Wednesday: Hills Have Eyes

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Hills have eyes, the hills have eyes
Who are you to judge, who are you to judge?
Hide your lies, girl, hide your lies
Only you to trust, only you

— excerpt, The Hills by The Weeknd

That tune’s NSFW, by the way, as is much of The Weeknd’s oeuvre.

Today’s theme is stuff to watch — things that aren’t quite done, may have long-term impact, or don’t make sense just yet.

U.S. Senate gun control filibuster
Right now I’m keeping an eye on the filibuster under way, now 13-plus hours in progress on the Senate floor, begun by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) to support legislation for universal background checks and barring firearms sales to suspected terrorists. As of 11:15 p.m. EDT, 40 Senators had already spoken in participation; there were only two Republicans (Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Ben Sasse of Nebraska) and one Independent (Angus King of Maine) who joined Democrats so far. The Brady Campaign has been taking calls from constituents in support of the filibuster at (855) 331-8593 and redirecting calls to senators’ voicemail so that the Senate can hear the public’s demand for gun control.

If you want to watch the filibuster, you can catch it on cable at CSPAN-2 or this link.

I’m also keeping an eye on these issues:

Next on Net Neutrality
A rare bright spot over the last week is the FCC’s win over ISPs in US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; you can bet this fight isn’t over, though the court found the FCC could regulate ISPs as it does common carriers. Worth brushing up on net neutrality, given Comcast’s support of candidate Trump by way of NBC coverage both as candidate and reality TV personality. Comcast could well parlay its support into demands for an end to net neutrality should Trump win the White House.

Brexit bonking bankers
Polling flipped over the last two weeks from Remain to Leave. Bankers are beginning to worry and are scheduling a very long night when polls close next week.

Microsoft and LinkedIn merger
Technology folks can’t make any sense out of this prospective marriage, which must yet be approved by the feds. I can’t make any sense out of it, either, given the losses several of LinkedIn’s largest investors must eat — they’re also Microsoft investors, which means the money merely changes pockets without actually increasing. The deal is massive in terms of cost, dwarfing previous acquisitions by Microsoft.

So why do this deal, apart from the obvious access to technology decisionmakers with high levels of discretionary income? Wouldn’t it simply be cheaper to buy ad space on LinkedIn or even invest a smaller amount rather than acquire the entire business?

Or has Microsoft changed its overall business model — does it intend to sell something other than software once it has closed the LinkedIn deal?

All I know is that I’m leaving LinkedIn as soon as the feds approve the deal. I don’t want Microsoft to have any more of my time and money than they have right now, and I’m sick of their highly intrusive habits. Imagine the persistent nagging of Microsoft combined with the icky annoyance of LinkedIn reminders, like ones I still get about long-deceased acquaintances. Clippy the Undead, nagging me about software updates…Gah.

Volatile Venezuela
Clearly candidate Trump is watching Venezuela closely, though I wonder if he would have noticed without being included in security briefings. With the latest El Nino now ended, the weather may change bringing relief from drought if not from political insecurity and volatility due to the collapse of oil prices over the last several years. Interesting op-ed on the violence in Venezuela suggests a new perspective must be considered: the violence suggests the end of the state apparatus.

Mongolia’s addresses
The country is migrating physical addresses to a three-word phrase to accommodate a spread-out nomadic population in country with few roads and little infrastructure. In some ways, this mirrors virtual addresses used in networked environments. Is this a model for other countries in the near future?

Zika virus and blood supply safety
Hadn’t even thought of this — if Zika can be transmitted by sex, it’s certainly transmitted by other bodily fluids like blood. We need to think about blood supply safety, especially once the virus is spread by domestic mosquitoes. Pregnant women, and persons intending to become parents within months of receiving a transfusion should not receive Zika-contaminated blood.

What are you watching?

Tuesday: Going Alone

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I’ve been so damned angry I’ve had difficulty wrapping words around what I want to say. It’s still Tuesday somewhere, so I’ll grit this out.

Assault weapons should be banned for sale to civilians.

Spare me the crap about hunters and taking their guns. My freezer contains 25 to 100 pounds of venison at any time. This household lives off the results of hunting and respects the power of firearms. None of this meat required an assault weapon.

