberg; Stephen Breyer, whom I enjoy hearing lecture, his sing-songy voice like a lullaby; Sonia Sotomayor, whose visage makes me smile with pleasure that she was Obama's first SCOTUS pick; and Elena Kagan) to uphold nearly all the provisions of the law, which he affirmed as Constitutional under Congress's power to impose taxes. The only constraint was a provision, signed by 7 justices, arguing that Congress could not cancel out all federal funding to states if they refused to augment the ACA's provisions on Medicaid expansion. A blow against the Commerce clause, an affirmation of Congress's power to tax, a limit on federal power in relation to funding in the states, and a green light for insurance companies, hospital corporations, medical insurance providers, and all private businesses involved in the still-expanding health care sector.

It was also an unambiguous victory for President Obama and the Democrats, made possible by one of the least likely of agents, Roberts, and it enraged conservative idealogues, from Republican President candidate Mitt Romney, who implemented a very similar prototype in Massachusetts when he was governor there, to a number of members of the Republican Congressional Congress, who spoke in testerical flights of rhetorical about "freedom" and so forth, to Republican icons like Sarah Palin, who claimed that it proved the President had "lied." Of course they are all aware that Republicans had championed the "mandate" only a few years ago; Romney was captured on camera praising it in Massachusetts in 2006. The entire plan was hardly the "socialist" threat conservatives had made it out to be, hatched as it was by the Heritage Foundation, but in many of its provisions, it does point towards the possibility of much better, universal, affordable care of the kind that is available throughout most of the industrialized world.

Some of its provisions are excellent: no coverage denial based on pre-existing conditions; young people can stay on their parents' health care much longer; a stricter limit on profits collected as overhead from premiums; Medicare and Medicaid expansion; subsidies to buy healthcare; many incentive-based pilot programs that could be far-reachingly positive in their effects; federal deficit-lowering mechanisms; and so forth. Single-payer health care would be optimal, and Medicare-for-All or a Public Option would be the next best thing, but for now, the ACA does much good, despite its problems, and it is still far better than what existed before its enactment, which doesn't even really go into effect until 2014. (Republicans, including Romney, who was for it before he was against it, have vowed to repeal it, to deny its components funding, and, as South Carolina's junior Senator, the Tea Party epigone Jim DeMint urged today, simply to nullify it, as that state's politicians were fond of doing before the US Civil War.)

When I heard the news on NPR, confirmed by online sources, I felt a brief moment of elation such as I hadn't felt about this administration and Congress, and their actions, in a long time. I also felt--and I admit this is a bit sentimental, melodramatic, and ridiculous, but bear with me--a bit of that starry promise that was so palpable the night Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and I wandered among the throngs of people in downtown Chicago, in front of the Art Institute of Chicago and onto the periphery of Grant Park, and everything seemed possible, people of all backgrounds, ages, life trajectories, milled about, tears in their eyes, drums beating in their ears, awaiting the President-elect, his wife and his two daughters, knowing that we had, at least for a day, made a point about the disastrous slog of the previous eight years.  So much seemed possible that night; health care and insurance reform, at least in my eyes, was one of the more pedestrian, though important, eventualities that would mark Obama's tenure. Ending the wars, prosecuting the Wall Street criminals, rolling back those budget-busting Bush tax cuts, and so much more seemed far more important.

During the campaign, Barack Obama did promise he would enact health care and insurance reform. Nearly all of his Democratic and even some of his Republican predecessors, going back to Harry S. Truman (Missourian!) had attempted to do so, but run up against one abatgis or another. Lyndon Johnson did, however, succeed with Medicare and Medicaid. But in his first term, Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats pulled it off. It is imperfect, but it is a crucial start, and as such strikes terror into the hearts of the Randroid types who want to dissassemble everything and hand it over to private agents who'll benefit even more than the private agents already feasting on the ACA's promised bounty.  More importantly, though, ACA, or Obamacare, is helping millions of people already, and will eventually cover and help many more. The UPS driver who collected my boxes told me with happiness that he was glad it was upheld; his child suffered from what most health insurance companies would consider a pre-existing condition, and because of the law she could not be denied coverage. He is one of many. He is one of us. Thank you to the President, the Congress who passed the law, and to the Supreme Court justices who bravely and rightly upheld it.

***

U.Va. PRESIDENT Teresa Sullivan (Dan Addison, U. of Virginia)

It is the case that things happen that I think could not possibly happen, which suggests that I am either still too naïve, something my father warned me about when I was young, or that I have not lost my capacity for astonishment. I'll go with the latter.  What astonished me?  For starters, the abrupt, public dismissal of the first female president of the august University of Virginia, Teresa Sullivan, by a group of wealthy corporate hacks who had, through the graces of Virginia's Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, come to dominate the Board of Visitors, the name for the powerful trustees who control what is still Mr. Jefferson's university. I spent 2 years there in the early 1990s, and I can say that it is an institution steeped in its history and traditions, distinguished academically in many disciplines, and not one in which things such as the rude, crude dismissal of presidents by secret plot happen regularly. As it turns out, the gang of however many, led by a real estate honcho named Helen Dragas (she was the "rector"), had two main concerns they felt Sullivan wasn't tackling swiftly enough. They wanted her to kill certain departments--like the Classics and German--to save money, and they wanted her to jump into the online teaching game, panicked as they were by the likes of Stanford and MIT (two institutions in my opinion most likely to undertake such experiments), and, it seems, not unsurprisingly, Harvard, in racing forward in doing so. Apparently Sullivan, being a reasonable person and grasping that a university president, especially at a major state institution, is not a dictator, did not sign off readily on either plan, and so Dragas and her conspirators secretly planned--all documented in released emails--to oust her, keeping their plans close to their vests until it was a fait accompli. They did. It was, in sum, a coup. A furore ensued. The university community protested vehemently, and Sullivan's replacement even felt shamed enough not to want the job permanently. Some members of the Board of Visitors hadn't even known about the plan until it was undertaken. But, to their credit, they reversed themselves, and on Tuesday unanimously reinstated Sullivan.  (Why she would reassume the job knowing that vultures like the ones she dealt with were hovering around I do not know.) But good for her, good for the University of Virginia, and a tocsin for all other public universities, large and small, as well as for private ones, rich or poor.

