Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 342

“Game” recognize game: Let’s pour out some Arbor Gold for Olenna Tyrell

Diana Rigg as Olenna Tyrell in "Game of Thrones" (Credit: HBO/Helen Sloan)

Grandfather clocks do not exist in “Game of Thrones.” That means when beloved characters die, there’s no pendulum to stop. Instead, the tick-tock march of death can often be measured in the clomping of hooves as destruction runs down a house on horseback. This is how Olenna Tyrell (Diana Rigg) faces her end in “The Queen’s Justice,” staring at Lannister soldiers stomping toward Highgarden. When Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) came into her chamber the lady made her last stand in the only way she knew how, by calling Jaime’s dead son Joffrey a c—t.

So passes Olenna Tyrell, the last of her name. The Unsilenced. Queen of Thorns, Lady of Highgarden. The Savage Rose. Thrower of Shade and Breaker of Quills. The Mother of Giving Zero F—ks.

We shall miss her so very, very much.

George R.R. Martin realized a number of complex and daunting female characters in “Game of Thrones” and the other novels in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” upon which HBO’s series is based. Olenna, though, is in a class by herself. The Internet is heavy with odes to Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) and a fierce embrace of everything Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) stands for. It’s easy to be fierce when you have three dragons at your back.

To be an elderly woman who refuses to defer to the patriarchy of Westeros wherever she confronts it  — and Olenna simply is not having it, ever — takes hardcore ovaries. Even as death walks up to her in gleaming golden armor bearing a sword named Widow’s Wail, Olenna does not quake. She curses. This is why women wish they had Olenna Tyrell as their grandmothers and also why they want to grow up to be Olenna Tyrell. She’s the toughest of the Golden Girls, for sure.

Though “Game of Thrones” viewers only received the slightest taste of Tyrell history in the series, Olenna lets us know that she’s a woman born with a rapier-sharp intelligence, surrounded entirely by men who enjoy higher status and possess markedly lower IQs.  Maternal affection didn’t not preclude her from softening her views about the dumbasses in her orbit; even the male she gave birth to was, in her estimation, nothing more than a “fathead.”

Lesser men and Cersei have cowered before the likes of Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance), but Olenna has no problem pulling his writing instrument out of his hands and snapping it in two to get his attention. He attempts to intimidate her by threatening her with the knowledge that her grandson is gay; she counters by intimating that she’s aware his grand kids are products of incest. Cersei (Lena Headey) tries to match her father Tywin in Olenna’s estimation but fails miserably, even if the woman on the Iron Throne wins in the end.

Rigg’s casting in the role, too, was sublime and perhaps fated. Few other actresses of her caliber can embody a character who has outlived so very many clever men and maneuvered her way into power by flouting male estimations of her sex. Olenna is a rose, after all, and Rigg, an actress known for playing one of television’s classiest femme fatales, Emma Peel of “The Avengers,” portrayed Olenna with a sharp awareness of the skewed value men place on beauty. And she is unafraid to use that knowledge, as well as the common preconceptions concerning elderly women, to manipulate her way into power.

Her heavy influence in raising her granddaughter Margaery (Natalie Dormer) shone throughout the young queen’s time in the story, too; the younger Tyrell’s strategic prowess and seductive appeal made her such a ferocious opponent that Cersei  had to take her out in a tower of Wildfire.

Had Olenna’s sole skill consisted of summoning lightning strike rejoinders, she’d merely be entertaining. Don’t get me wrong, “Game of Thrones” benefits from humor whenever its employed with purpose and taste. But the reason women, in particular, miss Olenna so much is that she displayed a strong loyalty to women of the realm who are like her – women who defy their prescribed place the political and cultural structure of Westeros.

Olenna’s championship of her gender is a supreme joy to behold, especially women who stand tall in spite of being consistently dismissed. Upon first meeting Brienne, Olenna compliments her magnificence, for example, praising her for knocking her grandson Loras into the dirt “like the silly little boy that he is.”

In those scenes Olenna evokes warmth. In many others, she’s the quintessential Iron Lady who uses her power to get what she wants for the good of her family. And in others, such as when she displayed kindness to the beaten-down woman Sansa (Sophie Turner), she’s a bit of both; she was kind to Sansa as she and Margaery pried information out of the abused Stark daughter, but she also made Sansa an unwitting accomplice in murder.

That Cersei and Jaime bring about the end of the Highgarden’s matriarch is neither a shame nor a complete tragedy thanks to Olenna’s deathbed jab, in which she gulps down a cup of poison and calmly confesses to poisoning Joffrey, goading Jaime to tell Cersei that she’s the culprit. Jaime could have run her through there and then with Widow’s Wail, and that would have been poetic.

He couldn’t, of course, because the always elegant, never genteel Olenna already had delivered the coup de grace in that duel. The Lannisters may have taken down the Tyrells, and even now “the rains weep o’er [their] halls.” But in that moment, a kingslayer bent the knee to a kingslayer. Game recognize game, the saying goes, and Olenna became a timeless legend, undefeated in hearts.

British bookmaker offers more odds on Trump’s remaining term

Jeff Sessions; Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Credit: AP/Susan Walsh/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

In January, a week before Donald Trump’s inauguration, we at Salon made a safe bet: It would not be long before the man whose original television catchphrase was “You’re fired!” would begin axing his inner circle as though they were contestants on “The Apprentice.” (The rate of turnover in his administration has indeed been more rapid than that of his recent predecessors.)

The more pressing question, of course, was who would go first. For that, we turned to the only source that was both removed enough from American politics to be objective and audacious enough to make lines on anything: the Irish bookmaking agency, Paddy Power.

Getting to hear Paddy Power, the agency’s head of marketing (and son of one of its founders) assess the sorry state of American politics with a palatable combination of sympathy and salt in his brogue, made the call across the pond worth its surcharge. But the exercise was not exactly revelatory. The agency’s favorite to exit first was Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross (at 6/1, meaning you could bet $1 to win $6). And the cabinet member least likely to exit first? It was a tie between Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (each given 25/1 odds).

Nearly 200 days into the Trump administration, Ross has been one of the few cabinet members from whom the public has barely heard a peep. Michael Flynn, on the other hand — well, you know.

By Power’s own admission, the agency has not been successful at prognosticating the world of Trump. “When Trump got voted in as president, we lost a lot of money on that,” Power said when I checked back in with him this week. “We got that completely wrong. He’s basically cost us a fortune. Everything he does, we’re getting it wrong.”

The occasion for the call was President Trump’s damning tweets about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s resignation and Trump’s swift firing of Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci. The palace intrigue inspired Paddy Power to roll out a new set of odds on which cabinet member would be next to go.

While some of the odds are no-brainers (Jeff Sessions is the overwhelming favorite at 6/4), and others make sense (Betsy DeVos is next at 4/1), there are some head-scratchers. After Sessions and DeVos, Paddy Power pegs Rex Tillerson (11/2) and then Elaine Chao, Steve Mnuchin, Ben Carson and James Mattis (each at 12/1) as the most likely cabinet members to exit next.

Unlike, say, Tom Price (18/1), these cabinet members have mostly stayed on Trump’s good side, or have made little noise. Power explained the thinking behind Tillerson’s placement as “a keep your friends close, your enemies closer type of thing.” He added: “I think they’re very close, Trump and Tillerson. But just for that reason, [Tillerson] could be the one sacrificed if he did need to pull the trigger on somebody.”

The reasoning doesn’t quite square. But it points to the spirit underlying the market. As opposed to sports bets, which the agency and bettors take quite seriously, Trump bets are loose and treated as low-stakes fare. “A lot of the [Trump] bets get a lot of attention and get people talking,” Power said. “But you tend to get relatively small bets. Like it’s probably friends having a pint and saying, ‘Did you see that bet? We’ll have a ten-er on your man.’”

Irish bettors, Power said, for the most part might not know the members of the administration if they haven’t been involved in a scandal or haven’t been parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”

So the Trump markets are weighted towards big names. Donald Trump Jr. is given 14/1 odds to be Trump’s next Communications Director.

Mark Zuckerberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are each given 16/1 odds to win the 2020 presidential election, trailing only Trump (9/4), Mike Pence (15/2), Elizabeth Warren (15/2) and Michelle Obama (14/1).

Still, the Irish seem to be having quite a bit of fun with the Trump markets. So much so, in fact, that Paddy Power had to appoint a “Head of Trump Betting” specialist. (These markets, Power said, did not exist under America’s last president.)