If an assault weapon had been used, it would have been a waste of a deer tag. There’d be no meat left.

The embedded video above shows the damage hunting ammo does at close range — approximately 15-20 feet — on meat. The next video shows the damage #4 and #8 birdshot can do at short range, even through multiple layers of denim and drywall. Imagine what an assault weapon would do to flesh at similar range.

Better yet, listen to what a combat vet says about assault weapons.

There’s nothing in the Second Amendment to suggest a prohibition on certain weapons is wrong; if anything, the framing of a ‘well regulated militia’ suggests limitations are in order.

There’s also nothing in the Second Amendment to suggest that gun manufacturers have an absolute right to an unrestrained business model, or to profits at the expense of the public’s general welfare.

Nor does the Second Amendment say a damned thing about catering to ‘gun enthusiasts’ who want guns for ‘pleasure’. A ‘well regulated militia’ doesn’t possess guns but as necessary for the ‘security of a free state’, not personal enjoyment.

And both embedded videos embedded make a bloody good case that arguments about assault weapons being necessary to stop a home invasion are trash. Birdshot at close range can do one hell of a lot of damage, as do 00 buckshot and a 1-oz slug.

Congress — more specifically, the GOP — needs to strap on its spine and draw the line on assault weapons. How many more dead Americans is it going to take before Congress clues in the terrorist threat is already here? It’s domestic, and it’s better armed than the police because GOP-led Congress is as weak as the GOP is against Trump.

Spare the empty moments of silence and prayers which might as well be to Moloch after another human sacrifice. Such fail at protecting the American public.

Speaking of which…

Information Security Fail

  • USAF database with records on ~100,000 investigations ‘lost’ (Defense One) — This is such bullshit, I can’t even…why is a CONTRACTOR, which may be the subject of any one of the 100K investigations, hosting and managing a database like this? What a massive conflict of interest. The database included constituent and congressional inquiries. Don’t even get me started on the fact this system relied on Microsoft Internet Explorer. Where have we seen this kind of massive loss of data including failed backups before? Hardly a surprise the data covers the period including most of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as the construction of the F-35. Somebody better lose their job for this crap, and there’d better be a respectable investigation instead of the usual fluffery hiding billions of lost dollars.
  • DNC database infiltrated by the Russians (WaPo) — DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz needs to be walked out the door for this bullshit, along with responsible IT management. As if anyone able to sit up and take nourishment couldn’t see the DNC computer systems would be a target for cybercrime and cyberwarfare. No excuses for this during the run-up to a general election season, especially when her favorite candidate is already floundering because of information security failures during her tenure as Secretary of State. This bit:

    The depth of the penetration reflects the skill and determination of the United States’ top cyber adversary as Russia goes after strategic targets, from the White House and State Department to political campaign organizations.

    Total blowjob for access. If the hackers got in by spearphishing as suggested in the article, there’s no finesse required. Just poorly trained/educated users and no firewall between email and database. The only thing that surprises me about this is that ransomware wasn’t deployed. Imagine it: a major U.S. political party ground to a halt by spearphish-delivered ransomware.

  • University of Calgary paid CDN$20K after ransomware attack (Calgary Herald) — First heard about this attack the end of May. Looks like the school had no choice but to offer the bitcoin equivalent of $20K to release their systems, which says a lot about backup systems and rebuild cost. Considering the broad range of users at universities and widely different levels of experience and training, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more ransomware attacks on schools. Though monetarily they’re less appetizing than other targets, and may have more resources to deal with the threat if they have a strong IS/IS program.
  • Chinese IBM employee arrested for trade secret theft (Reuters) — The indictment (pdf) says the now-former IBM employee stole proprietary software related to hyperscale storage clusters, or what most consumers would know as ‘cloud storage’. This is a technology segment in which the U.S. still has considerable clout in terms of marketshare, and in terms of global economic impact based on its use. Reporting on this indictment has been vague, referring to the technology at the heart of this case as ‘networking software’. It’s more complex than that; the proprietary software underpins storage and retrieval of data across networked large storage devices. (Hi blueba. Just checking to see if you missed me. Can’t let the Russians have all the fun.)

Basta. Enough. Let’s hope Wednesday is kinder than the last handful of days have been.

