Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 21

The Pawnshop Abortion Doctor

There's a lot of conversation, this week, around my old colleague Ross Douthat's column on marriage, abortion and birth control. I think that conversation could benefit from Eyal Press' profile, in this week's New Yorker, of Dr. Steven Brigham. This is not a piece rooted in theory and hypotheticals about a future where women lack control over their bodies. This is a piece of reporting that demonstrates what the world of back-alley abortions would like, because that world is already here: 

....in February, 2010, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners and the New Jersey Attorney General’s office received packets of letters about an enterprise called Grace Medical Care, whose Web site advertised second- and third-trimester abortions but failed to provide potential patients with basic information, such as the location of the facility. The letters came from staff members at the Cherry Hill clinic where Jen Boulanger works. Elizabeth Barnes, the clinic’s director, informed the board that she had learned that Grace Medical Care, at a facility in New Jersey, was initiating cervical dilation in patients with advanced-gestation fetuses; later, the patients were driven to another state—most likely Maryland—for surgery. Why the elaborate protocol? In New Jersey, after the fourteenth week of pregnancy, an abortion had to be performed in a licensed ambulatory facility or in a hospital, to insure safety. Maryland had no such rule. New Jersey officials did not respond to Barnes.

Several months later, on August 13th, a procession of cars drove south from Voorhees, New Jersey, through Delaware, and across the Maryland border. Among the passengers was an eighteen-year-old African-American girl who was twenty-one weeks pregnant. The convoy stopped outside an unmarked storefront in Elkton, Maryland. Inside, Nicola Riley, a physician the girl had never met before, performed an abortion while another doctor—Steven Brigham, the founder of Grace Medical Care—observed. Riley seemed to be training on the job, the patient later told a Maryland investigator. During surgery, the girl’s uterus was perforated and her bowel was damaged, and she was taken by car to a local hospital. She eventually had to be airlifted to Johns Hopkins Hospital. (The girl, who spent a week in the hospital, declined to be interviewed.)

A few days afterward, a detective in Elkton got in touch with the Maryland Board of Physicians to find out if Brigham was licensed to practice medicine in the state. He was not. The police obtained a search warrant and raided the building in Elkton. Inside a dingy storeroom, officers pried open a freezer filled with red biohazard bags that contained thirty-five advanced-gestation fetuses—medical remains that had not yet been disposed of. Some of the fetuses were past twenty-four weeks’ gestation, the point of viability. This ghoulish discovery triggered a grand-jury investigation, and in December, 2011, Brigham was arrested and charged with ten counts of murder. A week or so later, he was released, after posting bail of half a million dollars.

The story is chilling. Brigham claimed to be trained by people who don't remember him. He overcharged patients (accepting jewelry and personal property as collateral) and injured women. And our current geography insures that men like him (and the notorious Kermit Gosnell) will continue to exist:

In Maryland, a medical abortion generally costs about three hundred and seventy-five dollars. LeRoy Carhart, the doctor who had worked closely with George Tiller, told me that for a clinic that uses methotrexate “the profit margin is huge.” Carhart, now seventy-two, is an avuncular man with a shock of gray hair and soft pouches beneath his eyes. Based in Omaha, he flies to Maryland every week to perform surgery at the Germantown clinic. Since Tiller’s murder, there are only four doctors in the country who openly provide third-trimester abortions. Carhart told me that, the next day, he was seeing patients in Indiana. When wasn’t he working? “Never,” he said. “When George died, that was the last time I had time off.”

Since Carhart started performing abortions, in 1988, the number of abortion providers in the U.S. has fallen by a third—a decline that he attributes to protesters. “They have made it so the good physicians don’t really want to get involved,” he explained. “Now you have two types of doctors doing abortions—the doctors who are totally committed to women’s health and are going to do them even if they never get another dime, and the people that just want to take advantage of the situation and milk everything they can out of it.”

Reading this piece, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that terrorism sometimes works. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, than the killing of George Tiller must be viewed as a success. The killings in the 80s and 90s may well have been bad PR for the movement. But they terrorized doctors and were essential to the broader campaign that cleaved abortion away from mainstream medicine.

       

'To Europe—Yes, but Together With Our Dead'

At The Mecca. Photo: Sandhya Rajan

I think Anne Applebaum offers some helpful statistics for thinking about the blue period into which this blog has so recently plunged:

When the numbers are added up, the result is stark. In Britain, the war took the lives of 360,000 people, and in France, 590,000. These are horrific casualties, but they still come to less than 1.5 percent of those countries’ populations. By contrast, the Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which about 3 million were Jews. In total, some 20 percent of the Polish population, one in five people, did not survive. Even in countries where the fighting was less bloody, the proportion of deaths was still higher than in the west. Yugoslavia lost 1.5 million people, or 10 percent of the population. Some 6.2 percent of Hungarians and 3.7 percent of the prewar Czech population died too. In Germany itself, casualties came to between 6 million and 9 million people—depending upon whom one considers to be “German,” given all of the border changes—or up to 10 percent of the population. It would have been difficult, in Eastern Europe in 1945, to find a single family that had not suffered a serious loss.

