fabrisse

I've been posting at Slate about this. The below is from my comments there.

A single Air Force Bomber costs $550 million. The National Endowment for the Arts annual budget is $146 million. The National Endowment for the Humanities costs $167.5 million.

Using the annual budget of $3.1 billion which is the amount of the CDBG block grants and multiplying it by .05 to get the 5% that most jurisdictions use on Meals on Wheels, I get $155,000,000. What are we going to do with the other $81,500,000?

One plane less. When people tell you that "guns or butter" arguments don't work, remember that 1 less bomber for the Air Force would cover the above. Cutting half a squadron, 6 bombers, would cover the CDBG block grants in full and still leave enough left over to fund the National Endowment for the Humanities and have $32.5 million left to play with.

The Air Force has requested 100 bombers.

Several people have asked me how they can help DC protect itself from the ravages of the current congress and administration. I have an idea.

DCist has an article about the current abortion law before congress. There's also a link to a "death with dignity" law with which congress is trying to interfere and, though there's no link, mention of a gun law which the House, especially, has already tried to overturn. They've already interfered with our decriminalization of marijuana laws, leaving us in the awkward position of not being able to regulate a trade which, through taxation, would help us immensely.

Call your congress people and Senators. I don't care if you agree with DC's law. I disagree with the "death with dignity" law and the only reason I don't disagree on abortion is that someone who doesn't have bodily autonomy isn't a full citizen in the eyes of the law. I see anything forbidding the right to choose as a slippery slope to women no longer being seen as full citizens. After all, it's been less than a hundred years since we were seen as full citizens. The point is actually more powerful if you disagree.

The point is that we have Home Rule. The point is that congress is not allowed to interfere with Boston, Denver, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Memphis, Nashville, Seattle, El Paso, or Portland, OR all of which are cities within 50,000 of our population. If the US Congress passed a law that said only the citizens of Seattle had to turn in their personal guns, everyone would rightly be up in arms (no pun intended). If they passed a law that said only the citizens of El Paso were required to have a gun on them at all times, the NRA might be happy, but the rest of us would be up in arms.

The more conservative the state you live in, the more powerful the statement. It's primarily, though not exclusively, Republicans and conservatives who are putting their fingers in our pies. Many of them are the same Republicans who shout from the mountaintop that the Federal government shouldn't interfere in local laws -- like those "religious freedom" laws and "bathroom bills."

Call. Please call. Call often. Adapt one of the sample scripts from thesixtyfive.org. More than anything else, make certain that you say your are their constituent and that you support the District of Columbia's right to autonomy in local matters. It can also be phrased as support for the District's right to Home Rule. While you're at The Sixty-five, pick another call to make. This isn't going to be a short haul on any issue. If you call your congress critter on another issue, throw in a "and don't interfere in the District of Columbia's local laws" at the end of it.

Thank you. Spread this message any way you can.

In August of 2004, I was at a friend's birthday party. Someone came up to me and said that the people who lived in the middle of the country, the ones who were going to be voting Republican were, and I quote, "stupid." When I disagreed, he said, "What do you call people who vote against their own interests?" We then got into a discussion about totalitarianism's definition (he was using the word fascist when he meant totalitarian) and whether or not Bush was totalitarian (in my opinion, no, but Cheney probably was) until we finally circled back around to his original, "they're all stupid." He also called me a Republican and we had to have a side discussion on what independent means.

At that point, I said something along the lines of, "This is why you'll lose. You're not willing to find out why they aren't voting in their economic interests." More discussion.

Finally, I made my point, which is that the Democratic Party had a chance to reverse people's belief that it was made up entirely of elitists who didn't care about the middle of the country. What they needed to do was go out at a very grassroots level and talk to people door to door, set a spell on a front porch drinking the sweet tea that would be offered and ask about what's going wrong in America or in the neighborhood and take notes. Then go to the next front porch and do the same thing. At that point, we, and I'm counting myself there as an East coast elitist who is traditionally Liberal, had up to three years to figure out how to reach middle America and drop our elitist language.

We didn't. Obama won. And we forgot that this project still needed to be done.

Make no mistake, this is about class and privilege in the United States. While white privilege exists (hoo boy, does it exist), people who are in extreme poverty, without work, and with drugs devastating their communities don't see themselves as privileged.

