The way we look to a distant constellation That’s dying in a corner of the sky These are the days of miracle and wonder And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry Don’t cry. — “The Boy in the Bubble,” Paul Simon
I heard that Paul Simon song on Sirius radio last Thursday. I think it was on the Classic Vinyl station. I turned it up loud and thoughts arose, mostly about the time I first heard the Graceland album on which the tune made its debut.
It was the 1980s and we were living in Pittsburgh. My family and I were at a state park in Ohio, where we’d met up with three other families — friends with similarly aged young children. We’d rented cabins for the weekend and planned to fish and hike and cook out and probably have a little too much wine after the kids went to bed.
I’d just bought the Graceland cassette and we adults wore it out on a big jam box over the weekend. It took a minute for us to get used to the album’s quirky African rhythms and instrumentation — it was the big-hair Eighties, after all — but when it sunk in, it stuck, hard. It’s funny how music attaches itself like a sticky note to moments in your life.
Last Thursday, I happened to be listening to music because the thought of turning the Sirius dial to CNN or MSNBC or NPR or, heaven forbid, “Progressive Talk” radio was just unthinkable.
I used to listen to music all the time in the car, but as “The Boy in the Bubble” reached its familiar refrain in the Fresh Market parking lot, I realized I hadn’t really done so in months. I’d become obsessed with politics and the presidential race and I’d been spending all my time while in the car listening to news and political analysis. Horse race radio, basically.
A month ago, for example, I drove to upstate New York — 17 hours over two days — and listened to nothing but news and commentary, mostly about the presidential race. Even the podcasts I listened to were about politics. I was hooked by my confirmation biases and, if I’m honest, by the progressive outrage I was stewing in for hours at a time.
I was a boy in a bubble, and I wasn’t alone. There were millions of us, most of whom had convinced themselves that the Democrats would win, buoyed by outraged, pro-choice women, a fresh wave of committed young people, and a massive get-out-the-vote ground game. Oops.
There was another bubble, of course, one that pushed storylines supporting the GOP candidates and stirred up several ignorant and hateful narratives. There were millions of people in that bubble. I knew it existed, but I never dipped my toe into it for very long. Honestly, what kind of idiots would believe people were eating cats and dogs? Millions of them, apparently.
Some votes are still being counted as I write this, but it appears the Republican candidate won the presidency with around 25 percent of the nation’s eligible voters, about the same number he had in 2020, when he lost. The Democratic candidate garnered around 24 percent this time around.
But here’s the sad truth: The largest party in the country isn’t the Democrats or the Republicans. It’s the Apathy Party, which makes up around 47 percent of America’s eligible voters — those who couldn’t work up the time or energy to cast a ballot. They hold the power, but apparently have no interest in using it.
Around 8,000,000 fewer Americans voted in 2024 than in 2020. That’s a dangerous trend for a democracy, and something we need to figure out how to fix. In the end, it certainly wasn’t a landslide, as some have claimed. It was more like a slow mudslide. We need to dig out of the mud and leave our bubbles, but keep the faith. Speak the truth. These are the days of miracle and wonder. Don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry.
This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, political columnist Jackson Baker and Chris McCoy talk about the election and try to come to grips with what just happened. Check it out on YouTube.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ dramatic entry into the presidential race in July — including selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate — put a new twist on the already gendered nature of the election. A woman was now at the top of the ticket.
Instead of Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s misogynist manhood solely driving the media narrative, there was now a new storyline: Not only was a Black, South Asian woman the nominee; there also was a counternarrative — the egalitarian expression of manhood embodied by Walz and Doug Emhoff.
From the GOP convention theme song, “It’s a Man’s World,” to Hulk Hogan’s ridiculous tribute to old-school manhood, the Trump campaign gambled that their brand of “tough” masculinity would be a winning strategy against President Biden’s perceived “weak” portrayal of manhood. But Trump was caught up short when — just three days after his convention ended — he was facing a woman.
Into this fraught political moment comes a thought-provoking film exploring presidential masculinity. The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power & the American Presidency is rich with content and context for voters to make sense of the gender politics playing out in the election. Created by educator-author Jackson Katz, The Man Card was originally released in 2020. The updated and expanded 2024 version crackles with urgency now that Kamala Harris is Trump’s opponent.
The Man Card demonstrates how presidents and the presidency have historically been linked in the American imagination with traditional ideas about men. The film exposes how the right uses one-dimensional ideas about manhood to portray Democrats as too weak to attract working-class white men. In less politically volatile times, a full-on review of the film would make sense. But writing about The Man Card weeks before the election invites viewers to assess the film through an activist, not an educational, lens. Viewers might ask themselves: What can I do to get the film into a local union hall, before groups of younger, working-class men, broadcast on community access television, streamed in battleground states?
The Young Men Research Initiative, which Katz cofounded earlier this year, is urging the media to cover the male side of the gender gap and the Democrats to reach out to young men, especially those who typically get their news from the online, misogynist manosphere rather than traditional media.
The film uses vivid archival and contemporary footage to illustrate the ways presidential masculinity is portrayed, ranging from a cowboy hat-wearing Ronald Reagan cutting brush on his Santa Barbara ranch to George W. Bush decked out in a fighter pilot’s uniform landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln to (wrongly) declare, “Mission accomplished,” in Iraq.