AQ to CIA: You Are the Empire, and We Are Luke and Han

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I loathed Star Wars, The Force Awakens. Loathed it.

I hated it so much I made myself go back and watch 1 through 6 again, to try to understand what even Jar Jar Binks (in my admittedly lonely opinion, though I urge you to go back and watch those early ones again) had on Disney’s creation. Along the way, in addition to realizing that The Empire never thought to fix the vulnerability that allowed R2D2 to hack each new-and-improved Death Star instantaneously, I realized The Force Awakens should have, instead of replaying the same Star Wars story over again, talked about what went wrong with the Rebel Alliance, which after all shouldn’t have remained the rebels for long. Why couldn’t, didn’t, our noble heroes set up a sound society to replace The Empire? Instead, somehow, The Empire gets rebooted once again, without dealing with the fact that The Empire this time should have been the rebels in charge.

I realized, as I was watching over the movies again, how for some of the same time the US was celebrating Luke and Han on the wide screen, we were secretly backing our own group of theocratic rebels in the desert as they fought an evil empire (I assume our Hollywood President enjoyed the parallel). I’m the generation of Star Wars. I was raised believing in our scrappy victory over Evil. But it’s all too clear, now, that we’re not the rebels, if we ever were. The theocratic rebels we helped blow up a Death Star in 1977 went on to blow up our Death Star, and the endless series of sequels against these rebels is bleeding us dry.

The Force Awakens didn’t deal with the fact that the US has become (if it wasn’t already, in 1977) The Empire; the movie shied away from contemplating that fact.

Of course, that made the observation from this video — from an al Qaeda fighter (presumably captured) — all the more striking to me.

An al Qaeda fighter made a point once in a debriefing. He said, all these movies that America makes, like Independence Day and Hunger Games and Star Wars, they’re all about a small scrappy band of rebels who will do anything in their power with the limited resources available to them to expel an outside, technologically advanced invader. And what you don’t realize, he said, is that to us, the rest of the world, you are The Empire, and we are Luke and Han. You are the aliens and we are Will Smith.

Hollywood is still making movies that cover up this fact.

But it’s not fooling much of the rest of the world.

Update: As happened with Syed Rizwan Farook, the tabloid press managed to get into the culprit’s home. Both his 3-year old kid’s bedroom and the bathroom are completed decked out in Star Wars gear.

Monday: Bueller? Bueller?

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It’s Monday in more than one way. Monday has become synonymous with the weekly return to the rat race of school and work, the bruising grind of life. It’s the blues after a relaxing weekend, but even worse after a horrific weekend like the one we just left. But it also means a new day, a chance for improved direction assuming we note well where we’ve been and mark well where we want to go.

This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of writer/director John Hughes’ movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This film seems like a frothy bit of fun after yesterday’s gun-riddled hell chased by corporate-owned electeds’ hypocrisy. Yet it’s a really important work if one wants to know what’s going on in the heads of so many Americans who continue to support the death-dealing Congresspersons who refuse to ban assault rifles.

Ferris Bueller’s family is a fictional snapshot of white middle-class suburbia in the mid-1980s. Assuming the main character Ferris and his closest friends are 17 or 18 years old in 1986 (when this film was released), they’d be 47-48 years old now, members of Generation X.

Look at this next segment, which follows the first one above. Take careful note of the dialog. While Ferris is an idealized middle-class suburban white teen, much of this dialog reflects the thinking of real teens of that era. This is why Hughes’ movies remain so popular today; they reflected the audience back at themselves in a way that was non-confrontational while poking fun at their culture.

Over time, this movie was more than a mirror of culture. Ben Stein, who played the deadpan economics instructor, parlayed his increased profile to become a proponent of neoconservative socioeconomics as well as a TV game show host. What better way to gain ready access to the public’s mind than as comic relief. The reaction to Stein’s character teaching economics legitimized the general public’s reaction to econ — it’s just boring and repetitive filler, no need to pay close attention.

Ferris’ fluffy wisecrack about European socialism and fascist anarchism takes on a more ominous perspective thinking of former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s snark about “Old Europe,” or the willful blindness of tuned-out whites towards fascism’s rise in the west over the last three decades. It’s just the Donald they support in throwing over the GOP, not an -ism, right?