Until and unless we build this bridge, we will lose the hearts and minds of the middle of the country and their kids. Seeing that Grandma's medicare doesn't get her the help she needs or that his children are more likely to find meth than a job, alienates people and they are told by the ministers they listen to that a thrice married sociopath is better than a God-fearing Methodist who's stayed with her husband because the "values" shared aren't tangible. It doesn't matter that Hillary Clinton isn't warm and fuzzy, that can be overcome. It matters that the Democratic Party is bad at pointing to the concrete actions they have done to help. It matters that the Liberals don't deplore abortion, for instance, while explaining why it needs to remain legal with human and relatable anecdotes.

I work with numbers. I've learned to respect statistics. But I'm also southern culturally, and nothing is really understood within my culture without a story to explain it.

In a Guardian comment, I once said: In my jurisdiction, most of the women who choose to abort already have two or more children. They are making the choice, in part, to make certain the children they already have will be fed, schooled, and reared with fewer financial constraints. This is not the choice for toys. This is a choice for children to have the essentials of life.

You want to end abortion? Then make certain there are programs which provide safe havens for abused women. Make certain that every child who is already here has a safe place to sleep and sufficient to eat. I promise you, the abortion rate will go down drastically.

That's a strategy that has a story to be told. Sharing that story could get middle America supporting the right to choose if it's framed right (I admit, I picked a tough one as an example.).

But Liberals can't tell these stories until we've set on a porch and listened to their stories.

When my cousin who was more like a grandmother to me was in her late 80s, I said something inadvertently which led her to ask me about "the gays." I approached my answer through the bible using the ten commandments, the New testament superceding the Old, and 1 Corinthians 13 to buttress my argument. She listened because I was family, in part, but also because I was educated, because I approached it through the book she loved and the religion she practiced, and because I listened to her whole question.

I don't know how we can do this, but I know that we must.

I'm on the ballot. I have one person running against me. He just graduated university and bought a house. I think if I concentrate on the people in my apartment complex -- most of whom are poor -- I have a shot at winning. Money will be tough. My calculations are that I'll need a minimum of $650 for flyers, etc. But I can spread the cost out over two months (September and October, next week's paycheck is already spoken for).

Keep your fingers crossed.

I have my temporary DC Driver's License. I have made certain my voter registration is current.

I picked up my petitions to get on the ballot for ANC, and I already have 12 valid signatures (and 7 invalid ones). I need 25 valid signatures total before 5 pm on Wednesday (which, by the way, is 90 days to the election).

Wish me luck.

I was flabbergasted, as I think most of us were, to read of Prince's death. Like Bowie, I wasn't a huge fan, but it feels as if an important cultural influence has gone. In some ways, Prince was the cultural touchstone of the 1980s into the early 1990s in the same way that Bowie was to the 1970s-80s.

The song that I'm playing is Baltimore. It was performed publicly for the first time last year in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray riots. I'm still amazed that the Crips and Bloods did more to keep the peace during that week than the government did.

But the line that grips me from the song is "Peace is more than the absence of war."

In the mid-1980s I was working toward a Master's in International Relations and was required to take International Systems. One of the central texts was On the Causes of War by Michael Howard. In it, Howard argued that peace wasn't merely the absence of war, but absence of the threat of war. I was mocked by the professor for agreeing with Howard.

I still think it's one of the most important points, and may be part of the disconnect on "Black Lives Matter." Too many white people don't feel the threat of daily violence and so don't grasp that even when things are quiet, the neighborhoods aren't at peace.

I'm yelling a big NOOOO! right now.

I know I've told this story before, but...

In 1967, my family moved to London. My mother has said that one of the things she wanted to see hadn't been possible: one of London's famous pea-soup fogs.

The last one was in 1962. Ten years earlier in December of 1952 a pea-soup fog covered London for four days. Twelve thousand people -- elderly, some children, other vulnerable populations -- died. They died from breathing the air.

In 1956, Parliament passed the Clean Air Act, and I as a child got to reap the benefits, even if it disappointed my mother.

While we were living there, the Clean Water Act was passed. It was assumed to take 100 years before the Thames could support fish again. When I went back to live in London, in 1982, tiny whitebait fish were being caught in the river. I wouldn't have eaten them, but by the 21st Century a whale was actually able to survive in the Thames for a few days.

The US clean air and water acts were passed a bit later. We waited for a river to catch fire before we thought, "eh, maybe it's time to look at pollutants." One of the key agents of change was the EPA -- created by a Republican president (thank you, Richard Nixon (not a phrase heard often)) -- which was able to regulate and enforce.