Today the business of universities, at least in the eyes of many wealthy trustees, Randroid legislators, and many members of the public, is business. I mean both corporatization, and an increasing emphasis on business education and business study-related thinking. No matter how outstanding a job a university has been in achieving its goals, no matter how narrow or broad its mandate, no matter how relevant the fields it emphasizes, the aim today is to mimic corporations, to corporatize every aspect of university life, to place money at the forefront of everything.  The liberal arts, the life of the mind, the search for and creation of knowledge, the creation of community--none of it matters to those who want every institution of higher education to be ranked #1 and a carbon copy of GE. Look at what the state systems in Texas and California have been dealing with over the last few years. But this is a problem not just in the US; just note what Great Britain is doing in terms of hiking student fees, privileging wealthy students, slashing departments, forcing faculty members to fit business-developed metrics, and pushing for funding cuts to be made up, if at all, by corporations, and there is also the ongoing crisis in Québec, Canada, whose root issue is creeping privatization.

One irony for the UVa coup agents, as someone pointed out online today, is that the classics provide more than enough examples not just of the sort of behavior Dragas behaved in, but enough history, philosophy and literature to explain and illustrate the world we live in today, and, as regards the German department, Germany holds the fate of Europe, and thus the globe, in its hands. Of course irony is a key component of literature, a field many of the pro-business types are hostile too. Lost on them is too kind a word. But best wishes to President Sullivan, and goodspead to all in her position all over the country and globe.

***

The 2012 London Olympics will be upon us soon enough. I can't wait. So to will the Major League All Star game. The All England Club Wimbledon Tennis tournament, which I used to watch avidly, is also occurring now. And the British Open Golf tournament, at a suitably scraggly course, will happen in short order.  (The NBA Finals are over, and the Miami Heat won, 4-1, which gladdened me because the Oklahoma City Thunder's owners are rabidly anti-gay. Also, it redeemed LeBron James in the eyes of some; I'm all for him, so I was glad he brought home a crown to go with his predictions in prior years.)

But--I have been peeping the Euro 2012 soccer tournament. I wasn't really paying attention, and then one night I was in one of those extremely affordable pizza joint-cum-bars that you find in European countries, and saw England playing Sweden, I think, and England came back and won the match 3-2, the restaurant patrons erupted with cheers, I found myself drawn in, and now I eager to see who wins between the finalists, Spain and Italy, two countries particularly down on their luck these days but good enough as soccer powers to push the other top teams out of the way.

In the ex-colonial powers match-up, Spain defeated Portugal in the semifinals on penalty kicks, while the ex-fascists semifinal entailed Italy sending Germany packing 2-1, on 2 goals by the fro-hawked Mario Balotelli. The Spain-Portugal game from the snippet I saw was like watching a chalkboard dry, while Balotelli gave the latter game a jolt with his second, game-winning goal, on a crossing pass from Riccardo Montolivo, which he fired into the upper right corner of the goal from a distance. He promptly stripped off his shirt to display three blue (Gli Azzuri!) blue stripes on his muscular back, which led to a penalty. Drama! I want to see the final. Either team gets my vote. Go PIGS*! (Portugal-Italy-Greece-Spain!)

An update: UEFA, the organizer of the Euro 2012 tournament, has fined Spain €20,000 over its fans' racist chants against Mario Balotelli during their Group C clash. (Russia was fined €30,000 for its fans' monkey chants against the Czech Republic player Theodor Gebre Selassie, whose family originally is from Ethiopia. Russia's tournament fine total now tallies €225,000.) Balotelli has repeatedly been the target of racist invective, including during Italy's June 14th match against Croatia, which led UEFA to impose a sanction of €80,000 on that nation. I am hoping the Spanish fans choose not to resort to form during the final game. If so, go Italy!

Spain's Pique challenges Portugal's Nani during their Euro 2012 semi-final soccer match at Donbass Arena in Donetsk. DARREN STAPLES/REUTERS

Spain's goalkeeper Casillas makes a save next to team mate Iniesta and Portugal's Nani during their Euro 2012 semi-final soccer match at the Donbass Arena in Donetsk. ALESSANDRO BIANCHI/REUTERS

Spain's Pique scores a goal against Portugal's goalkeeper Patricio during penalty shoot-out at their Euro 2012 semi-final soccer match at Donbass Arena in Donetsk. DARREN STAPLES/REUTERS

German midfielder Sami Khedira (3dR) vies with Italian opponents during the Euro 2012 football championships semifinal match at the National Stadium in Warsaw.
GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Italy's Mario Balotelli scores the first goal.
Matthias Schrader / AP

Mario Balotelli flexing his muscles after his second goal.