When you talk about trying to understand the meaning of society in a country where 20 percent of the people have been killed, where decimation is a literal term, facts and figures begin to fail you and the individual experiences become much more revealing. A 20-percent casualty rate is why art exists and why personal, individual voices become so important. I can't really grok the sheer amount of death in The Bloodlands. But when Anna Akhmatova says mournfully of the many millions gone, "I would like to call you all by name," I feel something in particular.

The great edifice of slavery fixes us with a similar problem. When you start talking about 250 years of slavery, you are talking about entire ancestries of people earmarked for perpetual plunder. The majority of African-American history is the history of enslavement. Entire generations could, at one point, reach back to great-great-great-grandparents and find only the enslaved. The vastness of the thing can't really be calculated simply by piling up the numbers. We go to Lucille Clifton to understand the effects:

Love rejected
hurts so much more
than Love rejecting;
they act like they don't love their country

No

what it is
is they found out
their country don't love them.

I must have read that poem in my first year at Howard University. Lucille Clifton went to Howard and (like me) dropped out. I would have likely been sitting downstairs in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. I spent more time in those two places than I did in class. The questions which interested me at 17, when I arrived at Howard, have not changed: What happens when a great crime is perpetrated upon a nation? More, what happens when it isn't—or can't be—made right? How, specifically, do you make right the massacre of 20 percent of a population? What can atone for the perpetual destruction of families for profit and all its attendant effects? Do we even want to make things right?

This weekend, I went to a party for one of my oldest friends—another buddy from Howard—out in Fort Greene. The old crowd was there—men and women who too, 20 years earlier, had been drawn to the Mecca by the big questions of history. We commiserated. Danced to Beyonce. They played "Murder She Wrote," and I lost my mind a little. I came back to the bar. Talked some friends into drinking a couple Thug Passions. (It was whack. They only had the red Alize.) There was a Soul Train line. We took some Henny shots so as to be more cliché. I looked around at the old crew, and thought about those old days back in Moreland. I didn't know anything about Poland, then. I could not have pointed out Ukraine on a map. Everything was ancient Egypt and my God was the great historian of Africa, Basil Davidson. 

Back then, I still viewed history, primarily, as an exercise in competing hagiographies. If they had great walls, we must have them too. I really was looking for the Tolstoy of the Zulus. But Howard taught me that accepting the nationalism of my younger years reduced history to jingoism and thus accepted the premises of white supremacy, leaving its roots unscathed. The irony is that this awareness of the limits of nationalism came to me in a place where I knew virtually no white people, in a world delineated by segregation. Because there were no white people, our conversations could be frank and our critiques could be direct. In those conversations I came to see African-Americans as a people among peoples, and that feeling, the glow of that particular tribe, shook the club on Saturday night.

I came up at a time when it seemed to me that people who claimed humanism just didn't want to be black. It never occurred to me that blackness could lead one not to nationalism, but to humanism, to the sense that your shade is one in the rainbow. We are not all the same. The Poles and Ukrainians existed before the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. But we who are dark begin in tragedy. Black people are the orphans conceived in an act of Trans-Atlantic rape. And that perspective gives you a unique view on the West. You can want badly to see Krakow, as I do, but not feel it, or any other European city, to be the font of all nice things. And then at the same time you can understand that a 20-percent casualty rate inflicted on a society, in a relatively brief period, mostly concentrated on a minority, is a particular violence different from your own. What does it mean to be Polish after you see something like that? And how does that then inform your notion of being European?

Again Timothy Snyder gives us some help:

Germans killed millions of Polish citizens. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933. Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself. The Polish literary critic Maria Janion said of Poland’s accession to the European Union: “to Europe, yes, but with our dead.”

But with our dead.

And even here there is a moment of recognition, because this is exactly how I feel about America and the great project of the West. It's a beautiful thing. But not without our ancestors. Not without our enslaved. Not without our history. Not without my people. Not without our dead. 

       

Sean Wilentz Tries to Change the Subject

Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

Eminent Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has published a piece titled, "Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?" Wilentz promises to examine "important caches of evidence" which have been overlooked and reveal the unholy troika's "true motives" which are at odd with the liberal portrayal of them as "truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state."