When the company listed the position, it received over 120 applications, according to Joe Lee, a Paddy Power analyst who was involved in the interview process and eventually gave the job to himself “in true Trump fashion.”

Prior to working as the agency’s Trump specialist, Lee, who is Irish, helped make the agency’s American sports lines. Lee’s shift in focus is reflective of the change in the bets Paddy Power has been receiving. “Trump’s taken a lot of our punters and bettors who would’ve been sports or maybe TV show type bettors along with him,” Lee said. “Football (soccer) and horse racing are our two most dominant offerings year in and year out. But if you look at customer acquisition over the last 12 to 18 months, politics is now our top driving acquisition medium.”

Time will tell whether the company’s increased focus on Trump will make its bet-makers better predictors. But that seems unlikely, even to Paddy Power. “What we’ve learned is that the only predictable thing in this administration is the unpredictable.” So a week from now, who knows? Maybe Wilbur Ross (at 18/1 odds) will get the unceremonious boot for who knows what, bringing some semblance of order to what has heretofore been orderless.

Cindy Sherman’s Instagram account may be the best art exhibition of 2017

Cindy Sherman's Instagram (Credit: Instagram/_cindysherman_)

Last night Cindy Sherman, the sometimes cantankerous, sometimes problematic, but always pointed American artist, set her personal Instagram account from private to public.

Immediately, 590 images became available to users of the photo-based social-media platform, creating somewhat of an instant, scrollable exhibition. While each individual image is not itself a monumental demonstration of her powers, the account taken as a whole is as relevant to the veteran photographer’s body of work as any other piece she has produced in her 40-odd years in the art world.

According to Artnet, the 63-year-old photographer and filmmaker had started the account in October of last year, keeping it private all the while. Today, you can flip through its hundreds of entries. Some of them are fully seemingly innocuous shots of meals, trips to the museum, puddles or other things Sherman came across. Others are haunting, arresting warped versions of Sherman’s own face done through either makeup or digital tools available to most smartphone users or anyone with a laptop and an Adobe registration.

Take a look.

On the mend!

A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on Jul 31, 2017 at 12:39am PDT

Feeling all bubbly?

A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on Jul 5, 2017 at 2:29pm PDT

@jennimuldaur et moi, heureuse a Paris A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on Jun 8, 2017 at 2:25pm PDT

Me during filming for Prima Donna @rufuswainwright concert – next Sat June 10th, if you’re in Paris at Philharmonie de Paris

A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on Jun 3, 2017 at 12:35pm PDT

Claude Cajun & Gillian Wearing show A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on Mar 10, 2017 at 10:20am PST

Change of pace from pretty landscapes… Circa 1967

A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on Jan 16, 2017 at 2:52am PST

A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on Oct 26, 2016 at 12:45pm PDT

As said, each image taken on its own doesn’t stand out as a classic of Sherman’s considerable oeuvre. Indeed, this may all be an off-the-cuff nothingburger for the artist herself. Yet, the whole is considerable — perhaps most so because, smaller in size and frame, it offers a more strangely intimate variation of some of Sherman’s longstanding themes and methods.

The sort of self-transformations you see here have been central and recurring throughout Sherman’s photography, be they transformations of her female self to a male self or, very controversially, her white self into a black self. Usually, that plays out in gallery size prints, larger compositions that even when engineered to be off center and off kilter, show a certain clear, understandable geometry.

Here, through the smaller, more cramped medium of Instagram, those transformations of herself and the view through her eye at the rest of the world become more immediate and, at times, more wonderfully disturbing. (Note that it’s unclear if Sherman used a smartphone to create all of the images, a camera to capture them or a combination of both).

Whereas a gallery print, say one from her “Disasters and Fairy Tales” series, renders the subject (often a character, often played by Sherman) into a work of confrontational art, these snaps seem more like moments stolen from those character’s lives sometimes created by those characters. The unsettling implication one gets from this is that her grotesques — many of them designed to be affronts to the male gaze, beauty standards or really any establishment notion you’ve got lying around — live in our world. Here, they’ve broken out of the museum or the coffee-table book to share the streets with us, go to brunch like us, photograph their meals like us. Hell, they are us.

That’s not to say that all or any of these works is superior to Sherman’s previous output or that she’s put as much consideration in this series as any other before it. Indeed, it’s unlikely she doesn’t see this as a discrete series and we probably shouldn’t either.

Yet, Sherman’s Instagram account stands as a brilliant use of a medium that’s oft been derided not only for its low technical picture quality or tendency to inspire and enable narcissistic (and sometimes self-destructive) behaviors, but a wonderful example of an artist finding new meaning and new effects through injecting the well-traveled, well-acknowledged aspects of their art into a new medium.

As well, it shows a kind of wily adaptiveness, openness and facility with one’s own abilities that Sherman’s generational peers — including Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel and others — have lacked as they mature into their late periods. If only more artists could be so fun-seeking and malleable in their 60s.

The fact that her art is suddenly more sharable, more approachable and more available to a wider, younger audience is a rather canny side benefit. Again, this may or may not all be accidental — the takeaways for Sherman appreciators, though, are considerable.

This is, really, the first look we’ve gotten into Sherman’s life from her perspective. Trips to the hospital and days with friends appear — a shift for an artist who, though she appears consistently in her own work, has been remarkably private over the years. It also gives followers more of a look at her process than she normally affords. It’s a sign that this is not — as this article may be falsely implying — a conscious work of art. That said, it is certainly the work of an artist.

And, in the fact that it is off-the-cuff in parts, that it is reflective, recursive, gives Sherman’s Instagram account its most interesting value. As any other account on Instagram, it is an exercise in self branding, in narcissism, in presenting not who you are, but who you want the world to see (indeed, Instagram and the internet itself is seeing many humans reduce themselves to brands).

But Sherman was well ahead of this trend and, in using this engine for promotional mirror gazing, she undercuts that aspect of it. When she posts, her career-spanning critiques of body image, of the concept of self, of the male gaze, of the commodification of the face and body, bleed over onto Instagram itself. By surfacing her art on this platform for selling yourself, the artist who sells herself with almost every piece of her work shakes it from within.

Or maybe it’s a big, ol’ nothingburger — just a woman in her 60s taking photos of her macaw. Could be.

 

My boy

A post shared by cindy sherman (@_cindysherman_) on Oct 24, 2016 at 2:14pm PDT

WATCH: The top 5 rappers of all time, according to Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels

I was shooting jump shots over on Bocek’s basketball court in the East Baltimore neighborhood I grew up in the other day when a couple of kids commented on my Kevin Durant sneakers, saying they liked them a lot. I offered the same praise to their retro Scottie Pippen and Tim Duncan shoes — I wore the same shoes when I was their age, back when they were originally released.

As we played HORSE and talked trash about the NBA, somehow the conversation shifted to music, as it does, and we broke out into a debate over the top five best rappers of all time. The kids quickly threw out names like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, which I believe can be seriously debated. But then they started naming people like 21 Savage, Fetty Wap and Rich Homie Quan.

“Wait a second!” I yelled at them, snatching the ball. “What is wrong with you? No Jay Z? No Nas? We are in Baltimore! How can you not say 2Pac?!”

One of the kids laughed. “They old,” he said. “Those guys don’t make music for youth.”

I laughed and tossed the ball back. Their response made me think of the older guys I used to debate this stuff with back in the day and how they would flip when I didn’t mention Public Enemy, Slick Rick and Rakim. I realize now that these lists are subjective and will always reflect the current times. Biggie, Jay Z, 2Pac and Nas had the biggest impact on my generation, but what about the previous greats?

Want a true hip-hop lesson? Watch the Salon 5 to hear the legendary Darryl McDaniels, founding member of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame members RUN-D.M.C., on his top five favorite rappers.

The Supreme Court made it harder for states to ban sex offenders from social media. Here’s why

(Credit: AP Photo/Karly Domb Sadof, FIle)

Until recently, North Carolina law prohibited registered sex offenders from using various social media sites, such as Snapchat, Twitter and LinkedIn.

In June, a landmark Supreme court decision in Packingham v. North Carolina overturned that law.

The result is important for two reasons. One, the court addressed the role that the internet now plays in terms of citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Two, the high court declined to defer to a state legislature’s determination that such a restriction on sex offenders was necessary to protect children.