Which came first — the Bueller family’s materialism and its cultural validation by this film, or the materialism Hughes and his script depict? It’s difficult to separate them over the distance of 30 years. Many white straight suburban middle-class men in their 40s identified with Ferris and have now become leaders of business and government. They’re either wealthy enough (read: blessed/cursed by materialism) to see the world as Ferris did, not as it is in actuality.

The most important line of the film, its tag line, demanded action:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

And yet, did any character in this film truly look around? As much as I appreciate Hughes, he built an incredibly homogeneous world — it’s clean, safe, white 90% of the time, males have 80% or more of the dialog, and there’s no doubt that these suburbanites will succeed even if it means they don’t get to go to the school they want, exactly when they expect to do so. What exactly would these characters see if they did as bid? Departures from homogeneity are only opportunities for a laugh — like the parking tower attendants (who aren’t white) who “borrow” Mr. Frye’s car, or the ostensibly gay maitre’d whose behavior is treated as an annoyance to be blown off, or ‘Boy In The Police Station’ in trouble because of drugs (played by real-life drug abuser Charlie Sheen) who counsels Jeannie Bueller to relax.

Jeannie’s anger and frustration at the unfair double standard between her life and her older brother’s is brushed off. The last person from whom anyone should take advice basically tells her to chillax and focus on herself, to stop looking like a whore. And she validates his advice by getting all giggly because of his attention. This is feminism in the late 1980s, in the eyes of a white male — what has this kind of projection done, 30 years later, to Generation X women and their daughters?

What has it done to all of us to laugh off Bueller’s rule-evading lifestyle? What would that character end up doing as an adult — did he end up in finance like his dad or real estate like his mom, selling subprime home mortgages to individuals or bundled in tranches, disregarding what the fallout might be to everyone else, laughing it off as good fun because he finally got his second BMW/Porsche/Hummer?

In retrospect, Bueller’s vanilla Chicago suburb is shocking, distressing to look at now. Has this same image also become embedded in the minds of Gen X men who run corporations and government? Does it shape even the mixed-race former senator from Illinois now in the White House who is only slightly older than the Gen X folks impacted most by this film?

Here we are, decades later, in a world now owned and shaped by the best-of-breed Gen X. They’re traditionalists and work addicted compared to Baby Boomers and Millennials. Thanks to them in no small part, we’ve been foreclosed upon, shot at, marginalized, told to suck-it-up-comform-comply-because-Freedom-and-the-American-Capitalist-Free-Market-Way-uber-alles. Images of a safe suburban teenhood have been replaced with quarter-after-quarter superhero films featuring GUI-based homogeneous spandex-covered male archetypes protecting the American Way, because the Gen X white men running today’s film studios can’t even handle the risk of contemporary suburbia on the screen.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

As much fun as Hughes’ Bueller has been, he represents a narrow, distorted perspective from the rear-view mirror. His innocuous 1980s Midwest suburb was at best a wish, when the truth is Monday morning in street in front of Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Take a look around. Really, where’s Bueller now?

Friday: Ball and Chain

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This end-of-the-work-week observation is a little different. I’ve posted some not-jazz jazz for your listening pleasure. This piece called Ball and Chain is performed by a loosely joined group of people who worked on development of a subgenre of jazz during the 1990s. It’s called M-base — short for “macro-basic array of structured extemporization” — which relies on improvisation along with non-European elements as jazz does. But its artists’ deliberation in composition combined with a more contemporary flare set this style of music apart from other jazz.

Sample a couple more pieces with a little extra estrogen — Cassandra Wilson’s vocals in You Don’t Know What Love Is, and Geri Allen’s keyboarding here with Esperanza Spalding and Terri Lyne Carrington performing Unconditional Love at a recent Jazz in Marciac festival. Wilson and Allen have both been members of the M-base collective, along with Steve Coleman, Robin Eubanks, Graham Haynes, and Greg Osby. I recommend searching out each of those folks in YouTube to explore their continuation of M-base in their work.

That’s enough to get you through your Friday evening nightcap. You’ll probably need one after this stuff.