I think it's worth knowing the politics that animate "the leakers," as Wilentz dubs them, and engaging them. But hasn't this engagement has been going on for some years now? Glenn Greenwald's politics have long been a subject of debate among liberals. Haven't Julian Assange's politics also been up for debate, particularly among feminists? I guess Edward Snowden's politics haven't been as closely examined, but that only leads to deeper critique—Edward Snowden is significant because of what he told us about the NSA, not because he's Paul Wellstone reincarnated. 

In short, I think we know quite well what "the leakers" are thinking, but we're much more interested in what the NSA is doing. I know Wilentz is a prominent and celebrated historian, this piece just reads like elongated ad hominem. If Edward Snowden was a white supremacist, I would still be concerned about NSA officers spying on their exes, and James Clapper lying to the Senate. 

See Henry Farrell's thorough response for more. 

       

'With Complete Indifference to Life or Death'

Prisoners liberated from Gesiowka concentration camp by the the Polish Home Army during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; Ghetto Fighters House Museum

When I was going through my long study of the Civil War, I tried really hard to not get entranced by redemptive violence. The thing to understand about enslavement is that it usually went bad for the enslaved, and that for every Christian Fleetwood, there are so many millions raped, pillaged, murdered, and gone. Defeat is defeat. It is humiliating, destructive, and dehumanizing. There's nothing noble about the bottom.

There are no Djangos in history and when one finds Djangos, one has to be careful to not commit the nationalist error of ascribing those actions to some bone-deep chivalry. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands sucks much of the juice out of the idea of noble victimization. Those who have power, murder and plunder and those who murder and plunder are themselves then murdered and plundered. Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, all—at various points—double as victim and perpetrator. Only the Jewish communities emerge unstained and any serious belief in humanism must hold that this awful innocence is not a matter of DNA. One must always avoid a logic which allows, as Snyder puts it, "a nationalist to hug himself with one arm and strike his neighbor with another."

And then finally there is the matter of only seeing resistance in grand and vengeful strokes. The tendency is to make too much of Nat Turner, and too little out of the enslaved women who would do anything—filthy, spectacular, and mundane—for the majestic goal of simply saving her son. A few years back, Ron Rosenbaum wrote a great piece on the inability of Americans to grapple with 9/11. His point was that we focused on Flight 93—"The Plane That Fought Back"—because we could not grapple with the fact that thousands had been killed, without any chance to fight, without any sort of choice in how they might die. Instead we wanted a "feel good 9/11 movie."

Or maybe the need for narratives of uprising springs from something else. Bloodlands is filled with repeated acts of unimaginable horror. There is very little heroism in the book. Snyder licks shots at the God of History, at our sense of "progress," at our belief in meek inheritance, and triumphant justice. Then about three quarters of the way in, Snyder tells the story of the 1944 uprising in Warsaw. The uprising is defeated and thousands are killed. But there is one moment that stood out for me:  

On 5 August, Home Army soldiers entered the ruins of the ghetto, attacked Concentration Camp Warsaw, defeated the ninety SS-men who guarded it, and liberated its remaining 348 prisoners, most of them foreign Jews. One of the Home Army soldiers in this operation was Stanisław Aronson, who had himself been deported from the ghetto to Treblinka. Another recalled a Jew who greeted them with tears on his cheeks; yet another, the plea of a Jew for a weapon and a uniform, so that he could fight. Many of the liberated Jewish slave laborers did join the Home Army, fighting in their striped camp uniforms and wooden shoes, with “complete indifference to life or death,” as one Home Army soldier recalled.

I read this and started crying like a baby. Most of history's oppressed do not die with their wooden shoes on. But this scene was so familiar to me from studies of the Civil War. Very often you'd find men who'd been slaves one week, turn around and become soldiers the next. At Miliken's Bend, for instance, you had men who'd literally been working on cotton plantations a month earlier, turning around to fight white Texans during the Vicksburg campaign. 

Early on in Anne Applebaum's The Iron Curtain, she talks about how totalitarian governments rarely triumph completely. And I think there's a similar argument in the case of enslavement wherein the enslaved, very often, never completely becomes "a slave." I think that's what got me about that moment—you are half-starved, dressed only in your stripes, and your wooden shoes, but you have not actually fallen into that dark night of dehumanity. Violence is only the most spectacular example of this kind of resistance. Primo Levi has a great moment in If This Is a Man where he is told by another prisoner that he must continue to wash, that he cannot become what the enslaver asserts him to be. 

And there's something else: a significant portion of enslavement involves crafting a narrative of weakness. The racist—Nazi or Confederate—must always justify himself, and thus asserts that the subjugated has earned their fate through a blood-born cowardice. The subjugated claps back with their own narrative—"We too have Warsaw. We too had a 54th." I don't know how you avoid that need. I don't even know that you should. And I don't know how you integrate that into other narratives, because this too is Warsaw:

After October 1943, the Jews of Concentration Camp Warsaw were forced to perform yet another task: the disposal of the bodies of Poles taken from Warsaw and executed in the ruins of the ghetto. Poles were brought in trucks in groups of fifty or sixty to the terrain of the former ghetto, where they were executed in or near Concentration Camp Warsaw by machine gunners of the local SS and another police unit.