As a criminologist interested in the best use of science in the law, I have studied the validity of these sex offender laws.

Generally, I have challenged the assumption that greater limitations are justified for sex offenders because of their purported “high risk” of reoffending. The fact is that these assertions are typically not supported by studies on recidivism rates.

Undeterred by such evidence, the North Carolina legislature enacted a new sex offender policy in 2008.

The social media ban at issue

North Carolina’s law banned registered sex offenders from accessing social networking sites where children under 18 can create accounts. In 2010, police arrested Lester Packingham, a registered sex offender, after he posted “God is Good!” on his Facebook page. His intent appeared harmless. In the post, Packingham was merely happy a speeding ticket he had received had been thrown out.

Packingham appealed his conviction by challenging the constitutionality of the statute. The appeal eventually made it to the Supreme Court this year.

North Carolina argued the ban was necessary to prevent sex offenders from obtaining the personal information of minors. The state said that sex offenders could use this information to communicate with children and possibly to lure them for sexual purposes.

Packingham’s lawyers argued that the ban was so expansive that it violated his free speech rights — and those of others to whom the ban applied.

The Supreme Court justices’ rejection of the social networking prohibition was unanimous — itself remarkable considering the high percentage of Supreme Court decisions in recent years with dissenting opinions.

Not the usual deference

In the past few decades, legislators across the country have passed numerous laws that apply uniquely to sex offenders. These laws include such things as sex offender registries and residency restrictions. More recently, about a dozen states have passed various types of prohibitions on sex offenders using social media sites.

The Supreme Court has previously accepted state legislative findings that vulnerable children need to be protected from dangerous sex offenders. As a result, the high court has typically upheld sex offender-based laws.

In the Packingham case, the Supreme Court didn’t seriously challenge North Carolina’s assertion that registered sex offenders pose a significant risk to others. What it did do was rule that the state had not shown that its broad social networking ban served the purpose of protecting potential victims.

The court also expressed concern that the ban interfered with freedom of speech.

Social networking sites

This ruling is of interest as the First Amendment’s freedom of speech guarantee has typically been applied in the physical world. Courts recognize that some of the classic places to exercise free speech rights are streets and parks. These physical locations represent places where people often gather to express views, protest or otherwise communicate with each other.

In Packingham, the court took a rather progressive stance that the internet in general — and social media sites in particular — are now the modern settings in which many Americans exchange ideas.

Writing for the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy observed that social media sites are now among the most important places to exchange ideas. Social networking sites, he noted, are “the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the fact realms of human thought and knowledge. These websites can provide perhaps the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard.”

The court noted that online social media sites permit users to exercise a wide variety of First Amendment rights. Even convicted criminals — including registered sex offenders — maintain some legitimate right to use the internet to engage with the world of ideas.

Kennedy further suggested the ban could be counterproductive because social media sites may actually foster rehabilitation by providing avenues for former criminals to successfully reenter civic life.

State legislatures may try again

The verdict in the Packingham case does not mean that states may never limit sex offenders’ use of the internet. The Supreme Court noted that the problem was with this overly broad prohibition. North Carolina’s ban prevented access to too many online locations, many of which offer quite legitimate forums in which people can speak and listen.

Thus, the Supreme Court expressly left the door open to some form of social networking ban. The justices indicated that states may well have legitimate interests in protecting vulnerable victims from known sex offenders.

So, can states ban sex offenders from social media? The answer is “maybe.” The trick for legislators will be enacting a law that is sufficiently narrow to protect sex offenders’ free speech rights on the internet.

Melissa Hamilton, Senior Lecturer of Law & Criminology, University of Houston

Must they have so little dignity?

(Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” is considered one of the great political novels of the last century, but it is also very puzzling. Why does Rubashov, the loyal old Bolshevik, confess to capital crimes he did not commit? He is not tortured; he knows (as do his interrogators) that the charges are absurd.

Koestler, a disillusioned ex-communist, employs Rubashov as a metaphor for the moral bankruptcy that totalitarian ideologies deliberately inculcate in their followers. Their own self-respect as human beings, even objective truth itself, no longer matters to them, so they voluntarily allow the party to destroy them.

Some historians have disputed Koestler’s depiction. The confessing defendants at the Moscow purge trials were indeed tortured, they said. But Koestler, who had narrowly escaped both communism and fascism as a young man, had plenty of personal experience with totalitarian systems, so his interpretation is hardly fantasy; in any case, he was not writing history, but rather a psychological portrait of the hard-core party man who alienates himself from all values other than subservience to the party.

Shorn of its tragedy and reduced to something more like farce, Darkness at Noon becomes an instruction manual for understanding the psychology of the toadying functionaries who infest the Trump administration. Now-former chief of staff Reince Priebus, recent victim of the White House’s periodic purges, is a museum grade example of Rubashov’s Syndrome.

Enduring seven months of innuendo about his powerlessness, exclusion whenever decisions were made, and a total lack of line authority, Trump humiliatingly announced Priebus’ departure by tweet a mere day after he had been defamed (and accused of a felony) by Trump’s now erstwhile best buddy and walking mobster stereotype, Anthony (The Mooch) Scaramucci. So how did Priebus take this final, supreme degradation?

Within hours he appeared on Sean Hannity’s show (which he could be certain his old boss was viewing) to say how Trump’s brusque firing of him was “actually a good thing.” He proceeded to heap praise on the president, saying he will “be on Team Trump all the time.”

He also pretended there was no real issue between himself and The Mooch, dismissing it as a “distraction” from the president’s marvelous agenda, all of whose absurd and/or dangerous particulars he itemized as if he were an acolyte reciting the catechism. The Russia investigation was of course fake news, he said, which makes us wonder why everyone within groveling distance of Trump has lawyered up. The Onion deftly nailed Priebus’s self-administered abasement as a complete lack of dignity and self-respect.

Given that all movement conservatives who either have sinned or been made redundant seem eventually to end up on Hannity making their ritual pronouncements of eternal party loyalty, it makes one wonder if the News Corp. entertainer plays the same role enforcing GOP orthodoxy that Andrey Vyshinsky, Stalin’s fearsome prosecutor, played in ensuring that Communist Party comrades toed the line. We look forward, whenever the axe falls, to seeing Jefferson Beauregard Sessions tell Hannity how he can much better serve the president’s agenda as a private citizen than as attorney general of the United States.

Superficial analysis of the Priebus defenestration might conclude that he praised Trump to the heavens so that he could wangle a comfortable sinecure at Fox News or some similar landing pad within the Conservative Media-Entertainment Complex. But if he had been more honest, some other venue with different ideological leanings would surely have dangled a contract in front of him. And, assuming he writes his memoirs, publishers would happily pay multiples more cash for a volume that promised to dish dirt (you’d see “A Searing Indictment!” emblazoned on the book jacket) than they would for prose that might have been written by Kim Jong-un’s official biographer.

Many observers have commented on how the Republican Party has degenerated from a group espousing a more-or-less comprehensible set of principles into a racketeering operation exclusively interested in gaining and keeping power. Mitch McConnell exemplifies this trend. But he has been in the Senate since 1984, knows what terms like “sequestration and “point of order” mean, and has not quite caught up with the latest GOP fashion.

The GOP in the age of Trump also worships power, but power reduced to its most primitive, elemental form, and personalized in the figure of the omnipotent tribal leader. Just as a 12-year old boy worships power in the form he understands it — a pro linebacker, a tough guy, a bully — so the new GOP worships power in the form of Donald Trump because his bizarre displays of dominance (which strike the rest of us as pathetic overcompensation for insecurity) scratch some obscure psychological itch for them.

To return to the Darkness at Noon analogy, among some of Trump’s base, as well as the more fervent of his employees, the adoration approaches Stalin’s cult of personality. Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary, has said his boss has “superhuman” health and “perfect genes.” It would seem only a short distance from Mnuchin’s slavering to the mental framework that prevailed at the height of the Stalin cult, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences seriously considered renaming the moon that orbits the earth we live on for their fearless leader.

Likewise, Trump’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway, seems to have been so blinded by the reflected glory of her boss that she no longer recognizes the United States as a constitutional republic in which all citizens, elected and nonelected, are peers. “I do think that it is important to set up that level of deference and humility when you’ve got someone who’s your boss,” Conway gushed to Fox News, the television network now as ever-present in our lives as Big Brother was to Winston Smith and the other subjects of Oceanea.