Volkswagen’s Dieselgate

Living in a Digital World

  • Twitter says it wasn’t hacked after millions of users’ account data appears online (Bloomberg) — Hey, listen up, boneheads complaining about your Twitter account being locked: 1) Change your password periodically (like every 12 weeks) and 2) DON’T USE THE SAME PASSWORD ON MORE THAN ONE ACCOUNT. Looks like some folks haven’t learned that once one account is breached, more are at risk if they use the same password or a previous iteration from another account. ~smh~ It would take very little to create a database of breached addresses from multiple platforms and compare them for same passwords. If, for example, [123456PW] is used on two known accounts, why wouldn’t a hacker try that same password on other accounts attached to the same email address?
  • Oklahoma state police bought debit card scanning devices (KGOU) — They’re not merely reading account data if they pull you over and take your card to scan for information. They may confiscate any funds attached to the card, too, under civil forfeiture. This is ripe for abuse and overreach, given poor past legal precedent. Why is a magnetic strip any different than your wallet?

Economics of a different kind

  • Economics don’t match reality, and the root of the problem is academic (BloombergView) — Each of “coffee house macro,” finance macro, Fed macro, and academic macroeconomics are grossly out of sync with reality. But the root of this distortion is the one thing they all have in common: their origin in academic economics. Yeah — academia has become little more than an indoctrination factory for the same flawed concepts, while reducing any arguments against the current “free market uber alles” thought regime.
  • Adbusters isn’t waiting for academia; they’re ready to Battle for the Soul of Economics (kickitover.org) — Check it, social media warfare has begun.

That’s a wrap on this week. I’m fixing myself a stiff belt and shuffling off to bed. Catch you Monday, the Fates willing and the creek not rising due to climate change.

Wednesday: Graduate

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To the bastard talking down to me
Your whipping boy calamity
Cross your fingers
I’m going to knock it all down
Can I graduate

— excerpt, Graduate by Third Eye Blind

Well. That took a lot longer and was a much bigger pain in the rear than I expected. I’ve earned another notch in my belt, the proud parent of yet another high school graduate who left school this past week with less to look forward to than his parents did. Observation of this right of passage consisted of too many people crammed into too-small venues intent on traditional American celebratory excess.

I wonder yet days later if a particular family member’s vocal chords will ever recover from their screaming joy.

Crossing my fingers this kid can knock it all down when he next graduates.

Tick-tock
Meanwhile, I’m counting the days…only 87 days until my kid starts college.

And only 36 days left for the 114th Congress to work in D.C. before the general election, if I’ve counted correctly from the House majority leader’s calendar (pdf).

36 days — not counting today — to fix the Flint Water Crisis. Check my math, maybe I’m off a few days, but that’s not a lot of time give or take a few days. Flint residents are still experiencing problems with their water, which will  only be fully resolved when the damaged pipes are completely replaced.

Will this Congress shunt the responsibility off to the 115th? Or will they buck up and do their job by people most in need? Hey, novel idea here, since most of the time between now and election day will be spent in district — for the House members, this means campaigning. Why don’t you folks actually fix the problem ASAP and then tell your constituents what a great job you’ve done while you’re on the campaign trail?

Tick-tock.

American exceptionalism and EU air
Holy cats. Air pollution in the EU was responsible for 400,000 premature deaths — in 2010 alone.

I can’t wrap my head around that number. That’s massive. I can’t imagine how much money is spent on health care for the people who die, let alone the even larger number of people who are merely sick from air pollution. And yet the EU member states are quibbling over how and when to implement new regulations to clean their air.

If you recall the video in which two citizen investigators discussed both VW’s corporate infrastructure and the emissions controls defeat system, you know that EU automakers don’t fear EU regulators. Their legal system is lax, and they don’t have an effective overarching federal system to backstop the laws of individual member states. The fines assess for violations are a pittance to nonexistent in some EU states. You just know VW’s bean counters are cost averaging the fines across all the vehicles they’ve sold.

What worked to force the EU and member states to take real action is the U.S. — both its emissions standards at state and federal level and its laws with regard to fraud have forced the EU to snap out of its complacency and reexamine its own emissions standards and enforcement. There’s your American exceptionalism (even if contemporary GOP thwarts environmental law every chance it gets, being fossil fuel’s yappy little attack dog).

