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If you’re gonna put people on the phone to urge residents to support your candidate, you better make sure they know more than their hastily read script. They should also make clear what organization they’re working for, not just what candidate they’re supporting. I say “working”, because I’d expect a volunteer to be better informed than the caller was, and the caller sounded more Mid-Atlantic than New England. I guess scaling this kind of effort is never easy. Besides, I only answered because I was curious what local pitch I might hear, but this wasn’t that.
Election Refusal as Career
Highly recommended reading: “David Clements: The Evangelist of Election Refusal” by Anna Bower and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare, October 31, 2024.
The phenomenon described is worrying, but the telling is engaging, even entertaining—maybe because it feels so American to me.
The bright colors were largely gone on my walk in Whitaker Woods yesterday, and the sky was gray, so I turned my eyes to moss.
Okay, I’ve made it this far into my day without coffee because there was none. That’s changed, so time to put the moka pot to work. ☕️
Brought my mother to the town hall so she could drop off her absentee ballot and show her ID in person. No crowds, no fear of getting knocked over.
Looks like pieces of my old “Commonplacing” tumblelog were saved by the Wayback Machine too. I see quotes that meant something to me in 2009.
Following up on my efforts last Sunday, I began looking at 2009 posts saved by the Wayback Machine and imported my inauguration post to start with. I added a Washington, DC, category for that one, and I’ll apply that to other posts later on. I should also have my Twitter archive somewhere to pull from, though I won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t turn up.
For whatever reason, I ended up chatting with some guys I encountered on my walk this afternoon. Could’ve been coincidence, but maybe it was the cloudy sky, the brown foliage, and bare trees, not to mention the nerves we’re all feeing.
Wealthy 'Criminally Insane' Playboy Posing with Captors (ca. 1913–14)
Sometimes the world loves a notorious, wealthy, narcissistic, sociopathic, murdering playboy sadist. This one was Harry K. Thaw, seen here posing in chummy fashion with Canadian police and immigration officers around the time of his escape from the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in New York. What a strange photo!
Credit: Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, ca. 1913–14, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017648770/.
Winslow Homer, 'Bell-Time' (1868)
I used to occasionally run across Winslow Homer’s wood engravings of the American Civil War, which were widely circulated in Harper’s Weekly, but this is the first work of his I’ve seen that deals with immigrant factory workers in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Note the mix of genders and ages, including the presence of young children. This was not work that could feed a whole family. No matter the difficult pecuniary circumstances of his subjects, however, Homer portrayed them with dignity.
Credit: “Bell-Time” by Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly, July 25,1868, via Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Seeing pictures of the crowds of Harris–Walz supporters at the Washington Monument in DC tonight is heartening. They make me feel at home. That’s where I stood for Obama’s inauguration in 2009 – and for Independence Day celebrations despite the post-9/11 security theater.
'The Unrestricted Dumping Ground' (1903 Cartoon)
This color cartoon by Louis Dalrymple appeared in Judge magazine in 1903.1 It linked immigration to national security by portraying Italian immigrants in ways that prefigured Trump’s despicable, racist rhetoric about “bad hombres” and pet-eaters in the present presidential race. The federal government, personified here as Uncle Sam, comes off as old and ineffectual.
At least, that’s what I see. Here: Old Uncle Sam stands at the ramparts of fortress America, bounded by the sea. The smoke from his pipe forms a wreath to his left. In that appears the late President William McKinley, assassinated in 1901 by the Polish-American anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Uncle Sam has an arm and hand around the flagpole and a cane in the other hand. Rats, monkeys, and other immigrating vermin emerge from the water, clamber up the rampart, and scurry away.
Some of the dehumanized immigrants are armed with a knife or pistol, and they wear a floppy, broad-brimmed hat or a bandana in anarchist red or the Italian tricolor. Their weapons and head apparel read “Socialist,” “Anarchist,” “Murderer,” “Assassination,” and “Mafia.” More inhuman riffraff falls from a garbage chute marked, “Direct from the slums of Europe daily.” There is also a cluster of regular gray rats in the harbor.
The message is clear. The immigrants, in this case Italians, are criminal, radical, or just socially undesirable. They are other, vermin, and their presence threatens the country.
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“The Unrestricted Dumping Ground,” via The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c146bf32-7fda-68d3-e040-e00a1806693f. This page includes a high resolution TIFF download option, which is what I used to examine the detail. ↩︎
Talking about some other kid, the bagger asked the cashier, “How old is he?” “Fourteen,” she replied. “Fourteen?” “Yeah, same grade as me.”
I had to ask them how old you have to be to work at Market Basket. “Fourteen.” And to my follow-up, “No,” no permission by a parent was required.
Whenever Olaf Scholz sees an opportunity to do the wrong thing for European security and Ukraine, he seizes it. I don’t know how his foreign and defense ministers put up with this. The Wall came down 35 years ago, and yet there’s still no backbone or leadership in sight.
I never thought I’d be reprising this post from February 2017. Even the dominant color of this 1926 Mussolini cartoon is on point. 🍊
Russia is intent on eradicating the Ukrainian language and all aspects of Ukrainian identity, with young Ukrainians a particular target.
It hurts to hear that someone’s getting sucked even further into the black hole of MAGA, parroting the worst lies and injuring the feelings of family in the process because the orange dipshit is somehow a model of masculinity worth emulating.
Wow! Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement (report by David Folkenflick for NPR)
Pre-Election Jitters Be Still
I don’t think that would-be MAGA putchists should be under any illusions about the Biden administration’s willingness and ability to use force to defend the results of the upcoming election, should that become necessary. Public officials acting in bad faith will only be able to go so far without risking prison. Yes, many of us are nervous because of the Supreme Court’s interference in 2000, the January 6 debacle, and the work the GOP has been doing to undermine the upcoming election in battleground states. But the bad-faith actors are delusional. They might try some tricks, but most won’t stick their necks out. The country will happily embrace a clear result in Harris’s favor, as it did for Biden. It will just replace the ageism with sexism and racism.
I am adding some old blog posts that were largely saved by the Internet Archive. I’m doing this by hand in order to review links and to skip posts that no longer have a context. I started this effort because I remembered blogging a little about politics in 2008, and I wanted to bring that in for perspective in these fraught times.
Evening update: I made it through 2008. (I forgot how angry I was at McCain in this campaign.) There will be at least a few more bits and bobs from 2009 to add later.
Sun sets at 5:40 this afternoon, and it’s 3:10 now. I gotta get outside while there’s still time. 🥾
Societies, societal attitudes, and cultural norms change, but people not so much. Positive societal developments reinforce a healthy sense of progress and purpose, but they also trick us into taking too much for granted. Blind to the darkest parts of our own natures, we are caught off guard when the greed, cynicism, hubris, fear, prejudice, and hatred of individuals and mobs assert themselves.
The paradoxical relationship between societal change and human nature can be confounding, but it must not be permitted to immobilize us. There are so many examples of people following their better natures in the final weeks of this electoral fight, so many doing their best to be brave and not despair.
It’s one thing to criticize presentist thinking and optimistic notions of human progress that don’t comport with professional historiography. It’s quite another to be punched in the face repeatedly by the reality of historical contingency in our national experience these past few decades.
Photo of “African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs ‘We demand the right to vote, everywhere’ and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama” by Warren K. Leffler, March 12, 1965. Source: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014645538/.