The puzzling aspect is determining exactly what sort of satisfaction they derive from this adulation. In these primitive and childish dominance games, only a few — Trump, Donald Jr., Scaramucci (who himself got the axe after a run of less than two weeks: apparently being a professional suck-up is a precarious job) — get the privilege of being dominant. The rest are just contestants on The Apprentice being set up for groveling and humiliation, and seemingly enjoying it. This streak of willing subservience is noticeable in all of Trump’s retinue, from Cabinet members to the human props in MAGA caps at his rallies.

Just as Sessions or Preibus had to endure their share of derision, so it is with Trump’s base. He has mocked them (he’s underlined that they’re “losers” in life, sarcastically remarked “I love the poorly educated” and observed that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose their dog-like loyalty) — and yet they see it not as insulting, but rather as part of his charismatic charm.

Historian of the Third Reich Joachim Fest remarked on this trait in Hitler’s followers, and how at rallies, they were spiritually transported by becoming a part of the stage scenery. In extinguishing their own individual autonomy, they imagined they had gained power by being absorbed into the might of their leader. However sublimated this trait might have been, Fest deemed it hardly distinguishable from sexual masochism.

For some time now, the catch phrases of America’s right wingers have expressed the imbecile wisdom of the would-be John Wayne: these colors don’t run, kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out, this vehicle insured by Smith & Wesson and so on. Right-wing media such as The Rush Limbaugh Show are practically instructional guides to such homilies.

Yet their willing prostration before a transparent conman and obvious crybaby like Trump shows not only that their manly man, alpha-male pretentions — a pose much esteemed in conservative literature by pseudointellectuals like Harvey Mansfield and Bill Bennett — are laughable bunk, but that they also picked the worst conceivable messiah to venerate.

How and why this neurosis of power worship breaks out in societies, and particularly in a notionally secular, representative republic, is not something we fully understand. It is long past time for enterprising historians, sociologists, and abnormal psychologists to find out.

The importance of the fight for the South: Why it can and must be won

Sons of Confederate Veterans and other groups parade on the grounds of the state Capitol in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2016, in support of keeping the Confederate battle emblem on the state flag. The public display of Confederate symbols has come under increased scrutiny since June, when nine black worshippers were massacred at a church in South Carolina.(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) (Credit: AP)

This report was prepared in March 2015, prior to the 2016 election season that eventually resulted in Donald Trump’s victory. However, the right-wing capture of the presidency makes this report’s main arguments even more important. The far right, racism, militarism, inequality, and poverty are all centered in the South. The majority of African Americans, the main protagonists of progressive politics in this country, live in the South. And the South has more electoral votes, battleground state votes, population, and congresspersons than any other region. The South is changing rapidly, giving rise to more progressive demographic groups, especially black and Latino migrations, LGBTQs and urbanites, as well as a growing Democratic vote. These trends can only be maximized if the importance of the South is understood as a strategic necessity and the chance to win state by state is acknowledged and acted upon. Hard as the fight is, downplaying the Southern struggle is a losing political strategy and forfeits the moral high ground on the biggest issues facing the country.

The importance of the fight for the South is a matter of considerable controversy. Whatever the rhetoric, it’s safe to say that most progressives outside of the South have put little time, energy or money into this struggle since the height of the southern civil rights movement. Many have outright given up on the South, considering it either a reactionary lost cause or simply unwinnable.

We beg to disagree, and in this essay will make the case that failure to the fight for the South downplays the centrality of the black struggle in U.S. politics, strategically surrenders the upper hand to the far right and the Republican Party and cripples the fight against poverty. The South is a dynamically changing region and the fight for it is absolutely crucial to defeating the far right and winning a progressive future.

Specifically, we argue that as regards building the progressive movement into a powerful force in this country, the South is crucial.

1) Defeating the right and building a strong progressive movement in this country needs the leadership, experience and energy of African Americans, a growing majority of whom who live in the South.

2) Targeting the Southern racist rightwing in its own backyard, on issues of race, poverty, militarism, climate change and democracy, is a crucial part of a broad movement to defeat the right nationally in public opinion, on policy and in elections. To fail to do is a losing political strategy and forfeits the moral high ground on the biggest issues in the country. Organizing the South is also vital to building the progressive movement and an independent progressive wing of the Democratic Party that is key to defeating the far right and corporate power. Defeating the far right and winning a jobs, peace, justice and sustainability agenda will be difficult if not impossible if the South is left to Republicans (or rightwing Democrats).

Electoral action to win political power in the South is a strategic, not an optional, component of any strategy to defeat the right.

1) A critical mass of Southern states can and must be won if we are to block or defeat the right in presidential elections. Three of the five or so critical battleground states are in the South: Florida, Virginia and North Carolina. Southern blue and battleground states plus Washington D.C. hold 38 percent of the electoral votes needed to win.

2) Winning an anti-rightwing congressional majority depends on winning in the South, as the South has a bigger congressional delegation than any other region and Southern congresspersons also hold key leadership posts within the Republican Party’s congressional hierarchies.

3) There are tremendous opportunities to build progressive political power and governance at the local level in the South as 105 counties have a black majority. (Only one county outside of the South has a black majority.)

All of these points will sharpen in the coming decades, as the South is projected to continue to experience greater population gains as compared to the rest of the country. That population gain is rooted in the ongoing transformation of the Southern economy which is driven by changes in the global economy. Well aware of this, the far right has launched a withering campaign of voter suppression, racist gerrymandering and straight anti-democratic legislative maneuvers to combat it. The South is becoming ever more important economically and politically, not less.

While some might dismiss the South, focusing strategically on the Northeast and Pacific Coast as central to a progressive program and the Midwest as the main political battleground, the South’s dynamic growth, historical legacy of black struggle and powerful political weight make it a critical battlefield.

The nuance is that the South cannot be won as a bloc, but only state by state and county by county. In fact, winning the South in large part means understanding that it is not a monolithic entity and winning it piece by piece: i.e. politically deconstructing the South.

I. Background and dynamics

What is the South?

Defining any region of the country is always a bit arbitrary, as regions are defined by history that is constantly changing and always involves complex intersections.

At first blush one might define the South as the former Confederacy. With the outbreak of the Civil War, a bloody line in the sand was drawn between the Confederacy and the Union. It is often forgotten that Texas and Florida were part of the original core of hard line secession states along with South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama. When Lincoln called for the armed recapture of Fort Sumter, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina joined the Confederacy.

However, a number of slave states and territories did not join the Confederacy: Washington D.C., Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky and Kansas. West Virginia split from Virginia in opposition to secession.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the Civil War, and the South has been transformed in important ways. Gone are some of the most powerful hallmarks of the South, especially slavery, the plantation economy, sharecropping, whites-only voting and Jim Crow. All this makes defining the South even more difficult.

Today the U.S. Census defines the South as the 11 states of the former Confederacy plus the former border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Washington D.C.

This essay will adopt that definition but excludes Delaware since it never had many slaves, never had a significant plantation economy, never seriously considered seceding, never formally adopted Jim Crow and never had a significant black population. (Figure 1) Since the U.S. census is the primary source of data there may be times when our data sets include Delaware.

Against stereotyping: Variation and transformation of the South

The South has always been extremely diverse internally, with areas dominated by plantations and slavery or sharecropping (often called the Tidewater, the low country, the Delta or Black Belt), areas dominated by white small farmers (often including small scale slavery and sharecropping, sometimes called the Piedmont) and areas dominated by very poor white folk (often called the mountains, or Appalachia). Belatedly a number of fairly large and medium size cities came into being, mostly in the Piedmont areas though including a few port cities. And in the last 40 years different parts of the South, especially the emerging large cities and the Sun Belt, attract significant migration from outside the South, including immigrants.

Long-term transformations of the South began slowly following the Civil War. Industrialization began to supplant the plantation turned sharecropper economy and a modern transportation infrastructure was built on rails. The so-called New South of industrial towns like Atlanta, Birmingham and Durham, mostly post-Civil War in origin and located outside the prime plantation areas, exploded into centers of steel, tobacco and textile manufacturing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Mechanization of agriculture began displacing hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and small farmers. The historic black migration to the north starting in 1915 was a response to the push-pull factors of displacement off the land, and the lure of jobs and relative freedom in the industrial economies outside of the South.