Spring Break Is Here! + Health Insurance Bills Pass + Immigration Reformers Rally in DC

My grades are now in, which means that Spring Break week begins. It's more of a symbolic break--and brake--than a real one, though, since I still have to finish a syllabus for a new course I'm teaching next quarter, but that's always an enjoyable task. (Well, all except the document-scanning part.) I'm hoping the weather stays beautiful here so that we can start planting by this weekend, before I head back to Chicago, where, I read and heard, it snowed. Yikes. It was 70F here on Saturday, and between the scaling of prose I did get out and about. Spring, please, hang around.

===

The Democratic Leadership
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi celebrates
with other Democrats after
the health care reform
bill passed through the House
of Representatives by a vote
of 219 to 212 Sunday.
(Kevin Dietsch/UPI)

Perhaps it was always so, but politics these past few years have sometimes seemed more thrilling than the most artfully created dramas. To put it another way, there's an art and some farce to--and tremendous artifice in--our political system that was greatly on display yesterday. As I read short and marked up stories and essays and cooked, and C did his thing, we periodically would stop and watch the speechifying and punditizing and all the other lead ups to the dramatic vote last night for the terribly flawed, Republite, but still necessary Senate Health Insurance Reform and Reconciliation bills which passed last night, 219-210 and 220-209 respectively, in the US House of Representatives. We should all give great credit to President Barack Obama and his administration, and to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her caucus's leadership, for pulling off this major and longtime-coming accomplishment.

The recent path to last night's momentous events, easily the most important of President Obama's presidency and one of the landmark non-military votes of the last 35 years, involved ugly scenes and behavior of the sort that have been all to common in our history. Tea Party protesters massed outside the Capitol Building called civil rights hero Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) and a fellow Democrat, Indiana Congressman Andre Carson "nigger"; they spat on black Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver (D-MO); and hollered "faggot" at out gay Congressional leader Barney Frank (D-MA).  In addition someone hurled bricks through the windows and doors of Representative Louise Slaughter's upstate New York office, and someone shattered a window at Congresswoman Gabrielle Griffiths's (D-AZ) Tucson-area office window.  These acts mirrored some of the most hideous racist, homophobic, and violent rhetoric that emerged during the 2008 campaign, and which has reappeared in various forms in the Teabaggers' protests and gatherings over the last year; in all cases, fear, ignorance and hatred of the Other is motivating these people as much as any economic or economically ideological concerns.

60 Makes a Bill + Pushing from the Left

Delivered, but not sealed or signed--yet, and the US Senate's version of the historic yet problematic health care "reform" bill, that is. With 58 Democratic votes and the those of the two independents who caucus with them, the Democrats passed the severely gutted, lobbyist-shaped, and insurance industry-and-Big Pharma-friendly health care "reform" legislation. Now it heads to conference, where some contentious issues must be ironed out before it can be revoted up by both houses and then sent to President Barack Obama to be signed into law. Despite his aloofness from the turbulent Congressional debates, he's said he'll now get involved. I'll believe it when he does it.


Senate Democratic leaders announcing the passage of the legislation

The Senate bill

• has no government-run health insurance (i.e. public) option.
  
• has no Medicare buy-in for people under the current age of eligibility. (A recent Quinnipiac polled showed 56-38% support for the public option and 64-30% support for Medicare expansion.)
  
• still includes the very mandate that President Obama campaigned against, and does not "cover" 30 million new people, but forces them to buy insurance under penalty of fine.
• has weaker subsidies than those in the House bill.
• includes a problematic excise tax.
• does not include safe drug reimportation, though the president campaigned on this.
• bars undocumented immigrants from buying insurance on the available exchanges, out of racism and spite.
• includes anti-abortion provisions.
• does not cover all Americans citizens.
• does not really kick in for 4 years, by which time the GOP could repeal most of it or even the whole thing.
• did not emerge from the "transparent," televised (on CSPAN) negotations the president promised, and instead has lobbyists' wishes and demands all over it, making it, sad to say, liable to critiques and attacks from the right-wing, who offered no substantive reform proposals of their own.
  

Most problematically, it not only doesn't dramatically "bend" the cost curve, but it fails to ensure 1) affordable insurance for ALL Americans, and 2) cut the excessive US spending on health care, which results of from industry profits, waste and inefficiency, a fee-for-treatment approach, and many other sources.

In case anyone has forgotten the USA health care costs per person exceed other industrialized countries by a wide margin.

Total health care spending per person, in 2007:
USA: $7290
Switzerland: $4417
France: $3601
United Kingdom: $2992
Average of OECD developed nations: $2964
Italy: $2686
Japan: $2581

In part this results from our reliance on a for-profit health care system, and despite his campaign promises, the President is doing little to change this. The huge disparity in costs is one of the main reasons progressives--labeled as "insane," the "Internet left fringe," "the left of the left," "on hallucinogens," etc.--by the President's spokespeople and media commentators and pundits--were pushing for either a universal single-payer program or a robust public health insurance option. This cost disparity, and the rising cost curve, are unsustainable without serious damage to the US economy and Americans' well-being.