Jewish prisoners then had to form a Death Commando that would eliminate the traces of the execution. They would build a pyre from wood taken from the ruins of the ghetto, and then stack bodies and wood in layers. Then the Jews poured gasoline on the pyres and lit them. Yet this was a Death Commando in more than the usual sense. Once the bodies of the Poles were burning, the SS-men shot the Jewish laborers who had built the pyre, and tossed their bodies into the flame.

A serious humanism must conclude that you are no better than those who went into the pyre, that you would have gone into the pyre too, and thus have no right to disgust, because you cannot access that awful calculus, and that you have not earned the right to pity, that you must—at all cost—avoid the nationalist error of seeing yourself only in Nat Turner.

I haven't been to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. since I was a 22-year-old cub reporter. I've never been to Germany or Poland. And I wasn't on this line of questioning when I was in France. I wish I had something more learned to say. And this can only be a notepad of my thoughts, questions for later pursuit. I wish I knew more. Soon come.

       

'With Complete Indifference To Life Or Death'

Prisoners liberated from Gesiowka concentration camp by the the Polish Home Army during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; Ghetto Fighters House Museum

When I was going through my long study of the Civil War, I tried really hard to not get entranced by redemptive violence. The thing to understand about enslavement is that it usually went bad for the enslaved, and that for every Christian Fleetwood, there are so many millions raped, pillaged, murdered and gone. Defeat is defeat. It is humiliating, destructive and dehumanizing. There's nothing noble about the bottom.

There are no Djangos in history and when one finds Djangos, one has to be careful to not commit the nationalist error of ascribing those actions to some bone-deep, chivalry. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands sucks much of the juice out of the idea of noble victimization. Those who have power, murder and plunder and those who murder and plunder are themselves then murdered and plundered. Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, all--at vary points--double as victim and perpetrator.  Only the Jewish communities emerge unstained and any serious belief in humanism must hold that this awful innocence is not a matter of DNA. One must always avoid a logic which allows, as Snyder puts it, "a nationalist to hug himself with one arm and strike his neighbor with another."

And then finally there is the matter of only seeing resistance in grand and vengeful strokes. The tendency is to make too much of Nat Turner, and too little out of the enslaved women who would do anything--filthy, spectacular and mundane--for the majestic goal of simply saving her son.  A few years back, Ron Rosenbaum wrote a great piece on the inability of Americans to grapple with 9/11. His point was that we focused on Flight 93--"The Plane That Fought Back"--because we could not grapple with the fact that thousands had been killed, without any chance to fight, without any sort of choice in how they might die. Instead we wanted a "feel good 9/11 movie."

Or maybe the need for narratives of uprising springs froms something else. Bloodlands is filled with repeated acts of unimaginable horror. There is very little heroism in the book. Snyder licks shots at the God of History, at our sense of "progress," at our belief in meek inheritance, and triumphant justice. Then about three quarters of the way in, Snyder tells the story of the 1944 uprising in Warsaw. The uprising is defeated and thousands are killed. But there is one moment that stood out for me:  

On 5 August, Home Army soldiers entered the ruins of the ghetto, attacked Concentration Camp Warsaw, defeated the ninety SS-men who guarded it, and liberated its remaining 348 prisoners, most of them foreign Jews. One of the Home Army soldiers in this operation was Stanisław Aronson, who had himself been deported from the ghetto to Treblinka. Another recalled a Jew who greeted them with tears on his cheeks; yet another, the plea of a Jew for a weapon and a uniform, so that he could fight. Many of the liberated Jewish slave laborers did join the Home Army, fighting in their striped camp uniforms and wooden shoes, with “complete indifference to life or death,” as one Home Army soldier recalled.

I read this and started crying like a baby. Most of history's oppressed do not die with their wooden shoes on. But this scene was so familiar to me from studies of the Civil War. Very often you'd find men who'd been slaves one week, turn around and become soldiers the next. At Miliken's Bend, for instance, you had men who'd literally been working on cotton plantations a month earlier, turning around to fight white Texans during the Vicksburg campaign. 

Early on in Anne Applebaum's The Iron Curtain, she talks about how totalitarian governments rarely triumph completely. And I think there's a similar argument in the case of enslavement wherein the enslaved, very often, never completely becomes "a slave." I think that's what got me about that moment--you are half-starved, dressed only in your stripes, and your wooden shoes, but you have not actually fallen into that dark night of dehumanity. Violence is only the most spectacular example of this kind of resistance. Primo Levi has a great moment in If This Is  A Man where he is told by another prisoner that he must continue to wash, that he can not become what they want the enslaver asserts him to be. 