For the second time in eight years, a man whose political identity is rooted in both misogyny and reductive ideas about manhood is running against a woman. Instead of a white woman, now his opponent is Black and South Asian. Plus, she’s a prosecutor; he’s a felon. The Man Card asks white male voters, especially in battleground states, how they will judge the Harris-Walz ticket. Will they throw their support behind the MAGA movement that promises to restore men’s former glory? Or will they reject long-established voting patterns and help usher in a new era, redefining the highest office in the country, and with it our national identity?
Voters have a stark choice. Trump and Vance promote a rigid masculinity infused with both misogyny and Christian nationalism. They have used bigotry and fear of the other — including bald-faced lies about Haitian immigrants — to gin up their base. Meanwhile, Harris and Walz represent an evolving expression of leadership — championing women as leaders at the highest level — more suited to the 21st century.
Until now, the loudest voices in the struggle over which version of gender and power will prevail have been those promoting traditional masculinity as the key to solving society’s problems. Among them are some on the far right who, alarmingly, believe violence is both acceptable and necessary. Meanwhile, other voices are beginning to be recognized: those of antisexist men who have worked to transform conventional masculinity over the same half-century covered in The Man Card. They’ve been redefining manhood, fatherhood, and brotherhood. Now, it’s time to add white male presidents.
To better understand the deeply gendered social, cultural, and political forces that Kamala Harris is up against, here’s an idea: Set aside an hour and a quarter and watch The Man Card. Then, take to heart Michelle Obama’s challenge and “do something.” Maybe, begin by sharing what you learned with men you know — especially young men.
Rob Okun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is editor emeritus of Voice Male magazine, chronicling the antisexist men’s movement for more than 30 years and is editor of the anthology, Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement.
We have a video podcast! Wait. Does that make it just a talk show? Either way, we’ve been working on a new weekly … thing. It’s not polished up yet but head over to our YouTube channel for an early look.
Weird Elon
Posted to YouTube my Elon Musk
Memphis businessman Elon Musk tweeted something just so weird last week, earning him millions of ughs and boos from every corner of the internet.
Underground, indie singer/songwriter Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president with a picture of her cat (iykyk). This prompted Memphis businessman Elon Musk to tweet, “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”
Propers
Posted to Reddit by u/AlfofMelmac
Reddit user AlfofMelmac gave propers where they were due last week with a post titled, “Good job, MLGW!” The remnants of Hurricane Francine blustered through Memphis last week and the Redditor was “pleasantly surprised to see that there weren’t a whole lot of lights out on my commute, and not a ton of outages compared to prior big storms!”
In her debate with Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris declared, “Access to healthcare should be a right, not a privilege for those who can afford it.” Her stance is laudable, and the reforms she advocated that evening make political sense in a tight presidential race, i.e. widening access to care through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and extending negotiated drug prices (e.g., insulin capped at $35 per month) to all Americans, not only Medicare recipients.
But such reforms only go so far in realizing the fundamental value of healthcare as a right belonging to all Americans. The reforms won’t address the inequities and structural problems plaguing our fragmented healthcare system (or “semi-system,” as political scientist Jacob S. Hacker has described it).
This past year, the U.S. experienced a national medical emergency affecting millions of Americans. Known as the “Great Unwinding,” this underreported emergency entailed the disenrollment from Medicaid of 23 million Americans, many of them children. Medicaid, the joint federal-state program providing healthcare coverage to poor Americans, had put millions of people on continuous coverage as a result of 2020 legislation passed at the outset of the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, Medicaid recipients had to undergo regular checks on their income-related eligibility for the program, checks that often interrupted care with red tape and bureaucratic glitches (patients moving, or not getting adequate notifications, as well as confusing instructions for individuals with disabilities). Continuous coverage meant that approximately 90 million people received necessary medical appointments and medications without interruption.
But when the pandemic-era program expired last year, states began disenrolling patients (some states more aggressively than others) with results that were highly disruptive to patients’ ongoing care. One young Florida couple, whose 7-year-old daughter has cerebral palsy and epileptic seizures, was given a 10-day notice of their daughter’s disenrollment, a notification that meant disruptions to the visits with her daughter’s therapists, as well a threat to the continuous supply of her medications. Another couple was informed that their 12-year-old daughter had retained her Medicaid coverage, while their 6-year-old son was disenrolled.
Over the course of this past year, 56.4 million people (69 percent of the people who had been disenrolled) were eventually able to have their coverage renewed, while 25 million (31 percent) remain disenrolled, many for so-called “procedural” reasons (e.g., outdated contact information, inability to understand or complete renewal packets). Overall, 25.6 million Americans lack health insurance altogether.
These figures are unacceptable in a nation as wealthy as the U.S. — a nation that spends more on healthcare per capita than any comparable nation in wealth and size. As Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician, has noted, any short- or long-term gaps in coverage can “precipitate potentially deadly ruptures of care.” Citing recent medical studies, Gaffney explains that, “most of the benefits of modern healthcare, after all, emerge not from emergency care provided in places like ERs or ICUs, as important as that is. Rather, health is protected through long-standing therapeutic relationships between patients and primary care physicians that allow medical problems to be recognized and chronic problems carefully managed.”
For these reasons (i.e., the fragmented nature of our healthcare system, the medically harmful discontinuities of care, the unacceptable number of uninsured individuals), our nation deserves a genuine Medicare for all: a single-payer healthcare system that’s publicly financed, and that provides individuals with comprehensive care and choice in selecting providers. And, as recommended by the advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program, the delivery of care would remain “largely in private hands.”
