Texas Rangers? "The team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen."

Something else I've learned today. The argument is convincing. Just call the team the Texas Horny Toads from now on, and be done with it.

The Texas Rangers’ team name must go, by Karen Attiah (The Washington Post)

As the Washington football team finally gives up its racist slur of a name, there is one major sports team that has avoided the spotlight and resisted meaningful engagement with the violent and racist implications of its name. To know the full history of the Texas Rangers is to understand that the team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen.

I grew up in Dallas, raised on myths about Texas Rangers as brave and wholesome guardians of the Texas frontier, helping protect innocent settlers from violent Indians. At church, boys could sign up to be Royal Rangers, the Christian equivalent of the Boy Scouts. I still remember the excitement when Chuck Norris himself, star of the television show “Walker, Texas Ranger,” came to visit my elementary school class.

My dad sometimes took my younger siblings and me to Arlington Stadium to watch the Rangers play. No state mythologizes itself quite like Texas, so of course, it made sense to have a team name that embodied that gauzy, self-regarding history. At the same time, being from a Ghanaian immigrant family, we weren’t that invested in baseball, or the team name. I just liked going because my dad would sometimes let me take sips of his Coca-Cola mixed with beer.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that the Rangers were a cruel, racist force when it came to the nonwhites who inhabited the beautiful and untamed Texas territory. The first job of the Rangers, formed in 1835 after Texas declared independence from Mexico, was to clear the land of Indian for white settlers.

That was just the start. The Rangers oppressed black people, helping capture runaway slaves trying to escape to Mexico; in the aftermath of the Civil War, they killed free blacks with impunity. “The negroes here need killing,” a Ranger wrote in a local newspaper in 1877, after Rangers fired on a party of black former Buffalo soldiers, killing four of them and a 4-year old girl. A jury would later find that the black soldiers “came to their death while resisting officers in the discharge of their duty,” an unsettling echo of the justification for modern-day police killings ...

Design Justice seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture as a tool of oppression and sees it as an opportunity to envision radically just spaces centered on the liberation of disinherited communities.

Greg Fischer stopped reading after the first paragraph and went back to pretending he actually matters.

Do better than Fischer. Read the entire essay, and think about it.

America’s Cities Were Designed to Oppress, by Bryan Lee Jr. (City Lab)

Architects and planners have an obligation to protect health, safety and welfare through the spaces we design. As the George Floyd protests reveal, we’ve failed.

This moment is heartbreaking. Again. It is emotionally exhausting. Again. It is enraging to watch yet another black body plead not to be executed in public. Again.

There is nothing more representative of the state of and abuse of power in America than the scene that transpired in Washington, D.C. on Monday night: After watching U.S. cities erupt for days with pain and grief in response the police murder of George Floyd, President Donald Trump emerged from his White House bunker to forcibly remove clergy and tear-gas Black Lives Matter protesters — all in order to pose with a Bible in front of D.C.’s St. John’s Church. The Episcopal diocese oversees the 1815 structure and has expressed outrage at the action. It’s important to understand his intentions, as the president did all of this to marshal the physical architectural symbolism of the church to buttress his claims of moral, political, and racial authority. It was an escalation on the highest level, from the highest office.

For nearly every injustice in the world, there is an architecture that has been planned and designed to perpetuate it. That’s a key principle of the Design Justice movement, upon which I base my practice. Design Justice seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture as a tool of oppression and sees it as an opportunity to envision radically just spaces centered on the liberation of disinherited communities ...

"Andrew Sullivan extols a pre-Trump past that bears little resemblance to the grotesque reality of American society."

But these rose colored glasses
That I'm looking through
Show only the beauty
'Cause they hide all the truth

Andrew Sullivan’s Delusional Dreams, by by Emmett Rensin (Jacobin)

Andrew Sullivan extols a pre-Trump past that bears little resemblance to the grotesque reality of American society.

... I am not disputing Sullivan’s anxiety, nor the anxiety of those who read his passage and identified with it. But it is a curious idea, this notion that just one month ago, “many people” did not need to think about politics at all.

Who are these “many people”? Surely they are not the millions afflicted by homelessness and joblessness and pain, the Americans harassed or murdered by our criminal justice system, or those for whom daily hunger is an inheritance. If the achievement of free society and a stable democracy is its citizens’ capacity to devote themselves to “passions” and “pastimes” and “loves,” free from “those who rule over” them, then “many people,” many Americans, have never lived in a free society in a stable democracy.

Perhaps the extent of the present depravity is reflected in the fact that even the “many people” who make up the professional and upper classes find themselves suddenly subject to the instability and malevolence of our politics, but they are the exception. The “markedly less free” nation existed long before last January, and “many people” have been living there since they were born ...

SNIP

 ... I share Andrew Sullivan’s desire to live in a nation where people are free to lead their own lives, participating in politics where necessary but confident that their interests will not collapse without their constant involvement.

But in order to achieve that desire, our immediate ambition must be more political consciousness, not less. We must continue the work already carried out by countless left organizations, from the Moral Mondays movement to our socialist parties, the difficult and often tedious work of real politics that go beyond takes and tweets and #resistance in the form of endless faith in the Democratic Party. We must organize our poor and oppressed and incarcerated, our unemployed and our exploited workers into a political class, aware that their situation is not immutable, and committed to transforming the United States not just back into the depraved caste society of decades past, but into a vehicle for common prosperity, where no citizen goes without food or medicine or shelter and no one is subject to the capricious violence of the upper classes and their laws.

The alternative is defeat, both moral and political. The alternative is barbarism.

"Howard Zinn’s July 4 Wisdom Stands the Test of Time."

This was topical in 2015. 

“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media--none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.”
-- Howard Zinn 1922-2010

Empathy is an appreciation of another's point of view, often defined as "standing in someone else's shoes."