And there's something else: a significant portion of enslavement involves crafting a narrative of weakness. The racist--Nazi or Confederate--must always justify himself, and thus asserts that the subjugated has earned their fate through a blood-born cowardice. The subjugated claps back with their own narrative--"We too have Warsaw. We too had a 54th." I don't know how you avoid that need. I don't even know that you should. And I don't know how you integrate that into other narratives, because this too is Warsaw:

After October 1943, the Jews of Concentration Camp Warsaw were forced to perform yet another task: the disposal of the bodies of Poles taken from Warsaw and executed in the ruins of the ghetto. Poles were brought in trucks in groups of fifty or sixty to the terrain of the former ghetto, where they were executed in or near Concentration Camp Warsaw by machine gunners of the local SS and another police unit.

Jewish prisoners then had to form a Death Commando that would eliminate the traces of the execution. They would build a pyre from wood taken from the ruins of the ghetto, and then stack bodies and wood in layers. Then the Jews poured gasoline on the pyres and lit them. Yet this was a Death Commando in more than the usual sense. Once the bodies of the PolesRead more at location were burning, the SS-men shot the Jewish laborers who had built the pyre, and tossed their bodies into the flame.

A serious humanism must conclude that you are no better than those who went into the pyre, that you would have gone into the pyre too, and thus have no right to disgust, because you can not access that awful calculus, and that you have not earned the right to pity, that you must--at all cost--avoid the nationalist error of seeing yourself only in Nat Turner.

I haven't been to the Holocaust Museum DC since I was a 22-year old cub reporter. I've never been to Germany or Poland. And I wasn't on this line of questioning when I was in France. I wish I had something more learned to say. And this can only be a notepad of my thoughts, questions for later pursuit. I wish I knew more. Soon come.

       

Ukraine Has Not Yet Died

Newlyweds kissing in support of protests in Kiev. CNN

If I could be anywhere writing about anything, right now, I'd be lost in Kiev. I used to read about countries like certain countries in Europe after they threw bananas at some black soccer player, and say to myself, "I'll never go there." But I am a little older now, and I am more confirmed in the fact of this one-shot life. And knowing that this not a dress rehearsal, and knowing, too, that questions are burning in me, and feeling that my whole purpose here is to observe, I simply don't much care anymore. I am past the age where one can afford to sit around waiting for the world to autoliberate from its various hatreds. And I have had my hatreds too. Like most humans.

I began this blue period thinking mostly of justice for my people. And having explored that subject, I came to wonder how other societies handled their national crimes And so we've spent the past few months thinking of the some of the most horrifying wrongs of the 20th century, and in those wrongs I have seen so much of myself. It is an odd thing to be raised black, to be raised by the dictates of white supremacy prevention, and then turn around and see yourself in people lighter than you. I feel deeply ignorant writing that. But it's true. The Ukrainian national anthem translates as "Ukraine Has Not Yet Died," and I have some sense of what that means.* But then I kind of don't. Analogy can sometimes obscure as much as it clarifies. Someday I hope to know more. 

At any rate, here is a great piece by Tim Judah in the New York Review of Books. If you haven't been following the news, it's a good primer. But it also gets to one of the most trenchant questions, for me, to come out of this whole journey--what, precisely, do Europeans mean when they say Europe:

Before Yanukovych decided against the deal with the EU, Tetiana Sylina, a journalist highly critical of the government, told me that unless the EU signed the deal, with or without the release of Tymoshenko, it would “lose Ukraine.” Not signing, she said, would lead to increasing authoritarianism resembling Russia’s. “Yanukovych,” she said, 

is not interested in the EU or the customs union or European values, he just wants cheaper credits and foreign investment and the opening of markets for oligarchs. But for Ukrainians, Europe is not about Yanukovych but about its 46 million people.

In this respect, she echoed Hanna Shelest, a researcher at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, whom I met in the Black Sea port of Odessa. She told me that she wanted Ukraine to sign the deal because “it is a question of self-identification. Sometimes we don’t feel ourselves European but what is worse is when Europeans don’t see us as European.” Andrey Stavnitser, a businessman who runs a dry cargo terminal near Odessa, told me he was hoping that if the deal was signed, the application of EU standards would begin to curb corruption. “For my business,” he added, “it would be better to enter the customs union,” because he could then expect more Russian cargoes, but “as a citizen,” he said “I would vote for the EU.” As to a relationship dominated by Russia, he said, “I would not go there again.”