The explosive growth of the military industrial complex gave new energy to the Southern transformation in the mid and late 20th centuries. The South is home to approximately 41 percent of U.S. military installations and numerous military-related institutions which extended the already strong Southern militarist traditions.

In the old industrial heartland of America, the 1970s and 1980s marked the era of deindustrialization in which thousands of Northern factories were shuttered and fled off shore and to the non-unionized South. Tourism and a steady stream of retirees moving to better weather have contributed to rapid growth of Southern and Southwestern cities.

Cities such as Miami, Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth, have been collectively dubbed the Sun Belt. Additionally, finance fled the expensive Northern cities and suddenly Charlotte, NC flourished as the second biggest financial center in the country, trailing only New York City.

In the 1950s, long before Silicon Valley, Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh, leveraged the University of North Carolina, Duke University and North Carolina State to create the high tech Research Triangle Park, anchored by IBM. Since then the “New Economy,” “Information Revolution” or “Knowledge Economy” has filtered throughout the South with growing strength.

Each state is a different combination of these elements. The toxic mix of slavery, secession, sharecropping, white dictatorship and Jim Crow welded the South into the country’s most politically and economically identifiable region, but now the main trend is diversification. Despite these growing economic and social differences, the legacy of slavery, secession and Jim Crow — racism, conservative Christianity, anti-government sentiment and conservatism on all rights issues — continue to combine to create a right-wing white majority that reinforces Southern particularity, even as the economic and social basis for that uniqueness is undermined.

However these various transformations have been extremely uneven. The South today is a study in economic and political contrasts. Overall, the region remains the poorest in the country with nine of the 12 poorest states. But Virginia and Maryland rank in the top five richest states in the country. The region has a growing majority of African Americans in the country, but Kentucky has but few while blacks are about 35 percent of the population of Mississippi.

Today it might be helpful to view the South as consisting of three archetypal (and interpenetrating) political/economic/demographic subregions plus two unique states.

One subregion, consisting of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina, is marked by high percentages of black people (approximately 25-35 percent) and relatively backward economies. This is what has historically been known as the Deep South, minus Georgia.

A second subregion, consisting of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, is marked by significant black populations (approximately 20-25 percent) but also by strong industry, finance, new economic development (high tech) and strong economic and demographic growth, including immigrants. Tennessee and Arkansas are split between their poor white Appalachian regions and their heavily black areas on the Mississippi River, and seem to be moving in this direction, though with somewhat smaller black populations (17% and 15%).

Next there are the overwhelmingly white and very poor states of Kentucky and West Virginia. Oklahoma is similar but is not part of Appalachia and is quickly changing. Black and Latino populations are growing and it has always had a large Native American population.

Florida and Texas have become unique states due to their strong roles in the international and national economies, their extreme internal diversity demographically and economically, and their large populations.

The similarities and differences across the region point to the strategic challenges and opportunities it poses to progressives both inside and outside the South.

Political drivers, political trends

The destruction of the historic Southern plantation economy along with its white dictatorship and Jim Crow racism has, ironically, given rise to two contradictory political motions.

No longer a political or social outlier, corporate neo-liberals rather than plantation owners now dominate most of Southern politics. In fact they have encouraged and taken advantage of the longstanding far rightwing Southern populist movement to drive a powerful nationwide rightward motion since 1980. That far right is now mounting a serious challenge to the rightwing capitalists for power in the Republican Party.

While the South has become the center of the racist, militarist right wing that threatens to dominate the country, this “nationalization,” together with the powerful African American presence in the region that has produced many of the glorious progressive traditions of the country, gives rise to openings for Democrats and progressives if they choose to seize the moment.

This high-stakes political polarization makes the struggle for the South crucial.

The main business wing of the Southern Republican coalition is not just corporate, but the extreme rightwing of corporate forces in the U.S.: big oil and energy, military, low end retail, big Pharma and Southern-based banks.

They are powerfully flanked by regional, state and local elites, usually more rooted in backward white Southern traditions, like real estate developers, big car dealers, low-wage construction, regional and local capitalists, conservative law firms, the criminal justice complex, fundamentalist churches and small businesses — the state and local chambers of commerce and Christian coalitions.

These forces are joined to an often extreme rightwing populist/white supremacist base of affluent white suburban right wingers, tax revolters, gun enthusiasts and reactionary white workers and straight up white supremacists around an ideology of exclusionary blood and soil white nationalism, small government, and jingoistic military adventurism abroad.

In the face of this formidable Republican/rightwing coalition, more moderate and progressive forces are developing at different rates in different states. The Solid South is Solid no more and although the Republicans still win most Southern states, the Democratic presidential vote in the South has been rising over the past couple of decades.

The potential to defeat the Republicans in the South starts with the powerful African American community (and Latino community in Texas and elsewhere) and extends to the wider multiracial civil rights coalition of liberal churches, trial lawyers, progressive educators and students, unions and other liberal professionals.

It is being buttressed by new forces arising from the nationalization of the Southern economy and society, a process which includes urbanization, large scale national and international migration, the growth of the health industry, public education and government, tourism and retirement communities.

There are high political stakes underlying the South’s resistance to health care expansion, growth of government and public education, as workers in these sectors tend to be relatively liberal and unionized. There are important and growing immigrant rights, women’s and LGBTQ movements in the South.

Southern cities are growing rapidly in size and becoming bluer. As in the North, some older suburbs are becoming multi-cultural battlegrounds rather than exclusionary white enclaves that are economically and politically detached from the inner city. In fact a number of suburban areas have reincorporated to the city in places like Jacksonville, FL (the largest city in the South) and Memphis. As demonstrated most vividly in the Moral Monday/Forward Together movement in North Carolina, African Americans continue to hold the potential to lead another major transformation, a Third Reconstruction.

Neither party seriously represents the economic interests of white small farmers or poor whites, a potentially volatile sector, especially as their economic positions inevitably become more unstable. Many tend to fall back on backwards racist and sexist traditions and/or in behind the rightwing corporate forces. However, they also have progressive traditions to build on, from the New Deal to worker and union militancy, to the Populist movement to civil rights.

Climate change is also a huge issue in the South, which is projected to suffer much greater economic and social harm than the more moderate weather regions of the country and which has a history of environmental irresponsibility.

Each state is different, but something like this process has already broken up the solid South. 

Washington D.C. long ago became a majority African American city and a progressive Democratic bastion. Maryland became a battleground state in 1960 and has proceeded to become a solid Blue state. Formerly Florida voted like a classic Southern state since its founding. However as its economy diversified and its population exploded it moved to the center and since 1992 has been a classic battleground state with the country’s fourth highest electoral vote count. Virginia and North Carolina became battleground states in 2008.

Together the outcome of the battleground elections in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina could determine the presidency. Georgia will likely be the next state to become purple. Together with Maryland and Washington D.C., these Southern states alone have 84 electoral votes, more than 31 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

The potential of Mississippi lies in the fact that African Americans constitute almost 40 percent of the electorate. And down the road a bit is Texas, which could well be a national game-changer given its huge size and large people-of-color vote.

II: Point by point:  Why the battle for the South is crucial and can be won

Point #1: The South is the most concentrated expression of both anti-racist and anti-poverty struggles. 

The South is the historic home of the worst racism in the country. It is where the majority of African Americans reside and a destination for new migrants from around the country and the world. The South is also where poverty rates are the highest and income polarization is sharp.

a. A growing majority of African Americans live in the South where they have spearheaded the country’s most powerful traditions of progressive struggle and culture, especially since the 1950s. The fight against racism cannot be won without defeating racism in the South. 

The 2010 census indicated that 55 percent of blacks lived in the South, 18 percent in the Midwest, 17 percent in the Northeast and 10 percent in the West.

Although the black population has increased in all U.S. regions since 1990, the South has had the most growth. Gentrification as well as economic restructuring are motors of this growth, as they are displacing numerous African Americans from Northern cities. In addition, for the first time, the 2010 census showed that many black professionals are also returning to the South. The percentage of the black population that lives in the South is growing.

Demographic changes are reshaping the historical racial binary across the South as blacks return to the South and transnational migrants make their way to Texas, Georgia, Florida, Virginia and the Carolinas. Black return migration has increased the percentage of African Americans to 55 percent. Latinos started arriving in the late 1980s, and are expected to grow as a percentage of the population rising to above 30%, Figure 2a, mostly concentrated in Texas which, of course, was formerly part of Mexico.

b. It is near impossible to think of strong national progressive politics, a strong movement or organizing effort, without the deep involvement and leadership of black people.