The provision of coverage itself, however, must not be compromised by the introduction of for-profit insurance plans, like the Medicare Advantage (MA) plans that now enroll half of all Medicare recipients. Under such plans, a private insurer is paid a fixed monthly amount for each Medicare recipient who selects the option, and the plan handles the coverage for that individual. Introduced during the Reagan administration, the MA plans were intended to provide more efficient care, but they’ve ended up being more costly than traditional Medicare, have posed problems to patients and rural health facilities because of frequent denials of care, and have been investigated for fraudulent overbilling.
In its Project 2025 blueprint for governance, the Heritage Foundation has called for privatized MA plans to be the “default option” for Medicare, and they will likely be Donald Trump’s preferred option were he to be elected president this November. He would also be likely to follow the Project’s recommendations on stripping certain key consumer protections from the ACA.
If Kamala Harris is elected president, she will have before her an array of policy options that go far beyond the reforms she mentioned in her debate with Trump. These are options that can provide all Americans, no matter what their employment or socioeconomic status, with comprehensive and continuous healthcare.
For example, there is proposed Medicare for All legislation now before the Senate and House (Sanders, Jayapal, Dingell), with 15 cosponsors in the Senate and support from half the Democratic caucus in Congress. In addition, the 2024 Democratic Party platform includes a plank calling for a “public option” to supplement the marketplace plans in the ACA. Such an option, which Harris advocated in her 2019 bid for president, would give Americans of any age the opportunity to enroll in Medicare-style, publicly funded coverage.
In recent weeks, Harris has said that although her policy positions may have changed, her values haven’t. If she is elected president, she should seize the opportunity to align her values — healthcare as a right, not a commodity — with policies that offer the best chance of realizing those values fully.
Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor, nonviolence, and culture from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (nonviolence studies, English) from California State University.
Editor’s note: Our political columnist Jackson Baker and former Flyer writer Chris Davis traveled to Chicago, Illinois, last week for the Democratic National Convention from Monday, August 19th, to Thursday, August 22nd. For this story, Baker and Davis reflect on their experiences, giving light to the ever-changing political landscape.
CHICAGO — Let the record show that the second major-party convention of 2024 ended as the first one had — with a firm conviction on the part of its cadres that victory in the November general election was, if not inevitable, then likely. And if not that, at least possible.
That circumstance, ideal from the vantage point of a suspenseful showdown and a spirited turnout, depended largely on events that occurred between the two, the Republican gathering in Milwaukee in mid-July and the Democrats’ a month later.
Those events began with the withdrawal from the race of Democratic President Joe Biden, whose evident infirmities had been amply signaled in an early debate with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
Kamala Harris after acceptance address (Photo: David Upton)
They continued with the substitution of Democratic nominee of Vice President Kamala Harris, as close to her party’s line as Biden had been and vastly more dynamic and appealing in espousing it.
In between these events had come what appeared to be an emotional unraveling of contestant Trump, who was largely reduced to unloosing poorly formulated insults at his new opponent, including one which, manifestly absurdly, claimed he was the better-looking of the two.
Harris had, with impressive speed and efficiency, managed to still most doubts about herself as campaigner and party avatar within her party ranks, and she had bolstered her position with her choice of a running mate, the unassuming but engagingly folksy governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, a former high-school football coach progressive enough to have been faculty advisor for a “gay-straight alliance” at his school.
The Democrats’ changing of the guard would be relatively seamless. On night one of the convention, Biden, transparently grieving, would take his demotion with gravel-voiced acceptance and would be rewarded with prearranged chants of “We love Joe” and ritual hugs from wife, family, and Kamala. All would liken him to George Washington, obscuring the look of archetypal sacrifice.
Thereafter the money rolled in, the polls responded, and it was all a rush to celebrate Kamala as the first Black woman, first Asian, first woman of color (pick one) to be nominated for president of the United States, the consecrators came forth — the old Lion Bill in his subdued approving wheeze, the Obamas, “Do something,” “Tell Trump this is one of those Black jobs,” and the formal roll call to nominate her became a collage of carnivals, all more Dionysian than Apollonian. Coach Walz came in with gridiron metaphors: “A field goal down in the fourth quarter,” “Let’s roll.”
Kamala had every reason to smile, and her ever-beaming face became mask, then masque. It was on. The entertainers arrived, Stevie Wonder sighting higher ground and Oprah Winfrey flinging her arms in wide embrace.
On the last night, it was all Kamala. And she delivered, lashing the fundamentally unserious Trump as the serious threat he was, tying him to the retrograde Project 2025 with its rolling back of American freedoms and vowing, “We’ll never go back!”
She would go on to touch all the bases: a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, tax cuts for the middle class, freedom to read, solidarity with our NATO allies, confronting Big Pharma, retarding pursuing inflation, and overhauling immigration policy, protecting the border while creating a path to citizenship.
There was one less developed point — just what to do about the Israel-Gaza war, other than to seek a ceasefire and the return of hostages taken by Hamas.
The much-ballyhooed protest of Gaza war policy — seriously overseen by squadrons of Chicago’s finest — turned out to be more pro forma than profound. Passing through the midst of the chanters of an evening, I heard one voice out on its periphery, more prevalent than the rest, and that turned out to belong to a solitary sentinel denouncing things of this world.
A Christian soldier, as it were, passing out literature extolling a world to come — one even more remote than one in which Palestinians might achieve what they and their supporters could regard as full justice.
If there was a serious issue that never made it to the rostrum of either convention in 2024, it was anything resembling a major re-evaluation of the nation’s Middle East policy.
Kamala, it seemed, was able to finesse the issue on a talking point pledging support for Israel’s right to defend itself coupled with hopes for eventual self-determination for Palestinians.
