2025
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For further details about the Labor Canteen, see the long caption for Washington Area Spark, “Social equality at the Labor Canteen,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/54266105006/. ↩︎
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See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎
“Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?” by Samantha Hancox-Li, Contingent Magazine, October 1, 2019, contingentmagazine.org… 🏳️⚧️
Diplomacy 101: Orange Oaf’s threats are going to lose their value as fast as Putin’s nuclear saber rattling has. It sure would be nice if Orangina deigned to surround himself with people in possession of expertise and experience.
Sounds like artillery fire. Guess I’m close to Aberdeen Proving Ground. That, or things in DC are escalating.
“When this is all over, Adams Morgan, Washington, DC” by Tracy Meehleib, April 8, 2020. Via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2020632316/. License: CC BY-NC-ND.
Orange Oaf is setting up a mediocre cadre of leaders who will only tell him YES. And why not? This approach has been working out real well for the bare-chested judoist of the Kremlin, who’s losing hundreds of thousands in Ukraine.
📽️ Watched an antifascist drama set in the time before the United States was at war with Germany, “Watch on the Rhine,” dir. Herman Shumlin (USA, 1943). Despite the title, it takes place around the U.S. capitol, except for an initial border crossing from Mexico and a train to Washington.
It’s hard to look at the coming constitutional crisis and not think of Prussia’s constitutional crisis of 1858–64. But instead of Bismarck, we’ve got Boris and Natasha role-playing leaders.
I don’t understand how tariffs are supposed to foster American industry. How is investing in a country led by a criminal lunatic a sound plan?
Photo of Mixed Race Sociability in Jim Crow Washington, DC, 1944
Pete Seeger at twenty-five entertaining federal workers, sailors, and soldiers with a banjo and song at the opening of the Labor Canteen in Washington, DC, on February 13, 1944. This unsegregated place in a Jim Crow city was sponsored by the Federal Workers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.1 Note First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying herself in the mixed race and sex audience. On the wall behind the merrymakers are sketches of a hapless character undergoing physical training, perhaps Private Snafu.
Source: Office of War Information, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017864322/
The one who deals the blow forgets.
The one who carries the scar remembers.
– Haitian proverb*
* Quoted in Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism (St: Martin’s, 2022), front matter.
World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front
The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.
Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.
Books Are Weapons – World War Two poster by NYC WPA War Services promoting knowledge about Black history and culture, the war's colonial entanglements in Africa, and the role of Black Americans in national defense. The books referenced were housed in the New York Public Library's renowned Schomburg Collection.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id 5211531.
I don’t get it. With the Abraham Accords from last time and now the changed situation in Lebanon and Syria, His Royal Orangliness might have been uniquely poised to obtain a grand bargain for Israel and the region. Instead everything he says and does worsens the situation. Have they no imagination?
“WPA Rhythm Band” by Elisabeth Olds, 1937. I love how dynamic this image is, like her “Harlem WPA Street Dance” from the same year.
Signed and dated print, Federal Art Project, NYC WPA, via Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id 5180673.
Xi Jinping must be feeling really good. Putin’s worn down his army in a bid to end Ukrainian state- and nationhood. Felonious Husk is gutting the U.S. federal government from within, snuffing out crucial expertise. And Hegseth is leading the Pentagon—enough said.