The Senate's bill does include some worthwhile measures. It does bar the denial of health care based on pre-existing conditions, for children and for adults. It pushes Pharma to cover the doughnut hole. It includes funding for community health centers, which could provide more comprehensive and preventive health care services. It will allow more people--single adults--to buy into the Medicaid program. It also extends funding for Medicaid and Medicare, while streamlining the latter. In the event of a catastrophic illness it provides federal reinsurance to private companies that provide insurance for their employees. It funds training and education programs for non-physician healthcare professionals. So it's not totally worthless. But in terms of providing universal, affordable, high-quality care, and, to use the neoliberals' favorite concept, "choice," it falls--from what I can tell, FAR--short.

Nevertheless, one of the most credible critics of the legislation and the process by which it wound its way from rhetoric to near-law, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, argues in its favor. As he writes:

And for all its flaws and limitations, it’s a great achievement. It will provide real, concrete help to tens of millions of Americans and greater security to everyone. And it establishes the principle — even if it falls somewhat short in practice — that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.

Many people deserve credit for this moment. What really made it possible was the remarkable emergence of universal health care as a core principle during the Democratic primaries of 2007-2008 — an emergence that, in turn, owed a lot to progressive activism. (For what it’s worth, the reform that’s being passed is closer to Hillary Clinton’s plan than to President Obama’s). This made health reform a must-win for the next president. And it’s actually happening.

So progressives shouldn’t stop complaining, but they should congratulate themselves on what is, in the end, a big win for them — and for America.

Jonathan Chait, after a revisionist account of the 2000 election, agrees. So I guess it's a go--but also a strong reminder that for better legislation in the future, progressives will have to be relentless and, when necessary, willing to let the President and Congress know they do not have us in the pocket. No matter what Rahm Emanuel says.

===

One of my Twigente, Keraflo, posted this link to Cenk Uygur's Huffington Post article on moving President Obama (and the Congress) to the left. I agree with everything he's saying. Silence abets the status quo, which is what the majority opposed last year. Yet if we uncritically support the Obama administartion, criticizing only its right-wing opponents while not calling the president and the Congress when they fall far short of "change we can believe it" and not grow cynical, which strengthens those already in power.

===

Rod 2.0 has been up on the grave situation facing LGBTQ people in Uganda, where a viciously homophobic Anti-Homosexuality Bill is making its way through that country's parliament. In his most recent post on the subject, he notes that Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni (at right, silobreaker.com), has decided not to intervene directly to stop legislation that would harshly penalize people suspected of being LGBTQ, despite having given assurances that he would do so to US authorities. Museveni is now saying he will try to convince his party, which has a parliamentary majority, not to support it. The original legislative proposals went so far as proposing capital penalties--death--for LGBTQ acts. In this post, Rod links to an article suggesting that the opposition party, the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC), will oppose the legislation. This is unlikely to stop the bill's passage, but will register that it, and the toxic homophobia promoted by senior figures in Uganda's government, do not have tacit, universal support.

Monday Round-up

A few blips today: What wonderful news that Mexico City will become the first capital in Latin America (and the third in North America, after Ottawa and Washington, DC?) to ensure marriage equality, with its city assembly's passage of a same-sex marriage bill. The bill passed 39-20, with 5 abstentions. According to this BBC News report, the bill changes "the definition of marriage in the city's civic code - from the union of a man and a woman to 'the free uniting of two people.'"

I meant to post a congratulations to Annise Parker on her victory in the Houston mayoral race a week ago (December 12), but that post vanished into the ether, so let me belatedly do so. Parker becomes the first out lesbian to lead one of the US's top 5 largest cities, and probably among the first to lead a major city in one of the former states of the Confederacy.


Annise Parker, Houston's new mayor (Advocate.com)

Speaking of leadership, Drew Westen, the noted linguist, author of Metaphors We Live By and The Political Brain, and Emory professor, has a devastating article in today's Huffington Post on Obama's lack of leadership, laissez-faire style and content-free politics, and their effects on policies and the Democratic base and independents. (I'll try to write more about this tomorrow.)

Though he may be hands-off when it comes to major issues (the health care reform bill, the global warming/climate change/green technology crisis, the ongoing economic debacle, etc.) or too much of a Bushite (with his own "surge" in Afghanistan, continuation of infinite detentions and the Patriot Act, refusal to prosecute the criminal element that led the US over the last 8 years, etc.), Obama has been very good about appointing Latinos to government posts, many of them Harvardians. He's outpacing both W and his avatar*, Clinton. On the symbolism joint, he's got his act together.


Thomas E. Pérez, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division (mainjustice.com)

In case you were wondering what's in this crapola insurance and pharma-giveaway bill we're all supposed to get behind and believe is the best thing since Medicare or Social Security, McJoan at DailyKos gives a rundown. It's many eggs short of a dozen, no matter how prettily Sheldon Whitehouse and his colleagues try to dress up the carton.

Speaking of Avatar, which I haven't yet seen but am rather curious about, not everyone is rhapsodizing the film. Annalee Newitz at io9 asks, "When will white people stop making movies like 'Avatar'?" Nihilistic Kid offers a funnier but similarly cogent political take. And poet Ruthellen Kocher poses important questions about colonialism and how to discuss this with her youngster when seeing the film.


Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, in Avatar (telegraph.co.uk)

Speaking of colonialism, client states, and warmongering, I keep asking anyone who'll listen: what is really and currently going on in Iraq? On the flight overseas, I came across this New York Times article about black Iraqis. Why hasn't there been more reportage of this? Does the President, a great inspiration to them, know or even care what's going on over there?