That this might be seen as progress was a statement in and of itself.
Among the Democrats taking part one day in a rooftop celebration for the Tennessee delegation atop one of Chicago’s several new Downtown skyscrapers were Joseph Walters and Brenda Speer of Speerit Hill Farm of Lynnville. A second-marriage couple, they were, in retirement age, looking to the Harris-Walz team and its attempted evocation of joy as a revival of their political hopes.
These had been lapsed now for a near-generation, since, Walters remembers, the time of Obama, when a presidential victory in the nation at large became, paradoxically, a signal for the white South, including Tennessee, to forswear its Democratic Party heritage.
These were the years when Memphis’ Jim Kyle, now a Shelby County chancellor and then the Democrats’ leader in the Tennessee state Senate and a potential heir to the mantle of lieutenant governor, began a campaign for governor in 2010, only to discover that “all the yellow-dog Democrats had become yellow-dog Republicans”
“I was so disappointed,” Speer, still a mainstay of party activity in rural Middle Tennessee, such as it is, says of that time, when her neighbors began deserting the Democratic legacy in droves.
It may be impossible now, and for some time yet, for Democrats to challenge the Republican supermajority in Tennessee for power in the state at large.
Yet the building blocks would seem to be emerging in the ranks of determined Democrats like Sarah Freeman of the Germantown Democratic Club, a candidate this year for the 8th District congressional seat now held by Republican David Kustoff. Freeman won out in what was an old-fashioned multi-candidate free-for-all in the Democratic primary, and she was accompanied at the convention by her own videographer documentarian.
There was Lee Harris, the Shelby County mayor who was on hand for ongoing policy talks with peers from local governments elsewhere, and there was first-term Memphis Mayor Paul Young, who declared to his fellow Tennesseans, “People in the hood … don’t care about our conventions. They just want things to change. And so as we leave here, I want us to take this energy and turn it into action.”
Justin J. Pearson with the Tennessee delegation (Photo: Jackson Baker)
And there was Justin J. Pearson, the oracle of change to come, the galvanizing figure of the campaign to save South Memphis from a potentially hazardous oil pipeline and later a key member of the Tennessee Three, who shamed the state’s GOP leadership for its inaction on gun safety. And still later Pearson, the District 86 state representative, would become an accomplished fundraiser and all-purpose benefactor of progressive causes he deemed meritorious or necessary. And their apostle, as in the following words delivered to the Tennessee delegation on the last morning of the convention:
“We’ve got to be fired up when we have somebody who’s been convicted of 34 felonies running against the most qualified person ever to run for president of these United States, Vice President Kamala D. Harris.
“We’ve got to be fired up for such a time and moment as this, where we are seeing the rights of women being taken. We’ve got to be fired up when the gun violence epidemic continues to plague our communities because the Tennessee Firearms Association and the National Rifle Association seem to have bought our politicians into a level of complacency and cowardice that is demeaning and degrading and hurting us.
“We’ve got to be fired up when our civil rights are being attacked on every side, and this Supreme Court acts much more like a MAGA-extremist Republican Party than it should.
“We have to be fired up in this moment to preserve and protect and defend the democratic constitutional experiment that our ancestors marched for, that our ancestors died for, that our ancestors built through many dangers, toils, and snares. We’ve got to be fired up in this moment. In Tennessee and in America, we’ve got to be fired up. …
“We are Democrats. We are Democrats.”
Pearson’s oratory was confined to the Tennessee delegation. The nation at large has not yet heard him. But they will. They will.
Meanwhile, there is the following: a priceless musing on the subject at hand from my colleague on this mission and a strong right arm indeed, Chris Davis. — Jackson Baker
……………
A new audacity: Hopeful Democrats leave Chicago full of fight, but questions linger
The rebellion started, like they do, with a normal request from the back of the bus: “Can we please just get off and walk to United Center?” The question, voiced by some unidentified patriot, who only wanted to get to the Democratic National Convention in time to hear President Joe Biden speak, set off a rumble of interest. Problem was, a small but determined group of demonstrators had broken away from the bulk of Monday’s pro-Palestinian protests in Union Park and breached the DNC’s security perimeter.
The occupation was brief and peaceful but it ended in arrests, confusion, and a lengthy lockdown of the perimeter that stranded a mile-long convoy of buses, carrying DNC guests from their Downtown hotels to the venue. The stuck Democrats were getting restless, but they weren’t getting mad; they were ready to do something.
Pro-Palestine protestors marched in Chicago. (Photo: Chris Davis)
A genial police officer, assigned to guard the shuttle carrying delegates and guests to the venue in Chicago’s Near West Side neighborhood, didn’t want anybody taking any unnecessary risks: Stick to the plan and the bus will get everybody there, eventually. Ex-military and petite, the officer was wrapped in Kevlar, strapped with tactical gear, and gifted with an evident flair for theatrical performance.
She told riders they needed to stay on the bus because modern protesters wear gloves treated with caustic chemicals so they can burn cops just by grabbing them. The officer said she thought other guests from other buses had already attempted to walk and they’d gotten into fights with protesters or something like that. She said it was better for everybody to stay on a bus that wasn’t going anywhere than risk running into any of that.
Before the smiling officer could finish her cautionary fairytales, somebody in the middle of the bus found footage of the breach on TikTok. “I think I’m gonna walk,” they said. “The protesters aren’t wrong,” someone else said to a buzz of general agreement, and people began to stand up and move toward the front of the bus. By this time doors to the other stalled buses were swinging open and Democrats poured out into the street: evidence of similar, simultaneous rebellions within the stalled convoy.