Although fast being replaced by Latinos as the main source of low-wage labor in the rest of the country, blacks are still central to the Southern labor force. This provides leverage and organizing opportunities and places blacks at the crossroads of labor and anti-racist organizing.

Significant new black-led grassroots organizing efforts are underway, most notably the Moral Monday/Forward Together movement in North Carolina and #BlackLivesMatter and other fights in the wake of the Trayvon Martin, etc. cases. The NAACP, which in some Southern states has more than 100 chapters, is a revitalizing force. African American churches in the South are still incredibly numerous and potentially powerful. These fights are once again demonstrating the ability of African Americans to drive the fight for a Third Reconstruction.

c. The deep involvement and leadership of black people is indispensable to forming a strong progressive electoral bloc. 

The Jesse Jackson candidacy electrified the electoral potential of black people. And since 2000, African Americans have surged to the polls, constituting 30 percent of all new voters, voting for the Democrats (even before Obama) at an astonishing 90 percent rate, and surpassing whites in voter participation for the first time in history.

In fact, there has been steadily rising black presidential election turnout since 1996: 53 percent in 1996, going up to 67 percent in 2012. Meanwhile the percentage of African Americans voting Democratic has skyrocketed to more than ninety percent.

Race is the pivot of politics: Democrats and progressives cannot win without massive support from people of color and Republicans cannot win without suppressing the people of color vote.

d. The South is the most polarized center of the fight between the right-wing cross-class white political forces and the multi-racial anti-racist forces.

The political crux of the matter is still that white voters in the South vote about 75 percent Republican compared to the national white vote of about 60 percent Republican. And Southern Republicans tend to be further to the right than in most other regions. Race and racism are at the heart of the struggle for the South.To sustain their momentum, the far right has implemented a powerful campaign against voting rights and for voter suppression, and racial gerrymandering that must be met by a powerful democratic, antiracist response.

e.  There are excellent opportunities to fight for progressive organization, political power and governance at the local levels in the South because there are 105 black majority counties.

The only black majority county outside the South is St. Louis (which is actually an independent city, not a county). Despite this ripe organizing opportunity there has not been a major attempt to organize in these areas since SNCC. La Raza Unida Party had a brief but quite successful strategy in the Mexican majority areas of South Texas in the 1970s.

Point #2: The fight to combat poverty, improve the strength and quality of life of poor and working people, and their connection to the struggle against racism, is concentrated in the South. Overall, the U.S. is extremely polarized by income. Most of the Southern states suffer the double whammy of high inequality and low median income. The South is the poorest part of the country and has the highest poverty rates as well as sharp income polarization. Figures 3 and 4.

Virginia and Maryland have relatively low poverty rates, and less income inequality than other Southern states attesting to their shifting politics at the state level as well as their relationship to the new economy.

In 2012, the South had a non-metro poverty rate of 22.1 percent — nearly 7 percentage points higher than in the region’s metro areas, a greater difference than in any other region. The difference in poverty rates in the South is particularly important for the overall non-metro poverty rate because an estimated 43.1 percent of the nation’s non-metro population lived in this regionin 2012.

Southern poverty is a result of the region’s history of racially-coerced plantation labor and racial suppression which has stunted its economic development and produced the most reactionary labor laws in the country. Despite these laws, labor organizing is growing in certain parts of the South, and struggles to raise the minimum wage have great potential. Between the years 2011 and 2012, union membership increased the most in California (up 110,000 union members), Texas (up 65,000), and Louisiana (up 30,000). Unions still have an important role to play in the South.

In addition climate change poses a clear and present threat to the economic and social development of the South, not to speak of increasing environmental disasters.

Point #3: The South is the key center of the far right and the Republican Party; neither can be defeated without battling for the South.

a. The South is the stronghold and most dynamic center of the far right and the Republican Party. Neither can be defeated without winning key Southern states such as Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and soon, Georgia. 

b. The South currently has 192 electoral votes; it takes only 270 to win. The battleground states of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, with 57 votes, already often hold the balance of power in presidential elections. Georgia, with an additional 16 electoral votes, is likely to become a battleground state before long, possibly followed by Mississippi. Texas, due to its size and large percentage of Latino and black voters, could be a national game changer in a decade or so.

c. At the state level, Republican control of Southern states has had increasingly drastic results as the Tea Party has gained strength. Today Republicans control all but Virginia and Maryland. In North Carolina, long under Democratic control of the state government, the Republicans took power in 2010, consolidated it in 2012, quickly implemented the entire ALEC agenda of nullifying the Affordable Care Act, voter suppression, drastic cuts and privatization of schools, tax reform for the wealthy, closing abortion clinics, undercutting and privatizing Medicaid, legalized and subsided fracking, slashed unemployment benefits and gerrymandering. Throughout the South the far right has launched systematic attacks on voting rights, passed starkly racist voter suppression legislation and undermined the democratic workings of the government through systematic legislative and executive rule breaking. Taking on and defeating the right at the state level, with a focus on the purple states, is crucial to defending democracy and the people’s quality of life.

Point #4: The South possesses the largest congressional delegation of any region and the most electoral votes, and both are projected to grow at a faster rate than other regions. 

Consequently winning at least some states in the South is not only the key to the presidency but also to control of Congress and of its key committees. Currently there are 110 Republican congresspersons from the South, more than half of the 218 needed to control the House, and 49 Democrats. There are 23 Republican senators, almost half the number needed to control the Senate, and seven Democrats. All Southern states today have Republican governors and statehouses controlled by the GOP.

Point #5: The South is the biggest center of military industrial complex and therefore central to the fight for peace and against militarism.

The South is home to approximately 41 percent of U.S. military installations. Six of the top 10 states receiving Department of Defense funds are Southern states, including VA, TX, MD, FL, GA, and AL. The Washington Metro area accounted for approximately 11 percent of federal Department of Defense expenditures in 2005. Virginia ranks second among states in military procurement, behind California. (Table 4, Appendix) according to the National Priorities Project http://www.nationalpriorities.org/

Point #6: The South has more population than any other region and is growing more rapidly than other region. Therefore it will become even more powerful in national politics and more people will be under the control of Southern state and local governments. By 2040, it is estimated that 39 percent of Americans will live in the South and the majority will live in the Sunbelt regions of California, the Southwest, and the South.

This means that this region will wield even more power at the federal level, both the presidency and Congress.

It is increasingly difficult for progressives to argue that we represent a large, let alone majority, constituency unless we have a base in the South. Any progressive program and movement must exhibit an understanding of the past, present and future of the South. We cannot allow the rightwing at the state and local levels to continue to rule over such a large portion of folk, especially when so many are black and/or poor.

Point #7:  The South is not only rapidly changing economically, racially and demographically, it is changing in ways that represent the future of the country, not the past.

The South is gaining in importance not only politically, but also economically. Its people and politics are becoming more diverse.

III. Main state electoral battlefronts

Washington D.C. became the only non-state to have electoral votes in 1961.However it is limited to a number equal to the smallest state, which of course is 3. Since 1961 the residents have been overwhelmingly black and Democratic. Obama beat Romney by 13 to 1.

Maryland, with 10 electoral votes, is already deep blue.Since 1960, Maryland has voted Republican only in the landslide wins of Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. In 2012, Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney here (62% to 36%).

Florida has more electoral votes, 29, than any other battleground stateand the fourth highest electoral vote in the country. The Democrats have won every presidential election in Florida since 1996 except for 2004, but have never polled more than 51 percent of the vote. Florida has increased from a population of 6,789,443 (3.34% of the total US population) to 18,801,310 (6.09%) since 1970. Florida is a true purple state.

Virginia, with 13 electoral votes, just recently became a battleground state.It was reliably red since 1952 with the exception of the LBJ landslide in 1964. In 2004 Bush won the state by seven points. But in 2008 Obama won by eight. In 2012 Obama again won, but by only four points. The small but growing Latino vote was key to Obama’s victories. Virginia is one of the handful of true purple states, and is growing rapidly.

North Carolina has 15 electoral votes and is now the 9th largest state in the country.It voted reliably red from 1952 through the 2004 election; Bush won by 8 points in that latter year. Obama broke the red streak by one point in 2008, but then Romney won by two in 2012. North Carolina is another true purple state, and one whose population is rising fast. At present the Moral Monday/Forward Together movement is probably the largest black-led progressive movement in the country, and probably one of the strongest state level progressive movements in general.