The late Howard Zinn used empathy with considerable eloquence, as a starting point for harnessing the experiences of the oppressed to deconstruct mythology. In times of diversionary vitriol, it's important to remember that shoes come in different shapes and sizes.

People's History of the United States

... A People’s History is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.

July 4 offers an excellent annual opportunity to reconsider assumptions.

Howard Zinn’s July 4 Wisdom: Put Away Your Flags

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

But why restrict these reconsiderations to just one day a year?

Patriotism and the Fourth of July

... Mark Twain, having been called a "traitor" for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called "monarchical patriotism." He said: "The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: 'The King can do no wrong.' We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: 'Our country, right or wrong!' We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had - the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism."

Howard Zinn on the 4th of July.

“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media--none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.”
-- Howard Zinn 1922-2010

Empathy is an appreciation of another's point of view, often defined as "standing in someone else's shoes."

The late Howard Zinn used empathy with considerable eloquence, as a starting point for harnessing the experiences of the oppressed to deconstruct mythology. In times of diversionary vitriol, it's important to remember that shoes come in different shapes and sizes.

People's History of the United States

... A People’s History is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.

July 4 offers an excellent annual opportunity to reconsider assumptions.

Howard Zinn’s July 4 Wisdom: Put Away Your Flags

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

But why restrict these reconsiderations to just one day a year?

Patriotism and the Fourth of July

... Mark Twain, having been called a "traitor" for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called "monarchical patriotism." He said: "The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: 'The King can do no wrong.' We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: 'Our country, right or wrong!' We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had - the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism."

A feather knocks us over as Democrats belatedly shuffle, mumble and pander about oppression.

Given that the Floyd County Democratic Party has been censoring me on social media since December, 2014, it's true that I only rarely visit the party's propaganda hive at Facebook.

ON THE AVENUES: The Adamite Chronicles: Have muzzle, will drivel.

Consequently, I definitely missed this post late last night.

Let's review.

Weeks of silence pass, and at the very last opportunity to indicate the presence of a pulse, however faint, Adam Dickey waits until a brand new autonomous organization steps up to what might have been the Democratic Party's bully pulpit, and then -- only then -- oozes a tepid late-night statement of solidarity with the oppressed ... who have been waiting in vain for weeks on end for Adam's tea leaves to magically align.

And does not so much as mention Dan Coffey's name.

That's passionate, raw courage, isn't it?

In the narrowest of possible interpretations, then yes -- the local Democratic Party has not been silent about Coffey's anti-LGBT slurs, which were captured and documented on film.

But with leaders like these, who needs enemies?

Previously: 

June 11: ON THE AVENUES: This is Dan Coffey, New Albany’s quintessential Democrat.

June 4: ON THE AVENUES: Dan Coffey speaks for Jeff Gahan and the Democratic Party … unless they say otherwise.

Your Saturday Radical 2: Chris Hedges, Karl Marx and why everything is not beautiful.

For a broader overview, the interview format here:

“We are in a revolutionary moment”: Chris Hedges explains why an uprising is coming — and soon, by Elias Isquith (Salon)

In recent years, there’s been a small genre of left-of-center journalism that, following President Obama’s lead, endeavors to prove that things on Planet Earth are not just going well, but have, in fact, never been better. This is an inherently subjective claim, of course; it requires that one buy into the idea of human progress, for one thing. But no matter how it was framed, there’s at least one celebrated leftist activist, author and journalist who’d disagree: Chris Hedges.

In fact, in his latest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” Hedges argues that the world is currently at a crisis point the likes of which we’ve never really seen. There are similarities between our time and the era of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe — or the French Revolutionary era that preceded them — he says. But in many ways, climate change least among them, the stakes this time are much higher. According to Hedges, a revolution is coming; we just don’t yet know when, where, how — or on whose behalf.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Hedges to discuss his book, why he thinks our world is in for some massive disruptions, and why we need revolutionaries now more than ever.

A bit more deeply here:

Karl Marx Was Right, by Chris Hedges (Truth Dig)

... Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic.

Baltimore in a nutshell: "The machine can work without the operator."

Thanks to Jeff G for the link. Badger's essay is clear, sad and not at all restricted in scope to Baltimore. That's because this isn't about the tip of the iceberg, as displayed in Baltimore and glimpsed on social media feeds. Rather, it's about those long decades of contributing factors preceding it, there and elsewhere.

The long, painful and repetitive history of how Baltimore became Baltimore, by Emily Badger (Washington Post)

... These cycles are not unique to Baltimore, which is also why the unrest in Baltimore this week feels more like a movement that's bound to spread than the mere outburst of a few "thugs."

It's not about police versus thugs, but the way that we all -- ALL -- are made to dance like marionettes to the tune of the 1%, which is the only entity profiting from purpose-built and ongoing societal schisms.

Surely it is not insignificant that in New Albany, per 1,000 residents, the arrest rate three years ago showed three times as many blacks as non-blacks. As Jeff noted:

It's easy to offer judgments and commentary about Baltimore and other cities. It's harder to ask questions at home. With just a few days left until the primary, which candidates will publicly ask about this?

The envelope, please ... and the answer is, none. But we have another prayer inclusion resolution coming to council next Monday.

Choices for reading are endless. Last week we took a glance here: Take time to consider Heinberg's "Fight of the Century: Localization in a Globalized World." President Obama's comments also are worthy of note: "This is not new. This has been going on for decades."

In The Nation, Dave Zirin steps in where the usual sports stenographers fear to tread with Apartheid Games: Baltimore, Urban America, and Camden Yards, while at Jacobin, an older piece written during the time of Ferguson explains When Rioting is Rational.

Still accurate after all these years (3).