The protestors called for action not just for Palestine but for other nations, like the Philippines, whose leader is in effigy above with Harris and Biden. (Photo: Chris Davis)
“If you really want to get off the bus, I can’t stop you,” the officer said, as Democrats started getting off the bus en masse and trudging like a well-dressed zombie horde toward the fenced perimeter. Only those with mobility issues, and people who despise walking were left to ride. They would, as the police officer assured, arrive in time to see the president speak. Three-and-a-half hours later the last of the stuck passengers disembarked at the United Center.
This feels like a metaphor for something. Maybe a metaphor for everything. In any case, I got off the bus and walked to a happy hour event hosted by Grow Progress, an organization who “use[s] science and empathy” to build more persuasive political messages. They persuaded me to enjoy several drinks, and I arrived in the arena somewhat later than the stranded bus riders, but in a much better mood.
Hillary Clinton was speaking. I could see her on the hallway monitors, as I made my way to a media-friendly space, and I could hear the crowd chanting, “Lock him up.”
It was a beautiful first day for the DNC. The sun was high and bright but a steady wind turned larger, handmade signs into sails, billowing and blowing around some of the protesters gathering in Union Park to demonstrate on behalf of the people of Palestine.
These random acts of slapstick were a stark counterpoint to an event more sincere than sizable. Organizers had predicted a turnout of 20,000 or more and a credulous media, convinced 2024 was the new 1968, transformed those hopeful numbers into big, scary headlines. But taking every lazy argument into account, 2024 only resembles 1968 the way a cloud might resemble Grandma. You can see her sweet smile and that weird growth on her neck so clearly up there in the sky, but no matter how much that Grandma-shaped cloud reminds you of a simpler, happier time, it’s a cloud and won’t be baking cookies for your birthday. By the 2 p.m. start time, hundreds of pre-printed picket signs remained spread across the lawn, uncollected. It seemed unlikely that the protest would attract even a quarter of its projected numbers.
The protests were more sincere than sizable. (Photo: Chris Davis)
A big reason 2024 wasn’t like 1968 is the fact that Democrats weren’t engaged in a contentious fight to choose their candidate. This certainly could have happened and even typically level-headed pundits like Ezra Klein fantasized an open or brokered convention, rationalizing that the Democratic Party could only be perfected and purified by walking through a fire certain to burn bridges and destroy alliances. But that never happened. Biden selected his Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him, just as she would should he ever become unable to fulfill the duties of office, and to everybody’s surprise, the Democrats, a coalition party rarely able to agree on anything, got fully on board with a candidate voters hadn’t much liked the one time she ran for the nomination.
’68 was a rough ride for America. We lost MLK and Bobby Kennedy to assassins who didn’t miss. Conscripted American soldiers were dying in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement and American youth counterculture were in their fullest blossom, and the angry, young protesters who made their stand in Chicago truly believed the pressure they built there might determine who’d be picked to lead the Democratic ticket. Inside the convention, things were equally fraught with many delegates shouting, “No! No!” when Hubert Humphrey, who’d backed Johnson’s escalation of conflict in Vietnam, secured the party’s nomination.
’68 is also the year when Alabama Governor George Wallace, a right-wing extremist hellbent on denying either party an electoral majority, broke with the Democratic Party to make his own run at the White House, taking a big chunk of the “forget Hell!” South with him. Outside of President Biden choosing not to seek reelection and American involvement in a foreign civil war, 1968 and 2024 couldn’t be more dissimilar.
Even President Biden, in his emotional address to the DNC said, without reservation, “Those protesters out in the street have a point.” Only, he didn’t stop there, while he was ahead. “A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides,” he concluded, glossing over the disproportionate carnage that’s led to charges of war crimes and accusations of genocide against Israel, and to normal complaints from the back of the bus.
In 2004 America held its first post-9/11 political conventions, and as it’s so frequently stated, after that infamous date, “everything changed.” Manhattan locked down when the Republican National Convention landed in town.
The National Guard greeted the bridge-and-tunnel crowd with barricades and heavier arms, while a militarized police force took to the streets, throwing up barricades faster than protesters could pour into the city. New York arrested more than 1,800 people over four days, including kids, media, and bystanders. Detainees were taken to a makeshift detention camp called Pier 57, but described as, “Guantanamo on the Hudson.” More than 300 protesters were arrested by militarized police in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the first day of the RNC in 2008, and similar numbers were arrested each subsequent day during that convention. America’s misadventures in Iraq were still on the ballot and the whole world was experiencing massive economic collapse. Protest was heavy and the police response was disproportionate.
America was still at war during the 2016 conventions, but the public wasn’t activated to the same degree. Protest diminished and, for the Democrats, it was almost exclusively an internal squabble. Although senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders was giving Clinton his full-throated support, his disappointed supporters refused to let go of his lost candidacy. They turned out in force to protest by taping their mouths shut, and slamming against the perimeter barricades, where they were summarily arrested by militarized police.
I mention all of this protest history because one of the notable changes in both Milwaukee and Chicago compared to past conventions is how differently they were policed. Recent police raids clearing pro-Palestine encampments in Chicago encouraged our talking heads to dream harder about the ghost of Mayor Daley and a 1968 redux. But Chicago’s old-school head-busting police aren’t who showed up to serve and protect at the DNC. Bicycle cops and police wearing their everyday uniforms circled Union Park, where the bulk of the convention’s protests originated, to observe like an audience prepared for something other than the very worst.