But the current dithering and weaseling by some EU states continue in spite of ridiculously high mortality rates and legal costs cutting into the profitability of businesses like VW. It may take an even firmer hand here in the U.S., or we’ll see more EU backsliding impacting us directly.

VW got away with selling those cheating passenger diesel cars in EU and the U.S.; as long as it took for a tiny U.S.-based research group to discover the cheat, what’s to keep VW (or another EU-based automaker) from trying to slip another model under our radar? We know the EU won’t catch it first. Put the screws to them now to discourage any further attempts. They’ve already killed or sickened more than enough of our own citizens because they weren’t caught and punished at home.

Odd lots
No theme here, just interesting things swept into my feed.

Whew. That’s enough to get me over the hump today. Catch you tomorrow!

Wednesday: Looking Back

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Looking back over my deeds
I can see signs a wise man heeds
And if I just had the chance
I’d never make that same mistake again

— excerpt, Looking Back by Nat King Cole (c. 1958)

Sorry this is so late. Still have family here from out of town. Usual familial circus continues.

Today also happens to mark the fifth month I’ve been posting these Monday-Friday roundups. It’s time to take a look back at this effort. Have they been worthwhile? Are we getting anything out of them?

I started in part to force myself to write more every day, and I’ve achieved that. But it’s come at the expense of other writing; I need to do something different going forward to ensure I make my other personal writing goals.

I also started in part to return to political content, if not electoral politics. After five years away, it was time to come back; politics were why I started blogging fourteen years ago, after all, and the political is still a personal driver.

What I didn’t expect was how much more reading I would do every day. If I read 50K words a day before I started regular weekday posts, I read nearly 100K now, and across a breadth of subjects I might not have touched last year. This has been very helpful during discussions I’ve had with my young adult children, who are now starting and leaving college, and entering the workforce. What does the short- and long-term future look like based on current trends? But this much reading also exacts a price in terms of time.

These posts were also intended to offer an open thread for discussion. There’ve been a few choice nuggets along the way in the comments, like harpie’s research into the Flint Water Crisis.

When looking back again in another handful of months or a year or two, I wonder what the most important topic was out of these roundup posts so far? Plenty of food for thought and discussion.

Before I go back to taming lions and taking the occasional turn driving the clown car, I want to remind you there’s a backup site in case this one isn’t available. There’s some tinkering going on backend here; there’s a redesigned site coming in the very near future. Bookmark this: Emptywheel Alternate Site

Can’t promise comments there will be monitored as closely as they are here, but it’s an alternate place to catch our content if you have problems here at the main page. Catch you later!

Tuesday Morning: Family

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Don’t read anything into this music video. It’s the only one I could think with family as the theme.

Which is why I have to bail on you folks today: family. My folks are in town and are now subsuming the entire day here. I’ll try to have a normal post tomorrow, but no guarantees since the folks are here through Thursday. And you surely know how it works when family arrives from out of state — anything can happen.

Speaking of family, this post is worth some discussion:

The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence (QZ) — Wow. I wonder how this fits into Piketty’s work on inequality?

You can see this at work elsewhere across Europe; they protected the wealthy with peerage and pulled them into royalty.

Like the marriage this past week of Lady Charlotte Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s daughter, to Alejandro Santo Domingo, a Colombian investment banker.

Not just any banker; a billionaire already highly connected and swimming up to his ears in more billions from your beer consumption.

Two hundred years ago this would have been unthinkable, a scandal; peers did not wed the trade class. Apparently wars and the expensive amusements of the idle rich have a way of upending class barriers when capital accrues on the other side of the tracks.

Side note: Fear of Zika kept attendees away from the couple’s engagement party this February. If big money is afraid of Zika, why aren’t we seeing more investment in addressing prevention, infection control, vaccine, and therapy?

I guess not every family matters. Open thread as usual, play nicely!

Monday Morning: Diasporic

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Hope you’re having a pleasant holiday. I feel sorry for many East Coast folks who are wet due to Tropical Depression Bonnie today. We’ve got clear skies, a light breeze out of the northwest and 80F degrees here, which seems odd for Memorial Day in the Great Lakes State.