Georgia is the eighth largest state in the Union and has 16 electoral votes.It is still a reliably red state, but the Republican margins have been shrinking rapidly. W won by 12 and 17 points but in the last two presidentials the Republicans prevailed by only 7 and 5. With a large Latino immigration, Georgia is projected to become a majority people of color state in the 2030s, and with hard work can be turned into a battleground state much sooner.

These Southern states plus Washington D.C. with 84 electoral votes, account for more than 31 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

Mississippi’s economy and population is quite stagnant and in 2012 dropped an electoral vote and is now down to 6. It is a reliably red state, but Republican margins have recently fallen from the 20 point range to the 12 point range. Mississippi has the largest percentage black vote, about 37 percent. The NAACP and its allies are a dynamic force in the state. The potential of Mississippi was demonstrated in 2012 when a wide coalition unexpectedly defeated the reactionary Personhood state amendment. That amendment would have considered conception as equivalent to achieving personhood.

Texas is the second most populous state in the country and has 38 electoral votes.The state did not turn red until 1980 but has been deep red ever since. W carried the state by more than 20 points each time, but the Republican margin narrowed to 12 in 2008 and 16 in 2012. In the 2010 census non-Hispanic whites accounted for only 45.3 percent of the population and Latinos 37.6 percent. The racial picture is confounded because more than 10 percent identified themselves as “some other race.” Blacks constituted 3.8 percent and 2.7 percent as two or more races. Whites are definitely less than 50%.

There are raised hopes that Texas might before long become a battleground state, largely due to its racial/ethnic makeup. But Mexicans in Texas are notably more conservative than in other states. By the voting numbers there is a way to go, but over time Texas could be a national game changer.

Final thoughts

The focus of this paper has been to argue for the strategic national importance of the battle for the South. In making this argument we have indicated some important points about strategy, i.e. how to win the battle for the South. However, a developed strategy will require a far deeper dive than what we have attempted here.

The particularity of the subregions that we indicated would have to be explored in detail, as well as an examination of how different strategies connected to each subregion have fared. State by state analyses and strategies are a crucial necessity. This fight will be long and hard, but it is absolutely necessary if we are to defeat the far right and make any real progress in the fight for racial justice, democracy, peace and economic equality.

How wordless books can help your kid learn to read

Anyone who’s “read” a picture book can tell you that you don’t need words to tell a story. Prereading toddlers and preschoolers can follow a story told in pictures, a parent or child can narrate the action, and the cozy, empowering experience can help kids develop positive associations with books. (See our full list of Wonderful Wordless Books!)And even though kids aren’t reading words, it turns out that wordless books can develop important skills:

Literacy. Toddlers and preschoolers can learn how a book works: front to back, left to right, top to bottom. They practice listening, comprehension, and interpreting visual images. Following a story helps kids understand the structure of storytelling: cause and effect, conflict and resolution, character development, and a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end.
Vocabulary and verbal skills. By reading a wordless book with an adult or a more knowledgeable peer, kids can learn to identify objects, people, places, animals, and actions and narrate a story based on visual cues. This helps kids understand stories once they start reading and can inspire them to write their own stories — an expression of literacy.
Confidence. A toddler or preschooler is proud to have finished a favorite book and to have understood the whole story from start to finish without adult help.
A love of books and art. Wordless books can be enjoyed by readers of all ages and can develop a taste for reading for pleasure and delight in illustration.
Easy access. Books without text are great for kids who speak different languages, are learning English, or have developmental or learning difficulties that make reading words challenging.

And wordless books are growing in popularity and garnering kudos. Since 2007, four wordless books have won the prestigious Caldecott Medal — the top U.S. literary award for illustrated books:

A Ball for Daisy, age 3+. The tale of a cute little dog who loves, then loses a favorite ball and is restored by getting a new one.

Flotsam, age 4+. A boy discovers an undersea fantasy world when he develops the film from an underwater camera he finds washed up on the shore.

Journey, age 5+. A dreamy fantasy adventure that starts with a lonely girl drawing a door that leads into a colorful enchanted world where she finds excitement, danger, and friendship.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, 8+. A middle-grade novel about an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris train station (the book was made into the film “Hugo“).

Kids still need exposure to print, especially kids who may not have a lot of books at home. And how many literacy skills a child gains may depend on how involved the adult reader is in pointing out and reinforcing elements and vocabulary in the story. But the bottom line is that wordless books are loads of fun to read together and can be entertaining and empowering for kids of various ages to read on their own.

Trump’s white nationalism torments us now, but the “centrality of whiteness” will fade away

(Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Sheryll Cashin has hope for the future of America. Determined, persistent, enduring hope. And her hope is not only tenacious; it’s educated and informed. The author of “Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy” is continually optimistic about America’s future during a time when hope’s audacity seems to be a relic of the past.

Cashin’s optimism derives from changes that are apparent in the cultural fabric of the country: a fabric that is evolving into something more colorful — and more diverse — every day. She credits something she calls “cultural dexterity,” and it’s what is keeping the author and law professor going.

“The one thing that gives me some hope about this country, as toxically divided as we are, is that I think there’s a new generation,” she said. “I try not to be too Pollyannaish about it, but there’s a new type of culturally dexterous citizen in this country that accepts the loss of centrality of whiteness and wants to be a part of this something new that’s going on.”

If anyone is qualified to make that assessment, it’s Cashin. The daughter of civil rights activists, she was raised in a household that welcomed a diverse community of guests. She credits both her optimism and motivation to being a mother herself now.

“If I wasn’t a mother I could say, well, you know, this country’s just going to hell. I could up and move to Canada if it gets really bad,” she said. “As a mother, I have a different stake. I need this country to be better for my children.”

And, as she states in “Loving,” she is confident it will better, thanks to her researchand observations made while walking around her city. A law professor at Georgetown University, Cashin’s academic roster includes “Race in American Law,” which covers the1967 case Loving vs. Virginia. The case, she said, was sometimes difficult to teach.

“There were days when I would want to cry and sometimes my students would want to cry,” she said. “This is a hard history, and a lot of people don’t know it or don’t want to deal with the pain of absorbing it. I had been thinking for a while about these issues, and teaching that case and engaging with millennials about these issues.

“As a person who writes about race and the history of racism, it’s easy to critique what happened in the past and what’s wrong. It’s much harder to allow yourself to imagine how it could be different and then at least speculate out loud about the stages that could work a transformation. I just decided to be brave and say it out loud and hope, just by writing it down, it would come true.”

Those steps are inspired, in part, by a political shift in California, which is chronicled in “Loving,” evolving from a community at an impasse into a functional, governable state.

“California was nasty in the late ’80s,” Cashin recalled, describing the state as “gridlocked and ungovernable.” “How did it change? I really spent some time reading this political science literature, and I mapped it out. Here are the forces that I saw change and I looked around. These forces are going on now… If it happened there, it could happen nationally.” 

The same-sex marriage movement also inspired Cashin, as it represented “geometric progression.” In comparison to an arithmetic projection — a straight line going up — a geometric progression starts slowly, curves and shoots up toward its end.

“You get this inflection point,” she said. “A critical mass of people decide to live and let live and let them love who they love, and you get this dramatic change in attitude. I think we’re in ageometric progression in terms of race relations. We will get to the point where a critical mass of white folks — not all of them, but a critical mass has acquired the quality of cultural dexterity.”

Numbers talk, and they support Cashin’s thoughts.Interracial relationships are on the rise.A new Pew Research Center analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau data reported that 17 percent of all U.S. newlyweds had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity — a fivefold increase of the three percent of interracial marriages recorded in 1967. One out of every 10 married people in 2015 — not only newlyweds — had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. That’s 11 million people.

One possible cause, or result of this rise in social dexterity is the increased presence of interracial relationships in entertainment. “This is Us,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and “Master of None” are just a few of the series that can inspire emotional investment from viewers, changing how they see different demographics.  

“You can develop an emotional relationship with this person that you’re seeing on TV regularly. Social sciences show it can have the same, or similar, benefits to an authentic friendship, where it reduces your prejudice, enhances your empathy for that person,” she said. “There’s this density of offerings…It’s one way that some people are acquiring some intercultural knowledge. And the media and its offerings are getting more and more democratic.”