Riot cops did get busy for a short time on Tuesday, when a fringe protest led by groups like Behind Enemy Lines and Samidoun (vocally supportive of Hamas’ October 7th attack against Israel) got out of hand. During that one action, police made 50 of 74 total arrests spread across four days of mostly peaceful public demonstration. It’s not a perfect example, but this is progress.
So what year is it again, if not 1968? When I heard the chants of “Lock him up,” I was rocketed back to the 2016 RNC, when Hillary’s emails were big news and chants of “Lock her up” shook Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse.
Now that Trump’s a convicted felon 34 times over, the irony is too delicious, and I wanted to enjoy watching the former senator from New York and failed presidential contender enjoy her moment. But no matter how perfectly poetic, or deserved, hearing a mob calling for the incarceration of their immediate political rival is somehow no less chilling now than it was eight years ago.
But what do I know? Nielsen ratings for the DNC’s first night demolished the RNC’s opening by a margin of 29 percent and, against the usual trend, the Democrats increased viewership each night. It’s interesting to consider how only a month ago serious commentators watching the RNC’s opening night contemplated the possibility of a once-in-a-generation political realignment favoring the GOP. It’s helpful to remember how the Democrats’ increased viewership, though in the millions, might be accounted for within the biggest blue areas and reflect no electoral college advantage whatsoever. It’s important to know that almost four times as many people tuned in to watch the DNC in 1968, when real Americans watched TV, goddammit.
Critics of the 2024 convention have astutely recognized that it was largely about feelings, and feelings aren’t a plan. True enough, but politics is made out of feelings. In recent cycles, anger, fear, hope, grief, grievance, and a host of other feelings have driven voters to the polls, why not bet on joy, for a change? Policy is key, but as Al Gore will surely tell you, if you lead with it, they put you in a lockbox.
What else can I say about the Democrats’ superb execution at the United Center that won’t have been said a thousand times already by the time anybody reads this article? Has anybody else noted how even the venue’s name seemed to announce party goals every time it was spoken? A united center is literally what I saw in Chicago. The only thing that might bring normie America together harder than the unrehearsed display of love Tim Walz’s son Gus showed for his dad is the near-universal revulsion evinced when the weirdo tried to mock him for it. The 2024 convention was a credible, joyful attempt by Democrats to reclaim ideas long ago hijacked by the right: ideas like family values, patriotism, and … well … “normal.”
In the fight against Trump, J.D. Vance, and the whole Project 2025 gang, it currently looks like the only thing still dividing Democrats is Palestine. Vice President Harris’ near-flawless closing night speech promised a different approach. With its rhetoric about Palestinian self-determination, she also promised to give Israel everything it needs in the meantime.
Activists demanding disinvestment and an arms embargo remain unconvinced and uncommitted. For them, the D-bus is stalled, all they are hearing from the cop up front is fairytales, and the threat of getting off and walking is real. So the big question going into the homestretch of this, the latest most important election of our lifetime: Will the Center hold, or will we elect Nixon? — Chris Davis
Kamala Harris plans to expand access to healthcare. (Photo: Hush Naidoo Jade Photography | Unsplash)
As the November election approaches, the nation again nears a crossroads on healthcare, with candidates diverging on a basic question of equity: Who is to bear the risks and costs of care? For Donald Trump, his congressional allies, and conservative policy analysts, the answer is clear: cut government spending and shift the risks and costs back onto individuals, employers, and states. For Kamala Harris, the priorities move in a strikingly different direction: expand access to healthcare, strengthening the federal government’s role in guaranteeing healthcare for all Americans, no matter what their socioeconomic status may be.
The differences show up most pointedly in the candidates’ positions on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Medicaid. Fourteen years after Congress passed the ACA, providing subsidies that enabled millions of Americans to obtain health insurance, the percentage of uninsured Americans has declined to a historic low of less than eight percent. Vice President Harris has advocated for, and defended, the ACA, and is expected to support the extension of enhanced subsidies, introduced during the pandemic, beyond their expiration date of 2025. These subsidies have made it possible for many people to obtain marketplace coverage.
Donald Trump tried and failed to repeal the ACA in 2017, and since then he has vowed he “would make it much better than it is right now,” though without providing specifics. One likely course of action, however, would be to target the ACA’s protection of individuals against insurance denial because of preexisting health conditions. As president, Trump authorized the expansion of short-term insurance plans as an alternative to the more comprehensive ACA marketplace plans. These short-term plans allowed insurers to bar people from coverage because of preexisting conditions, and to set rates based on their medical histories.
More recently, the Republican Study Committee, a group comprising four-fifths of Republican congressional members and their leadership, released a budget proposal calling — among many other things — for an end to the federal government’s regulation regarding preexisting conditions, and allowing states to decide whether or not to keep the rule.
Medicaid also represents a major difference between the candidates. A joint federal-state program established in 1965 along with Medicare, Medicaid now provides health insurance for almost 75 million low-income Americans. When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in 2014, it included a provision to expand Medicaid coverage to all Americans earning up to 138 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. Forty-one states, including the District of Columbia, adopted the expanded coverage, along with federal matching grants to go with it, and 10 states (primarily Republican-controlled states) rejected it, keeping insurance out of reach for many low-income residents.
As president, Donald Trump approved waivers allowing states to set work requirements in order for people to receive Medicaid, and waiver programs have proved costly and ineffective. The Biden-Harris administration withdrew those waivers, claiming that work requirements do nothing to advance the purpose of Medicaid, which has been to expand access to healthcare.