The pleasantness heightens the contrast of this embedded short film, Robots of Brixton by Kibwe Tavares and FactoryFifteen. It’s a nice example of Afrofuturism, this one blending science fiction, fantasy, and historical nonfiction from perspective of the African diaspora. We are treating technology as we do humans of color — as disposable inconveniences, seeing their frustration as nuisance rather than a angry plea for deeper consideration.

I’ll let you imagine the things I typed and deleted here about the future. That is the entire exercise of futurism — imagining what could be, will be, should be — and it’s not limited to nor should it be defined by the dominant culture. What do you imagine?

And what did they imagine, the ones we memorialize today? Did the future fail, meet, or exceed their expectations?

Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, and American Exceptionalism

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Back when Dick Cheney was being hailed for calling out Donald Trump’s racism, I noted one aspect of that radio interview that largely escaped notice: his embrace of the myth that the American continent was empty when his Puritan ancestors got here.

Cheney didn’t stop there. He then emphasized that one of his ancestors arrived as a religious refugee, a Puritan. “A lot of people, my ancestors got here, because they were Puritans.” Cheney suggested, then, that the place was empty when William Cheney arrived in the 17th century. “There wasn’t anybody here, then, when they came.”

There has been little recognition that, in speaking out against the ban on all Muslims, Cheney either unintentionally or intentionally propagated another racist myth, that there “wasn’t anybody here” when the Puritans came.

It’s unclear whether Cheney meant there was no formal state to exclude the Puritan refugees, or whether he really meant — which is what it sounds like — that the continent was empty in the 17th century.

But it seems like a very subtle dog whistle, the kind Republicans used to limit themselves to, suggesting that it is OK for white men to colonize a previously occupied space, even while espousing a kind of tolerance for what we would recognize as religion. By claiming “there wasn’t anybody here” when colonists first came to America, Cheney normalizes conquest, the same kind of conquest he demanded in the Middle East a decade ago, which has so badly exacerbated extremism and continued to make us insecure.

The degree to which Cheney’s perpetuation of that “empty America” myth went largely unnoticed is worth remembering as you read this Pat Buchanan piece, which complains that middle aged whites are killing themselves because their children are learning that America wasn’t actually empty.

A lost generation is growing up all around us.

In the popular culture of the ’40s and ’50s, white men were role models. They were the detectives and cops who ran down gangsters and the heroes who won World War II on the battlefields of Europe and in the islands of the Pacific.

They were doctors, journalists, lawyers, architects and clergy. White males were our skilled workers and craftsmen — carpenters, painters, plumbers, bricklayers, machinists, mechanics.

They were the Founding Fathers, Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, and the statesmen, Webster, Clay and Calhoun.

[snip]

The world has been turned upside-down for white children. In our schools the history books have been rewritten and old heroes blotted out, as their statues are taken down and their flags are put away.

Children are being taught that America was “discovered” by genocidal white racists, who murdered the native peoples of color, enslaved Africans to do the labor they refused to do, then went out and brutalized and colonized indigenous peoples all over the world.

In Hollywood films and TV shows, working-class white males are regularly portrayed as what was once disparaged as “white trash.”

Unlike Cheney’s embrace of the empty America myth, Buchanan’s is (rightly) getting a lot of attention. I obviously don’t endorse his views, but I do think they explain the strength of Trump. Buchanan not only talks about declining economic prospects of white working class men, the relatively improved fortunes of people of color, but especially about the plight of white men losing their myths of superiority, losing the myth that white men made this country and led the world without the often-coerced labor and deaths of lots of brown people.

Trump’s lies, Buchanan suggests, permit these white men to believe their myth again, the myth of white American exceptionalism.

Here’s the thing. A lot of people are linking Buchanan’s post are pointing just to those far right nutjobs whose enthusiasm has fueled Trump’s rise this year.

But — as the example of Dick Cheney perpetuating the very same myths, even while criticizing Trump’s overt racism — that underlying myth extends well beyond the far right nutjobs, well into mainstream Republican and even Democratic ideology.

America has a Donald Trump problem — one that its diversity will probably defeat, at least in the short term. But underlying that Donald Trump problem is a desperate insistence on clinging to the myth of American exceptionalism, with its more offensive parts even embraced in the mainstream. For the sake of the white men who’ve relied on those myths for their sense of dignity, but also to prevent future Trumps, it is time to start replacing that exceptionalist myth with something else.