I am behind on New Yorkers (by weeks now--this means my graduate fiction students next quarter may not have to read so many of this year's stories), but I enjoyed the snarky piece, "To the MAXXII" (only the audio slideshow's online) on Pritzker Prize-winning artist and architect Zaha Hadid, who's finally seeing her visions realized. Why does the writer keep commenting on her clothes, though? Would this happen to a male (st)architect? Also, Joan Accocella's short commentary on Geoffrey Chaucer-related books and Peter Ackroyd's butchered "translation" of The Canterbury Tales was a highlight. Note to authors: some books do not need to be "updated."

Lastly, it appears that residents of Laredo, Texas, a city of over 250,000 people, will be without a single chain or independent bookstore very soon. Barnes & Noble is closing its "profitable" B. Dalton outlet there, because it's not...bringing in enough money! Disgraceful.

Snowpocalypse + Geoffrey Jacques New Book + Odds & Ends

The snowpocalypse came and...there's a lot of snow. Yet the world, including that part of the world here in the northeastern US, still exists. I admit to being inured to both the cold and snow after so many winters spent in Chicago, where you really do get cold weather (it was 7-11°F just a few days ago when I was there, which is cold) and lots of snow, including weeks on end of snow (was it last winter or the one before where the snowfalls seemed to stretch on indefinitely?). So it's been a bit humoring to watch the frenzy around this northeaster. Every TV and radio pronouncement seems to require an exclamation point. C, like many people on Twitter, reported to me on the hurlyburly at the supermarket and the home improvement stores. The local airports have shut down all flights, and some people have been stranded for 24 hours or more. Even bus service has been suspended, leaving only that 19th century technology, the train, for non-auto intercity travel. Because of the snow! And yet last night, when I went over to New York City for an event, quite a few people were out and about, walking through the swirling and shifting drifts, thronging the lower level of the Apple Store on 14th St., bustling up 7th Avenue and down Christopher. They obviously hadn't gotten the panic-stay inside-fret for the end of life as we know it memo. Today we shoveled and salted the front and the walk, and by midday, despite the sliver of sunlight, the sidewalk and roadways were visible. In the backyard a splendor of birds, one as red as a poppy, another with a flaming orange beak and breast-feathers, settled temporarily in the leafless lilac, before scattering about the yard. And the pride of cats that calls our backyard home remained unseen, though their tracks dotted the white quilt that stretched from the back porch to the wall at yard's end. The snowpocalypse arrived, and life goes on. As I tweeted earlier today, for today's #snowpoem:

Under its white quilt
the frozen street lies silent
indoors we watch films

===

Last night, as I mentioned, I ventured over to Manhattan, despite the snowstorm, to attend a book launch party for poet and critic Geoffrey Jacques at the Skoto Gallery in Chelsea. Geoffrey, who provided the afterword for Chris Stackhouse's and my book, Seismosis (1913 Press), has just published his first critical study, A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African-American Imaginary (U. Mass Press, 2009), an exciting and penetrating, carefully historicized and argued exploration of some of the previously underexamined sources of translatlantic Modernism. One of the book's many insights is its discussion of the effects of black urban geographic distribution on Modernist poetics; as Geoffrey and I discussed last night when talking about the figure via whom I first learned about Geoffrey (because of his incisive critique in the Threepenny Review), Wallace Stevens, in addition to all the bright colors, the exotic place names, the unusual terminology, there are also lots of Negroes in his poems. Lots. Geoffrey unpacks this presence, these presences--he said that that letter in the literary journal, which Tom Ellis pointed out to me years ago, was the starting point--across a range of authors and works, while also tracing the influence of other popular and expressive cultural genres and forms such as blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, advertising, vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley. Geoffrey even got an opportunity to school me a bit more on Stevens as "aesthete," and his relation to Victorian predecessor A. E. Housman. Without question A Change in the Weather is a book worth diving into, as soon as you can, and also check out Geoffrey's collections of poetry, including Just for a Thrill (Wayne State University Press).


Geoffrey Jacques (at right) and a friend

Book party attendees

On display at the gallery were sculptures and 3-D drawings in metal by Nigerian artist Olu Amoda. I was only able to chat with him briefly, but he explained a few things about his work, which he creates from found objects in Lagos, where he has been working since the early 1980s. He also talked about his process to me, noting his desire to go beyond "drawing" as it's traditionally understood, moving from the medium of paper and canvas into metal, various welders taking the place of pen and pencil. Adoma also described one set of 2-3 ft. figures as being inspired by Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's famous play Death and the Horsemen; he suggested that instead of the usual relationship between humans and props, or sculptures as props, he wanted to animate the usually inanimate. The expressivity of his metal forms definitely gave them a sense of movement, and liveliness.


Olu Amoda

One of Amoda's sculptures, from the Death and the Horseman series

The Death and the Horseman series

One of Amoda's drawings, on/in metal

Chelsea street (W. 20th St.), during the snowstorm

===

On another note, I've got so much catching up to do. First, congratulations to Washington, DC's City Council, led by Republican David Catania, for passing a same-sex marriage bill and for having a mayor, Adrian Fenty, willing and eager to sign it. As conservative as Southern-influenced Washington can sometimes be compared to other parts of the East Coast, let alone the rest of the country, but not always. This was a particularly hopeful sign in light of the collapse of the marriage equality push in New York State earlier this month, the horrible reversal in Maine, and the ongoing intransigence of the Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress to repeal hateful laws and policies like Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and to pass the Employment Non-Description Act (ENDA). Now, on this issue at least, DC must become a beacon casting its light north, south, east, and west.