What should voters make of these differences? One way to begin answering the question is to listen to people closest to the issues. An internist working at a San Francisco public hospital writes of treating an indigent man who requested hospice care rather than undergoing an amputation for a bone infection in his arm, an infection that didn’t respond to antibiotics. The man explained that with an amputated arm, he’d be much more vulnerable to assault on the streets, and thus he opted for hospice — unless he was able to get housing — a goal far out of reach in a city with a critical shortage of available housing.
The man eventually died of sepsis (the physician refers to the cause as “end-stage poverty”), and the internist explains, “ … that illness in our patients isn’t just a biological phenomenon. It’s the manifestation of social inequality in people’s bodies.”
The U.S. spends more money per capita on healthcare than any comparable nation in wealth and size, and yet life expectancy in the nation is lower than that of any peer nation. There are many reasons for this, one certainly having to do with the U.S. being the only advanced nation without universal healthcare for its citizens. Poverty and racism factor significantly as well, with persistent indicators like major racial gaps in maternal and infant mortality. A recent California study found that babies born to the poorest Black mothers have almost twice the mortality rate of the poorest white mothers, and even babies born to the wealthiest Black mothers have a higher mortality rate than the poorest white mothers.
The U.S. has been slowly moving in the direction of other advanced nations, gradually increasing the federal role in guaranteeing healthcare for all. This November’s election will be a referendum of sorts, indicating a continuation of the present direction or a significant reversal of policy. At stake is a choice between leaving individuals more or less to their own devices in a highly unequal society, or recognizing that healthcare — and the eradication of inequity — is a collective responsibility.
Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor, nonviolence, and culture from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (nonviolence studies, English) from the California State University.
CHICAGO — All the president’s men, women, courtiers, and supporters and well-wishers of all stripes were surely attuned to his appearance Monday night at Chicago’s United Center.
It was not Joe Biden’s farewell to public life — he would continue to campaign for the Democratic ticket, he promised — but it was his sayonara song as head of that ticket. For all the pre-planned choruses of “We Love Joe!” and “Thank You, Joe!” emanating from the massive arena crowd, it was impossible not to see the man’s deep regret as he spoke, dry-throated, in anapestically rising cadences, of his achievements and unfinished ventures as president: the post-pandemic recovery act, the lessoning of Big Pharma, the infrastructure initiatives, the re-establishment of NATO solidarity, and all the rest.
“Bittersweet” doesn’t begin to do it.
Nevertheless, the torch was passed, the guard was changed, and Biden’s successor as standard-bearer, Kamala Harris, would make an appearance on stage to hug and embrace and celebrate her predecessor, along with members of Biden’s personal and official families.
The evening, first of a week’s worth to come in the 2024 Democratic National Convention, was replete with snapshots from the party scrapbook, new faces and old ones alike.
There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — “AOC” in the vernacular — wildly applauded for the progressive congresswoman’s spicy personality and her recollections of working-class origins in New York.
There was Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic candidate from 2016, able now to voice rebukes of her conqueror (“We have him on the run now”) via hopes for the new avatar Harris (“Something is happening in America. You can feel it!”)
True Gretch with Tennessee delegation
• That there was a palpable feeling of hope and exhilaration as this convention began was undeniable. It was obvious, too, in the daily morning breakfasts of the Tennessee delegation at Chicago’s quite posh Hyatt Regency.
On Tuesday morning, another of the Democratic Party’s new stars, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (aka “True Gretch,” after the title of her just-published memoir), came into the delegation’s meeting room to deliver an energetic pep talk. She was followed somewhat later by an energetic exhortation from New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who, after being introduced by Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, stood atop a chair and, sans mic, declaimed his largish hopes for 2024.
The two national party figures bracketed remarks from a Tennessee hopeful, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, who hopes to win what is certainly a long-odds contest with the ultra right-wing Republican incumbent U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Who knows? For the moment, all things seem possible for the Democrats, and their mood of optimism seems certain to crest at week’s end when Kam-ala (broad “a” in the accented first syllable) takes the stage for her official acceptance address.
Stayed tuned for next week’s cover story on the Democratic National Convention.
Mikhail Gorbachev in 1992 (Photo: Konstantin Gushcha | Dreamstime)
Look, comrades, I grew up at a time in this country when the thing we kids were taught to fear more than anything else in our little Midwestern lives was COMMUNISM!
Communist Russia — the USSR — was the big, scary enemy, a country led by authoritarian leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who were attempting to take over the world and destroy democracy and the American way of life. They were the commies, the pinkos, the red menace — a nuclear-armed adversary who was also our rival in space, with their cursed Sputnik satellites. The Russians were so bold they even propped up Fidel Castro in a communist state 90 miles away from Miami. Russia, we were told by our teachers and parents, was determined to force everyone in the world to live in a commune and toil under communism, a fate presumably worse than death.
In our schools, we had two kinds of drills: fire drills, in which at the sound of a long bell, every student high-tailed it “single file” down the stairs and out the doors onto the schoolyard lawn, goose-assing and laughing all the way. (If you were lucky, you attended a school that had one of those cool fire-escape slides out a third-story window, which livened up the process.) But the real serious stuff took place during the air-raid drills, where, at the sound of a keening siren, we had to “duck and cover” under our desks, which, as everyone knows, will protect you against nuclear holocaust. Mainly, of course, it just scared the crap out of us and traumatized a couple generations.