Comparing cultural dexterity to a muscle that can be strengthened through practice,Cashin said.“I think the thing that’s spreading cultural dexterity is that social barriers to cross racial or cross ethnic love are coming down rapidly…A person can disavow racism but certainly not be comfortable being outnumbered by a different group.”

These social barriers — the threat of physical barriers along the US/Mexico border —are more present following the election of Donald Trump, a man whose shockingly racist declarations,promise to “build a wall” and attempts to institute a Muslim travel ban a few weeks after his inauguration have appalled the culturally dexterous.

“The way the election turned out sort of clarifiedthis overarching argument I have about the dexterous vs. the non-dexterous,” Cashin said. “The fearful vs. the people who are at least open minded about a new America that’s coming and willing to do the work of adjusting to a new America rather than trying to hold onto some nostalgia about an America of the past and trying to return to that.”

One contribution to Trump’s victory was his background in business, which many of his supporters said would be an asset to America’s economy. Such a focus on money, a driving force behind politics, is also strongly tied to attempts to create a divide between races, Cashin said.

“A lot of whiteness is about bolstering the interests of economic elites who don’t want to pay more taxes,” she said. “Whiteness and any miscegenation law was created to solve class conflict between wealthy planters and poor white servants. It had a political function and this dog-whistling of divide-and-conquer continues to this day. Whenever you had an assertion of whiteness, whether it’s explicit or coded —wink wink, ‘Make America Great Again,’ wink wink —there’s an economic story there.

“Typically what it does is peel away struggling whites from people of color they might otherwise ally with in a way so that there will be less demanded of economic elites.It happens time and time again. That dog-whistling politics – whoever gets elected by it – the policies they’re pursuing betray the struggling people they’re peeling off. People keep falling for it.”

The people who don’t keep falling for it are the culturally dexterous, Cashin said. And in “Loving,” she details her hope that the ever-expanding group of people will “restore functionality to politics.”

“The one thing that gives me hope in this country is the emerging class of culturally dexterous folks who can see past, and don’t fall for this dog whistling,” she said. “[They] can connect the dots and see how the union’s being harmed and have empathy for people of other ethnicities. It’s the one thing that gives me hope.

“This why I start in 1607 at the beginnings of the colonies to show that it wasn’t always that way. There was no concept of whiteness and blackness for the first six or seven decades.It had to be constructed. Struggling people in there together rebelling against the economic elites. That’s what the founders most feared: debt relief. If you read the Federalist papers, the worst thing that could happen if we had too much democracy and people demand debt relief, so let’s have representative democracy that slows democracy down. Only white property-owning males get to vote.”

“I’ve read articles where social conservatives will say, ‘I don’t recognize this country anymore.’ And I’m like, yeah!” she said, laughing. “The genie’s out of the bottle in a lot of ways.”

Body count comeback

(Credit: Wikipedia)

One of the hoariest methods of modern war propaganda remains the official body count. Government or military officials decisively touting large numbers of enemies killed has long been a surefire way to get credulous or friendly press coverage, despite the fact that the figures cited are routinely presented with no evidence to back them up or context about how they are counting this “enemy.” This dubious practice of body count reporting reached its peak during the Vietnam War, when the US government relied upon this fabulism as a consistent tactic to prop up a failing war effort, as FAIR’s Jeff Cohen recounted (5/6/01):

Any alert journalist should have known the official count was grossly inflated, in large part by adding in dead civilians— yet Walter Cronkite and the other network anchors dutifully read it straight faced week after week.

As a result of widespread criticism in the post-Vietnam era, the Pentagon and other US officials curtailed this practice during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who was US Defense Secretary from 2013–15, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer back in December (12/16/16): “My policy has always been, don’t release that kind of thing. . . . I mean, come on, did we learn anything from Vietnam?” he asked. “Body counts make no sense.”

Nevertheless, in the past few years, official body count estimates have made a notable comeback, as US military and administration officials have tried to talk up the US coalition’s war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The transparent absurdity and contradictory nature of these claims hasn’t stopped corporate media from repeatedly citing these figures in headlines and news stories with little or no pushback.

For example, last August, the US commander of the Syrian-Iraq war garnered a flurry of favorable coverage of the war when he announced that the coalition had killed 45,000 ISIS militants in the past two years (NBC News, 8/12/16; CBS News, 8/10/16; Fox News, 8/10/16). By December, the official ISIS body count number, according to an anonymous “senior US official,” had risen to 50,000 and led headlines on cable news (Fox News, 12/8/16; CNN, 12/9/16).

Reading through that media coverage, though, one finds little skepticism about the figures or historical context about how these killed in action numbers line up with the official estimates of ISIS’s overall size, which have stayed stubbornly consistent year after year (Fox News, 2/4/16). In fact, the official estimated size of ISIS in 2015 and 2016 averaged 25,000 fighters, which means the US coalition had supposedly wiped out the equivalent of its entire force over both years without making a dent in its overall size.

Foreign Policy (8/16/16) also took the time to comb through the body count and force-size numbers to highlight how the chronology of estimates made little sense as well:

If the Obama administration’s latest estimates are accurate, that would mean there was a zero percent increase in the number of Islamic State fighters killed in the first four months of [2016], followed by a remarkable 80 percent during the past four months.

Even more remarkably, only one week after the anonymous 50,000 body count number was reported in December, the UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, standing alongside US Defense Secretary Ash Carter, publicly halved it. At a joint press briefing (12/15/16), Fallon said 25,000 ISIS militants had been killed by coalition forces, yet almost no newspapers or TV news networks (save CNN, 12/16/16) covered this glaring discrepancy.

Under the Trump administration, the public use of ISIS body counts has by no means diminished. In February, Gen. Tony Thomas, the commander of US Special Operations Command, told a public symposium that 60,000 ISIS fighters had been killed. Thomas added this disingenuous qualifier to his evidence-free number: “I’m not that into morbid body count, but that matters.” Unsurprisingly, Fox News (2/15/17) gobbled up his figure happily and with little skepticism. CNN (2/15/17) did at least point out the previously huge disconnect between US and UK body count numbers in its reporting, saying it “underscores the challenge of assessing enemy casualties,” but its headline was a clear public relations win for the war: “US Special Ops Chief: More Than 60,000 ISIS Fighters Killed.”

Last Friday, Thomas claimed yet another ISIS body count number at the Aspen Security Forum — this time citing up to 70,000 militants killed during the war, or, put another way, another full ISIS army’s size from last August. Again, Fox News (7/21/17) ran this number with no pushback, as part of a report that also uncritically repeated his accusation that the New York Times published a leak that let ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi slip away. (After the Times pointed out the factual problems with Thomas’s claim, the Fox News story has since added an “update.”)

This 70,000 estimate is not new. The Pentagon started to provide this new total of ISIS “militants” killed in Syria and Iraq to the press as far back as April (LA Times, 4/21/17), a mere nine weeks after Thomas’s 60,000 estimate. While it’s true the operational tempo of coalition air attacks has increased significantly since Trump became president, it’s notable that, up through this spring, US officials also estimated coalition warplanes had only killed between 230 to 350 civilians in Syria and Iraq since 2014.

Research from the non-profit group Airwars, which uses both media and on-the-ground reports, suggests the US government’s civilian casualty total is as absurdly low as its ISIS KIA claims appear absurdly high. Airwars’ count of the US coalition civilian casualties as of March was roughly 3,100, or more than eight times higher than what the Pentagon claimed (New York Times, 5/25/17). (As of today, Airwars’ minimum estimate of Syrian/Iraq civilian casualties stands at 4,544 killed.) Is the coalition miscounting dead civilians as part of its ISIS KIA total? It seems highly likely, but it’s impossible to tell, of course, because these official body count estimates lack all transparency.

All these glaring disconnects between the official estimates of ISIS fighters killed, total contingent size and civilian casualties cries out for much greater skepticism and due diligence among the corporate media. As our not too distant past has clearly shown, enemy body counts are a handy, hard-to-resist tool that administrations of both parties often use for war propaganda to promote the idea we are “winning” and to stave off dissent about why we’re fighting in the first place. Any reputable news organization need only consider this history and the obvious, current contradictions from “US officials” to realize that body counts should never be reported uncritically without context and third-party, expert commentary. As our nation spirals toward the end of a second decade of uninterrupted war with US troops killing and dying in yet another Middle Eastern country, the press owes the American public nothing less.