Among ordinary people there was more ambivalence about the deal, although the polls favor it. A big reason for this was that what was at stake and how the EU deals or the customs union would actually affect people’s lives were rarely explained properly. Indeed, the Russian-funded media in Ukraine had, said Shelest, even given people the impression that if they chose Russia over the EU, “then everything will be cheaper, such as gas, and that if we go toward the EU, normal marriages will not exist, only gay marriages.” Russia, she said, was presenting itself as “the big brother who will tell us what to do,” and a pro-Russian choice would mean “we will live happily ever after and won’t have to read that complicated EU agreement.”

There's so much there--The fear of being relegated to Asia ("You cannot move Romania into Africa.") whatever Asia means in the Ukrainian mind, and at the same time, a fear of modernism represented by the recognition of the right of gay human beings to form families. And then finally a desire for a dictator to simply tell people what to do. 

Here's another piece over at NYRB from Timothy Snyder arguing that the country has, on paper, slipped into dictatorship:

In procedure and in content the laws “passed” by the Ukrainian parliament this week contravene the most basic rights of modern constitutional democracies: to speech, assembly, and representation. Although they concern the most basic aspects of political life, and transform the constitutional structure of the Ukrainian state, these measures were not subjected to even the barest of parliamentary procedures. There were no public hearings, there was no debate in parliament, and there was no actual vote. There was a show of hands in parliament and an estimate of how many hands were raised. The standard electronic voting system, which creates an official record, was not used.

The deputies—those who apparently raised their hands—have all but voted themselves out of existence. If the deputies from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions read the legislation, which according to Ukrainian reports they did not, they would realize that their own positions are now under threat. Their parliamentary immunity is now no longer guaranteed, which means that if they vote the wrong way they can be stripped of immunity and prosecuted. Yanukovych’s main political rival, Julia Tymoshenko, is in prison. Her defense lawyer has already been stripped of his parliamentary mandate.

Speaking at all about the Tymoshenko case will now be risky. Actions deemed to “interfere with the work of courts” have been banned. Making remarks of an “offensive” nature about judges is illegal. It seems unlikely that truth will be a defense. It is true, for example, that the new president of the highest Ukrainian court was once in charge of the court that misplaced documents about President Yanukovych’s earlier criminal convictions for rape and robbery. But that seems like exactly the thing that people will no longer be allowed to say. As far as Yanukovych’s own record is concerned, the new legislation’s vaguely worded ban on “slander” will presumably be used to criminalize unfriendly references to the president.

Democracy is such a fragile project--more a continuing series of actions, then a state.

More soon. I've just started reading Anne Applebaum's The Iron Curtain. She begins with Stalin crushing the societies of Poland, Hungary and the old GDR. I can tell there are lots of bright days ahead on this blog. As I said, more soon.

*As a sidenote, a comment on that page reads "Russians have killed 10 million of us, jews have tried to take us over, the polish killed us too. but we they have not succedded. ukraine be free!!!!" A foot on the neck is never an ennobling experience.

       

Richard Sherman's Best Behavior

 

BREAKING: It's racist to say anything negative about Richard Sherman.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) January 20, 2014

 

We just got set back 500 years...

— Andre Iguodala (@andre) January 20, 2014

 

It's worth heading over to Deadspin for a moment and checking out both Greg Howard penetrating piece on the reaction to Richard Sherman and Samer Kalef's aggregation of the racist bile directed his way. Podhoretz was responding to tweet he sent out asserting that Sherman was a "role model for today's Taliban youth," presumably because....I actually don't know. And neither did Podhoretz who deleted the tweet and claimed it was just a joke. The tweet from Iguodala just makes me sad, mostly because it reflects a rather ancient strain of thought in black America which holds that men like Richard Sherman are the reason we can't have nice things. 

A few points of biography: Richard Sherman is a the son of sanitation worker and teacher. He finished second in his class in high school and then went to Stanford. Here is how he describes his introduction to the school:

 "I was with kids from prestigious private schools, and they were drawing comparisons between Plato and Aristotle," says Sherman. "A lot went over my head. I hadn't even read The Iliad yet. I had to check out all these books just so I could know what everybody was talking about."

Here is what Richard Sherman is doing now:

Beverly and Kevin now live in a well-landscaped community in Compton, but she still works for Children's Services and he still drives his truck every morning at 4 a.m., a Seahawks sticker plastered across his helmet. Their home is wallpapered with pictures of their children: Richard, Branton and 22-year-old Kristyna, who runs a hair salon out of the Shermans' garage. (Seahawks receiver Sidney Rice is a client.) The first photo you see, upon opening the front door, is of Richard's commencement ceremony at Stanford.

Across the street lives an English teacher from Dominguez named Michelle Woods who charters a bus every spring break for Dominguez students to visit colleges throughout California. "Most of them think Cal State is their only option," she says. When Sherman was at Stanford, he made sure the bus swung by Palo Alto, and he led the tours himself. "I'm here; you can be too," he told the group every year as he advised them on classes and grants.