I also have been meaning to note the passing in November of Jeanne-Claude, legendary partner of and co-artist, for over half a century, with the equally legendary Christo. It was their spectacle in orange, in New York's Central Park, the sublime (to me) and crowd-pleasing "The Gates," with which I inaugurated this blog back in February 2005. (Actually Jay Wright and Rainer Rilke came first, but should that be a surprise?) That blogging moment feels like a lifetime ago, but the drama surrounding the installation, and then the anticipation and subsequent experience of heading uptown and walking through the series of sunset-brilliant standards, is quite vivid. That was only one of Jeanne-Claude and Christo's public triumphs; they also famously, or notoriously depending upon your perspective, wrapped an atoll and Berlin's Reichstag building, among many other structures, natural and manmade, in plastic; erected umbrellas in California; and raised an "Iron Curtain" on a Paris street. Christo plans to continue their ongoing projects, and it wasn't until well into their careers that Jeanne-Claude was credited with her central role in their projects, but thankfully she was, and together she and he pushed the boundaries of public and conceptual art and sculpture while also devising new and interesting means of political expression. Jeanne-Claude's vision and savvy, so key to Christo's, will be missed.

Nielsen has announced the immediate closing of media watchdog Editor & Publisher, and, personally more devastatingly to me, Kirkus Reviews. Librarians and bookstores will probably lament the latter shuttering, while quite a few authors, slammed in the pages of Kirkus, may not. I personally had a very positive experience with the publication; it gave Annotations one of its first reviews, a very laudatory one at that, that appeared to set the tone for all the ones that followed in the first months after the book hit the shelves. My publisher was both amazed and pleased beyond belief--or relief, perhaps. But beyond my personal experience, it's important to note that the loss of yet another major book reviewing organ can only be viewed as a loss for contemporary American letters and publishing. As fine as so many of the online review publications are, none has the history or scope of publications like Kirkus. What are we to do, though? Perhaps a not-for-profit is the way to go. Will a consortium of wealthy authors (Tom Clancy? John Grisham? Terry McMillan?) bankroll its establishment? How then to keep it in print? What would a sustainable model look like? These are pressing questions every author should be thinking about.

==

The Senate Democrats are finally set to pass a severely weakened version of health care reform legislation. It's shorn of a public option, of a Medicare buy-in, of a drug reimportation measure, and of several other features that President Barack Obama promised during his 2007-8 campaign; it does, however, have restrictive anti-abortion and anti-immigrant language, weakened subsidies, and a funding mechanism tied not to increased taxes on the rich but on so-called "Cadillac" plans, and, worst of all, the very mandate that Obama decried in Hillary Clinton's and John Edwards' plans. It will thus deliver 30 million new customers, at penalty of fine and under financial duress, to the health insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital, and medical device companies. This is not what Obama and the Democrats promised last year, nor what they were elected to deliver, and yet progressives are being urged--when not being insultingly called "insane" or "batsh*t crazy"--to swallow our desire for a fight and a superior bill, and support this dreck. In the Senate, they'll probably do it, and it'll probably also happen in the House with minimal adjustment, despite Speaker Nancy Pelosi's own promises, meaning this train-wreck a bill will become law. The president, who has cut deals with health care lobbyists (cf. Tom Daschle, among others) and Big PhrMa, are determined to sign whatever crosses his desk, no matter how awful.

One of the few contemporary journalists I trust, Nobel laureate economist and opinion columnist and blogger Paul Krugman, says that this bill will be better than nothing, and can serve as a beginning step in reforming health care, but even he agrees that it could be a lot better. Much better. Journalist Matt Taibbi, however, says, in concert with former DNC chairman and physician Howard Dean, that the Democrats ought to scrap this crap and produce a better bill via reconciliation. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refuses to go this route, and the Washington Village consensus* is that it can't be done. (Why?) So this mess, opposed by all 40 Senate Republicans despite Obama's endless conciliation and machinations--for them to serve as cover?--is probably going to pass. And the Democrats could pay a serious electoral price in 2010.

Ultimately, I think Krugman is right that the longterm effects will be positive even if they don't address some of the key structural problems with our health insurance system (such as the for-profit motive that's a major source of the steadily rising costs), but if Obama keeps screwing up and following Bill Clinton's playbook of moving further to the right and slamming the Left base, we could end up with a GOP Congress and, worse, a real Republican in the White House in 2012. Perhaps Obama and the Democrats will wake up before then instead of reverting, as always, to their neoliberal, corporatist, Third Way default policies. If neither does, Lord help us, because though we know we can live under GOP misrule, the next iteration will only be that much worse.

*Nate Silver also says it'd be difficult, calling reconciliation an "insidious myth." Well okie dokey!