This went on through the 1980s, at which point, President Reagan had turned standing up to Russia into performance art (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). It turned out to be a surprisingly effective gambit, or at the worst, Reagan’s timing was spot-on. The Soviet Union’s economy was collapsing during the 1980s, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and lending a measure of stature to Reagan’s latter years in office.
If there was one benefit of this strange, decades-long international game of Russian roulette, it was the fact that we were actually taught what communism is. We learned most of Karl Marx’s greatest one-liners, including the scariest one: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” which we Americans were taught to see as the mantra of a system that destroyed ambition and the drive to succeed that American capitalism was built upon. I think that’s simplistic, but it’s also mostly true. Living on the dole is living on the dole. All communism does is narrow economic opportunity to oligarchs. Everyone else? Pass the beans and borscht and keep your head down, comrade.
The fact is that communism has proven to be a horrible system of government, one that concentrates power under an authoritarian rule, censors books and newspapers, offers only rudimentary education for the poor, discriminates on the basis of gender and race, and controls healthcare. In communist countries, posters of the authoritarian Dear Leader are plastered on every open space. Flags with his image are flown in every public square.
That’s why it seems so absurd to me to hear MAGA types — and Donald Trump himself — call Kamala Harris and Democrats “communists.” It sounds like you’re being tough when you call someone a communist, but they literally appear to have no idea what a communist is.
Think of the two major American political parties: When it comes to a cult of personality, one that features posters of Dear Leader, flags, religious iconography, clothes, and even tattoos, which party comes to mind? Which party has come out in support of banning books? Which party wants to give public tax dollars to private schools? Which party openly demonizes LGBTQ Americans and people of color? Which party wants to centralize power and give it to an authoritarian who will “be a dictator on day one”? Which party wants to control the healthcare decisions of the country’s females? Which party literally rejected democracy in 2020?
If your answer to those questions is anything other than the Republican Party, you’ve gone down into a scary rabbit hole, a place where the light of the obvious won’t penetrate. It’s like you’re in a permanent duck-and-cover drill.
Hate to be the bearer of, er, news, good, bad, and insane. (Photo: Jillian | Adobe Stock)
I awoke early Monday morning, made a cup of espresso from the fancy machine gifted to me from my son last Christmas, and sat on the deck to watch the hummingbirds. Well, that, and scroll through the news on my phone. It was quite the news day already, even at 7:30 a.m.
In Florida, Hurricane Debby was dumping massive rains on that perennially dumped-on state. Flooding would soon ensue. In the Middle East, the winds of war seemed to be heating to a fever pitch, with Iran, Hezbollah, Israel, and Hamas all making threats and seemingly prepping for attacks. In the UK, there were riots in the streets from far-right protestors. A hotel was burned. In Paris at the Olympics, there were photo-finishes, a female boxer accused of being male, and lots of U.S. swimming medals. Kamala Harris was about to name her veep candidate. Donald Trump attacked Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp 12 times in an Atlanta stump speech. And on Wall Street, stocks appeared to be headed lower as a bear market loomed on news that the U.S. economy seemed to be cooling.
Pshew, what a start to the week, I thought. But wait, there was more. … Speaking of bears: Erstwhile presidential candidate, vax truther, and brain-wormer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a videotape of himself telling a tale about dumping a dead bear cub and a bicycle in New York’s Central Park after leaving Peter Luger Steak House one night. And as if that itself weren’t strange enough, the kicker was that he was telling this bizarre story at Roseanne Barr’s house. What? Is this real life?
As one person wrote on X:
Kristi Noem — “Let me tell you about my animal killings.”
RFK Jr. — “Here, hold my bear.”
Kennedy said he released the tape to “get ahead” of a New Yorker story that was about to recount the bear saga, which had been a mystery since 2014, when it was first reported in the media that two women had found a dead bear cub under a bicycle in Central Park.
In Kennedy’s version, via the video (which also featured Roseanne wandering around and occasionally looking at Kennedy as though he were nuts), he’d found the bear dead beside the road in upstate New York and put it in his car, intending to skin it and eat it. Yes, he said that. He then went to dinner at the aforementioned famous steak house, then realized he had to catch a plane and didn’t want to leave the bear in his car, so, as one does, he drove to Central Park and dumped it on a trail, underneath his bicycle, trying to make it look like the bear had been killed by a cyclist.
I don’t know about you, but this episode makes me think RFK Jr. just might be a tad, well, insane. But maybe that’s just me. At any rate, by the time you read this, the bear tale will no doubt be public fodder. But damn, it was a heckuva way to start my work week.
Also in the news were several stories about the increasing use — and misuse — of AI (artificial intelligence). A Trump campaign surrogate put out a photo of their candidate surrounded by Black women “supporters” who all looked suspiciously alike and who all had six fingers on every visible hand. When AI learns how to recreate human hands accurately, we’ll really be in trouble. But until then, I don’t trust it.
Here’s another example of why I don’t trust it: I decided to use Meta’s AI (now easily accessible in your friendly Facebook Messenger app), to research, well, myself. I prompted it thusly: Who is Bruce VanWyngarden? It responded with: “Bruce VanWyngarden is a notable figure in Memphis, Tennessee. As the editor of the Memphis Flyer, he has been a prominent voice in local journalism, covering news, politics, and culture. He has written two books, including Everything That’s True (2021). Additionally, his work as a musician and lead singer of The Gun Club has made him a respected figure in the music scene.”
What? I was lead singer of an infamous post-punk L.A. band? Who knew? I’d totally forgotten that part of my life. Dang. Well, at least, AI didn’t dig up that embarrassing armadillo incident. Pshew.