I don't think this is what people think when they see Sherman trash-talking. There's some weird notion in our society  that hold that trash-talking is for the classless and stupid. I don't know what it means to be "classless" in an organization like the NFL. And then there is the racism from onlookers, who are incapable of perceiving in Sherman an individual, and instead see the sum of all American fears--monkey, thug, terrorist, nigger. And then there is us, ashamed at our own nakedness, at our humanity. Racism is a kind of fatalism, so seductive, that enthralls even it's victims. But we will not get out of this by being on our best behavior--sometimes it has taken our worse. There's never been a single thing wrong with black people, that the total destruction of white supremacy would not fix. 

       

Richard Sherman Is Better at Life Than You

 

I sat down and watched two football games yesterday for the first time in a couple of years. It was sort of like seeing your ex-wife for coffee. For 30 years of my life, Sunday afternoons in the Fall were the best time of the year. But given the NFL's tangled, and frankly indefensible, sense of morality, I left. Tom Brady and Peyton are like old friends, the last stars of my generation entering the twilight years of their career. I watched the Broncos win, and then I turned to see the real treat—Richard Sherman and the Seattle Seahawks.

Sherman is the best cornerback in football and loves to explain this, as he did to Erin Andrews last night after the game. There's some amount of consternation, and broad sense that Sherman is crazy. But Sherman isn't crazy, as Tommy Tomilson explains over at Forbes:

8. If you stick a microphone in a football player’s face seconds after he made a huge play to send his team to the Super Bowl, you shouldn’t be surprised if he’s a little amped up.

9. Ninety-nine percent of on-field interviews are boring and useless. The TV networks do them anyway for the 1 percent of the time they get a moment like Richard Sherman.

10. As a reporter and writer, that raw emotion — whatever form it takes — is exactly what I hope for. That’s why media people fight for access to locker rooms. After players and coaches cool off, most of them turn into Crash Davis, reading from the book of cliches.

11. But we — the media, and fans in general — don’t know what we want. We rip athletes for giving us boring quotes. But if they say what they actually feel, we rip them for spouting off or showing a lack of class.

12. It’s like we want them to be thinking, Well, that was a fine contest, and jolly good that we won. Which NO athlete is EVER thinking.

Much of what makes pro football so attractive is embodied in Sherman. There's the pure athletics of the play he made at the game. But behind there's the intelligence which Sherman employs on the field and off. It's worth checking out this video, where Sherman gives you some sense of how he prepares for game day (H/T Deadspin.) And then there's the raw emotion which you saw on display last night. You watch an NFL game and there's a sense that the total individual is competing in the ultimate team game. It remains a beautiful—and endangered—thing.

As a side-note, it's worth checking out Sherman's dismantling of Skip Bayless in the video above, "Skip, whenever you ever you address me, address me as 'All-Pro, Stanford Graduate.'"

There's something very English and debonair about it: 

I'm intelligent enough and capable enough to understand that you are an ignorant, pompous, egotistical cretin ... I am going to crush you on here in front of everybody because I am tired of hearing about it.

Anyway, it was good to see the ex-wife again. It was also good to remember why I left.

       

Richard Sherman Is Better At Life Than You

 

I sat down and watched two football games yesterday for the first time in a couple of years. It was sort of like seeing your ex-wife for coffee. For thirty years of my life, Sunday afternoons in the Fall were the best time of the year. But given the NFL's tangled, and frankly indefensible, sense of morality, I left. Tom Brady and Peyton are like old friends, the last stars of my generation entering the twilight years of their career. I watched the Broncos win, and then I turned to see the real treat--Richard Sherman and the Seattle Seahawks.

Sherman is the best cornerback in football and loves to explain this, as he did to Erin Andrews last night after the game. There's some amount of consternation, and broad sense that Sherman is crazy. But Sherman isn't crazy, as Tommy Tomilson explains over at Forbes:

8. If you stick a microphone in a football player’s face seconds after he made a huge play to send his team to the Super Bowl, you shouldn’t be surprised if he’s a little amped up.

9. Ninety-nine percent of on-field interviews are boring and useless. The TV networks do them anyway for the 1 percent of the time they get a moment like Richard Sherman.

10. As a reporter and writer, that raw emotion — whatever form it takes — is exactly what I hope for. That’s why media people fight for access to locker rooms. After players and coaches cool off, most of them turn into Crash Davis, reading from the book of cliches.

11. But we — the media, and fans in general — don’t know what we want. We rip athletes for giving us boring quotes. But if they say what they actually feel, we rip them for spouting off or showing a lack of class.