Dems Proceed on HCR09 + US in Shambles + Blade Closes + Partió Blas Jiménez

I'm glad that the last two holdouts in the Democratic caucus, Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Blanche Lambert Lincoln (D-AR), have decided to vote with the rest of their caucus and allow the debate on the combined health care bill Harry Reid (D-NV) debuted earlier this week to proceed. Recalcitrants like these two, as well as Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) have repeatedly dispelled the illusion of party cohesion that the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Senate Campaign Committee love to sell; while the Senate Democrats have helped to pass some important, mostly small-bore legislation since taking power in 2006, they continue to slog along as if the GOP were still in control, failing again and again to show real leadership on any of the major issues that face the country. Instead, what the public sees is a glacially moving body, full of right-wing ranters and moderate milquetoasts, taking a scattered and often seemingly ineffective approach to everything. Above all, the needs of Congress's corporate masters come first.

Perhaps it has often, if not always, been this way, but the close-but-unfinished health care reform effort, the ongoing wars and related national security issues, and the economic crisis all throw into high relief how ineffective the United States' upper house continues to be. That said, it increasingly looks like the Democrats will pass a health care reform bill that, while not perfect, will be better than earlier indications suggested. Though the single-payer option is going, the final bill probably will have a public insurance plan; it probably will allow people to opt out of terrible current plans instead of being locked into them; it probably will provide adequate subsidies for a sizable portion of working- and lower-middle families; and it will stop insurance companies from some of their worst practices, such as dropping people because of "pre-existing" conditions, jacking up rates when people get sick, and turning the entire process of dealing with the health care system into a free-for-all lottery. The Senate bill, like the House bills, also includes horrendous anti-immigrant and anti-reproductive rights provisions, and it does not adequately address the for-profit nature of the system, which means that US consumers spend anywhere from twice to three times as much per capita per year as our industrialized peers, and it doesn't have enough in it to drive down insurance costs or drug prices, another baleful aspect of the current American healthcare landscape.

As the bill undergoes continual weakening and diminishment, it makes me wonder whether the Democrats, despite getting so far, will be able to pass it, either by majority with or without a single Republican vote, or by reconciliation, thereby taking a page from the GOP, and if they do so and President Obama in the end signs it, whether it will anything more than a mostly hollow victory. Continual public pressure on the Congress seems to be the only way ensure even minimal fidelity to the people's business, so you know what we all must do:

Call/write/fax your Representative
Call/write/fax your Senators

Urge everyone you know to do so to. Now is a very perilous period for the health care reform bill, and anything progressive.

===

Things are really grim economically across the US and much of the world; this isn't news. I see and feel it in varying ways, and often have to force myself not to dwell on how it's affecting so many people I know well, as well as those I don't. Then I read an article like the ones below and I start to feel more than a little worried; things are much, much worse than they seem, and yet the people running the government, corporate heads, the mainstream media all seem so blasé, indifferent, or incapable to getting their acts together.

Alternet.org: 15 Signs the Country Is Coming Apart at the Seams

Longer piece: Amped Status: The Critical Unraveling of US Society

Despite all the grim indicators--including the 123 banks that have failed so far this year--believe the country will turn around, but given the approach of those leading the government and many corporate leaders, it's going to be a painful process, and there's no guarantee that we won't be even worse off if the main perpetrators--their enablers remain in power--behind the mess we're in somehow inveigle their way back to full power using false-populism, lies, propaganda, and anything else that works.

One issue I've thought about a lot is the Congress's inability to reform the financial industries or sector. One key issue is the "too-big-too-fail" problem. As I've mentioned before on this blog, my first post-undergrad job was in banking, when commercial and investment banks were forbidden by law from merging or sharing certain key functions, when banks could not operate across state lines, and when certain other regulatory controls dating from the period of the New Deal were still strongly in place. Even with those safeguards, in October 1987, one month after I began my very brief banking career, stock markets across the world witnessed their biggest crashes in decades. This was also during a period when the US dollar was comparatively weak, and the country was struggling with the deficits that had built up during the previous 8 years of massive tax cuts, defense spending binges, rising deregulation, and gross underinvestment in public and private infrastructure. The US had seen two recessions under Reagan, I believe, and would see an even worse one in a few years under HW Bush. And yet a little over a decade later, in the late 1990s, after the economic upswing, financial policymakers led by Robert Rubin and Larry Summers would do everything they could to gut what remained of the New Deal safeguards, working hand-in-glove with people like Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) to repeal the Glass-Steagall Acts of 1932 and 1933, which had maintained one of the last walls prevent a return to 1920s-style laissez-faire capitalism. Many of these policymakers and their adepts are in place today; we have a libertarian Republican as Fed Chair. We have a neoliberal centrist from the Rubin school, who made disastrous bets at his previous job, coordinating economic policy for the administration. We have a lackey for longtime financial megagambler Goldman Sachs as Treasury Secretary. The already big banks are considerably bigger, and several will be handing out more in bonuses--record bonuses--this year than some states' budget deficits. How it all will shake out, I don't know. But as the Alternet piece suggests, things are pretty grave and could get ugly. Very, very ugly. I hope and pray they won't.

===

I recently participated in some heavy backchannel lamenting about the collapse of the Washington Blade, one of the nation's premier LGBTQ newspapers which had just celebrated its 40th birthday; its sibling newspaper, The Southern Voice in Atlanta, and of its parent company, Window Media, the owner of several other LGBTQ-focused newspapers and periodicials in the country.