I don't want to go back to those days. Thanks to several bouts of pneumonia, I have weak lungs. But even if it weren't for the self interest, I don't want to go back.

This is wrong, and I don't know how to fight it.

A week or so ago, tediousandbrief mentioned the Falklands War in his lj, and it brought back memories for me. A blank front page on The Guardian (well, not entirely blank. Mostly though.), lots of references to "Argies," The International Herald Tribune being read by British people because the British press wasn't allowed to report accurately. (Found an interesting paper on jingoism in British journalism during the Falklands here.)

And The Flying Pickets.

They had a Christmas hit -- which is the one everyone always remembers in Britain; Americans tend to remember summer songs -- in 1983. They'd recorded an album (and I recently discovered a TV special) called "Live at the Albany Empire." The album had several politically pointed segments that were omitted from the TV special, but they both have a cover of "Walk Like a Man." (It's at about minute 31 on the special.) On the album, it's directly linked to the Malv... Falklands War.

What I hadn't known about them, though, was that they began as part of a theater group called 7 84. The name referred to the 7% of the population which held 84% of the world's wealth. And it hit me: As recently as thirty years ago, the 1% was 7%.

ETA: The album opens with Red Stripe (described as one YouTube Commenter as "Uncle Fester in eyeliner") saying, "People keep asking us, have we got a record, have we got a record they keep asking. I tell them, 'of course, we got a record. What'd you think we are? Choir boys?'"

ETA2: In a weird synchronicity, I got an email from someone I hadn't heard from since 2008. Our correspondence had been related to The Flying Pickets song (written by Rick Lloyd -- gold hat in the video) called "Remember This." Neither of us could figure out one phrase in the chorus. A month ago, he met Rick Lloyd and asked him. It turned out to be:
"Venceremos" is a Spanish slogan meaning "We shall overcome".

The lyrics are:
Remember this, nothing is sacred. We live right beside the abyss.
Remember this, there is no doubt that your name is on somebody's list.

Remember this, the cloud you live under is hiding the thunder to come
Remember this, truth's out of season, they'll try you for treason, my son
Remember this

Venceremos, they can't tame us, please remember this
Venceremos, we'll be famous, our names on every list

Remember this, requiems don't quite make up for the loss of a life
Remember this, southern bananas fall prey to piranhas by night.

Venceremos, they can't tame us, please remember this
Venceremos, we'll be famous, our names on every list

Lost out here in the market place with nowhere left to run
Too many people have disappeared to doubt what has begun

Remember this, locked in the stadium are people who've fought without fear.
Remember this, battered and broken for what they have spoken for years

Remember this...

I'm tired, y'all. The District of Columbia has a larger population than Wyoming. Wyoming has two Senators and a Representative in the House. They paid $3,828,379,000 in gross income tax for fiscal year 2012 (per Wikipedia. I know.)

The District paid $20,747,652,000.

We pay more in income tax than Montana, Wyoming, and both Dakotas combined ($19,013,215,000 for all four of them vs $20,747,652,000 for the District using those 2012 numbers).

But the death of Marion Barry and the Ferguson protests here (which have not erupted in violence) are getting dismissive comments about our being "like children" who "lack any capacity to govern." If we weren't a predominantly black city, I don't think anyone would use those phrases.

We have more Ph.D.s per capita than Cambridge, MA and three wards with a combined illiteracy rate of 27%. We're trying to combat the latter, but it's not easy. Generations of people who were never encouraged to read, who lost their children to AIDS (one in five DC residents is HIV positive -- per a study from 2011, it's probably less now because the population has increased) and are now trying to rear their grandchildren and, in some cases, great-grandchildren.

The thing is, some of the policies that would help our situation are opposed by a conservative Congress. We've lost our needle exchange programs which is part of our Medicaid (paid by our local taxes; this isn't federal money) because Congress has interfered. Ditto some of our abortion rights. If Congress doesn't like something we fund, they can stop it. They can't in Boston or Chicago or any other major city, but they can here. But we're "like children."

I am semi-seriously considering "live" blogging World War I. It would mean a great deal of research for me, and, yes, I would probably concentrate on the Belgian and French fronts of the war since I know them best, but I really feel that it's forgotten in the US. Also, Michael Gove's remarks back in January really got under my skin.

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