12. It’s like we want them to be thinking, Well, that was a fine contest, and jolly good that we won. Which NO athlete is EVER thinking.

Much of what makes pro football so attractive is embodied in Sherman. There's the pure athletics of the play he made at the game. But behind there's the intelligence which Sherman employs on the field and off. It's worth checking out this video, where Sherman gives you some sense of how he prepares for game day (H/T Deadspin.) And then there's the raw emotion which you saw on display last night. You watch an NFL game and there's a sense that the total individual is competing in the ultimate team game. It remains a beautiful--and endangered--thing.

As a side-note, it's worth checking out Sherman's dismantling of Skip Bayless in the video above, "Skip, whenever you ever you address me, address me as 'All-Pro, Stanford Graduate.'"

There's something very English and debonair about it: 

I'm intelligent enough and capable enough to understand that you are an ignorant, pompous, egotistical cretin....I am going to crush you on here in front of everybody because I am tired of hearing about it.

Anyway, it was good to see the ex-wife again. It was also good to remember why I left.

 

       

Neal Brennan: White America's Greatest Klingon Writer

The Q&A with Neal Brennan, co-creator of "Chappelle's Show," over at Buzzfeed begins with this ominous paragraph:

In a sense, Brennan has made introducing black America to white America his life’s work. His advice for how white people should act around black people? “It’s an odd thing. You treat them like human beings.”

These two sentences are in conflict. It's certainly true that you should treat black people like human beings. The first step in that process is understanding that asking how to act "around black people" is itself an act of inhumanity.

The second step is understanding that the way to get introduced to black America is to introduce yourself to black America. This is not particularly hard. We have a month every year dedicated to this task. Some of our greatest literature, music, cinema and art hails from this experience. I have heard that there are whole neighborhoods where black people actually live.

The third step is understanding that white America does not so much need to be introduced to black America, as it needs to be introduced to itself. It pains me (seriously) to see this point made by Neal Brennan himself:

Some people question whether a white person should even be writing black characters.

NB: I think anyone can write about anything that they have knowledge of and exposure to. I think the best black screenwriter is Quentin Tarantino. Quentin may write better black characters than Spike. I mean, Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction is fucking unbelievable. That would be Exhibit A. I actually think that’s why Spike gets mad at Quentin. Quentin happens to write unbelievably rich black characters.

So does David Simon.

NB: There’s Exhibit B. Omar is the best black TV character, one of the best TV characters of all time. I think saying a white person can’t write black characters is as racist as anything on earth. And it’s also insulting to black people. It’s like, “So, are you not human?” Because I can write about humans. A white person writing about black people is writing about humanity with a slight vernacular spin.

I am not sure who these people are who don't think white people should never write black characters. Certainly not black actors and actresses, the lionshare of whom want to compete for the largest roles possible. Probably not even black screenwriters who, like most artists, want the right to follow their imagination. More likely, there are artists who are concerned that they actually don't get to follow their imagination, and even in their native world there are white artists who are privileged over them.

Which brings us back to Neal Brennan. Last week, during the great public intellectual debate, I pointed out that I'd grown up in a time when white people freely made whatever declarations they please about worlds they knew very little about. Neal Brennan is an accomplished artist, and we all thank him for his substantial contributions to "Chappelle's Show." But if you try to picture rich black American life, and the first thing that comes to mind is The Wire and Pulp Fiction, and the first characters who come to mind are black men who kill people, I suspect your qualifications are not all in order. 

And I love The Wire, but blindness follows blindness. Leave aside black screenwriters like John Ridley, Barry Jenkins and Ava DuVernay—Neal Brennan does not know who the best black screenwriter is because the best black screenwriter right now is waitressing tables, counting up shit tips, thinking about her babysitting shift that night, hoping to get her car out the shop tomorrow, and storing lines of dialogue and character notes in her memory chalet. Neal Brennan can not know who "the best black" anything is, because the best black anythings are shot, jailed and destroyed at discomfiting rates. And there were so few black people in Wilmette. And these facts, and Brennan's blindness, and Brennan's declaration offered in blindness, are not wholly unconnected.

Never trust anyone posing as a tour guide. Learning things is hard. Do the work.

Never trust that part of you that wants a tour guide. All of us are tempted by the Cliff-Notes. Decline them. Sometimes you must wander through The Louvre.

Never trust that part of you that thinks you found "the best black" anything. Likely, you are speaking loudly of the little you know, and not intelligently of the everything that is. And you know so little of it. This world was made precisely so that you would know so little of it. And the minute you learn anything of it, you will understand why that part of you was ridiculous.

Never try to look cool and learn something at the same time. You must have an awkward phase. All of us would like to skip that awkward phase. That is not how it works. Here is how it works: Get your ass in the water. Swim like me.