The culprit, from what I can tell, is the current dismal economic environment. Several publications in New York and other cities have also fallen by the wayside over the last year. I agree with the argument that with the ongoing development of the Internet and new online media have come a range of new means for disseminating news, conducting investigations, and fostering advocacy and knowledge production around LGBTQ issues, but I also think we shouldn't underestimate the value and necessity of traditional news organizations, including the much smaller but once vital issues and identity-oriented ones, like the Blade. It and newspapers like it have played and continue to play an important role especially during a period when some certainties about how far the society has shifted on LGBTQ and other issues are being called into question. At her David R. Kessler lecture several weeks ago, Sarah Schulman noted, among her many wise points, that "we are dismantling" many of our longstanding institutions--or we are allowing them to be dismantled--at the very moment that we may need them more than ever. Perhaps these vivid manifestations of ongoing struggles remind us that we aren't yet in the post-everything (post-gay, post-race, etc.) worlds that have been proclaimed for quite some time.

Some articles suggest that the Blade may resume publication under different auspices, perhaps as an employee-owned paper or as a not-for-profit, the latter being a model I'm surprised isn't discussed even more as journalism in general takes hit after hit.

===

A friend, translator, scholar and librarian Herbert R., recently sent word of the passing of one of the Dominican Republic's important poets, Blas Jiménez (at left), on November 13. One of the most stalwart expositors and champions of the DR's African heritage--90% of Dominicans have African ancestry, a higher percentage than almost every other country in the Americas except Haiti, Jamaica, and the predominantly Black Caribbean islands--Jiménez had a rich and varied career, as an award-winning journalist; essayist; professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra; TV producer and host of Página Abierta, radio producer and host of La Mañana en Antena; as Secretary General of the DR's national commission for the United Nations Organization for Education, Culture and Communication (UNESCO). For over a decade he worked at the International Education Resource Center, where he developed courses on Afro-Dominican and Caribbean culture and literature.

Amidst all of this great work, he was also and perhaps best known as a poet, and especially as a "poeta de negritud." His works include the volumes Aqui... Otro Español (Here...Another Spanish), Caribe Africano en Despertar (African Caribbean Waking Up), Exigencias de un Cimarrón (Exigiences of a Maroon), and El Nativo (The Native). With highly regarded scholars Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernández, he co-edited the book Desde la Orilla: hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos (From the Edge: Towards a Nationality Without Evictions). His death, as this very brief note makes clear, is a major loss for Dominican, Caribbean, and African Diasporic literature and culture.

MoveOn.Org Rally for Health Care Reform

Last night I participated in a small rally in Jersey City's Journal Square that MoveOn.org organized on behalf of health care reform, one of hundreds of such efforts across the country. The rally and accompanying candlelight vigil's aim was to sure that whatever bills President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress cobble together, the final version, which will be signed into law, include a robust public health insurance option. To that end we attendees, initially numbering about 40 or so and finally rising to about double that number, heard from a New York physician, a handful of people who'd experienced nightmares with the health care system, other healthcare advocates, and local MoveOn.org representatives who excerpts of Teddy Kennedy's speeches.

The gathering was heartening, especially by evening's end when people passing by decided to hang around, listen to the speakers, and sign up for future MoveOn.org activities, but I still am very worried about what the White House and the Congress are up to and what will come from their efforts. We've gotten all sorts of doubletalk from the White House, waffling in one direction or the other, after they'd already taken single-payer universal health insurance, which would surely drive down costs and provide health care for everyone, off the table before they even began.

The President, like a weathervane, has allowed the hot and toxic air emanating from the right and enabled by the mainstream corporate media, increasingly to set the terms of the discussion. Instead of laying out clear principles and selling them nonstop, with Democratic support, he has gone silent for long stretches, failed to actively and enthusiastically challenge the lies and misstatements about the bill, and refused to publicize and humanize the issue. One minute he is for the public option, the next he and his surrogates suggest he isn't (or--Rahm Emanuel--might not be). One minute he is admitting that he (Rahm Emanuel) cut a deal with Big Pharma, laying out the odious terms, the next minute he says he didn't do so.

Health care in the US is in crisis; doing nothing about it is not an option. But throwing together a crappy bill that does nothing to transform the current situation, just to have something to sign also isn't and cannot be an option.

The same has been true of the Congress, whose leaders, especially in the Senate, continue to be too pusillanimous despite now having close to an absolute majority to pass legislation. The three House bills include forms of public health insurance, as does Kennedy's HELP panel's bill, but the key Senate Finance bill, from Max Baucus (written by him and sextet of moderate and conservative Democrats and Republicans), is unclear. Baucus's original guidelines for a bill, from last year, sounded pretty progressive, but his just released sketch of a bill sounds like a disaster, with reduced subsidies for poor and working-class people and no public option.

Are Baucus's newest set of guidelines a sop for his health care industry funders, a ploy to placate the GOP and Democratic fiscal whiners who were silent when George W. Bush dynamited the deficit open with tax cuts and war spending, a skeleton to be fleshed out with the House's more liberal plans in conference, or something else?

None of this came up at the rally. In fact the faith that people there appeared to have that the President and the Congress would do the right thing was strong, by my observation. I hate to be more cynical, but as in 1992, on the big issues this administration has represented one disappointment after another. I am hoping--and will do my part to ensure that--this extremely important effort will not turn out to be yet one more to be added to the list.

Participants in the MoveOn.org health care reform rally and vigil

Participants at the rally and vigil

Participants at the rally and vigil

A participant with a flyer

Our local newsperson, Mike Gilliam of Channel 9 News; he aired a very sympathetic and thoughtful piece on the rally