American Dolchstoss: Pimping the Struggle in Trump’s America

American Dolchstoss

American Dolchstoss: Pimping the Struggle in Trump’s America

By Shawn Hamilton July 20, 2017

[This post originally appeared in Longreads.] When I was about 7 or 8 I had my first serious conversation with my mother about the future: what I wanted to be; how I wanted to get there; how things really “were.” The word “were” in this context was probably my first paradox. Things that “were” were infinitely complex, yet simple. They were understood with or without understanding. You had to know how things “were” before they made themselves known, or you would regret having made the acquaintance. There were jobs that were “gone” as she described it. Jobs that paid well right out of high school were “gone.” Jobs with security were “gone.” Before those jobs had “gone,” they had been scarce for black folks in her experience anyway, but now they were accessible in theory but nonexistent in reality. Now the door that would have been closed because of Jim…

Gun Violence

Collateral Damage – The Prototype Lee H. Oswald

By Shawn Hamilton March 9, 2017

[This video originally appeared on Huffington Post] Episode 1 – The Prototype 1963 The first episode dissects a shooting that managed to be both the crime of the century and a typical act of gun violence. It tracks both the wanderings and escalating violence of a man who went my the alias Alek Hidell, and the political calculations that led to this very dysfunctional man having very functional – and cheap – weapons. Hidell was a man of reinventions – changing occupations, homes, and identities at will – become more lethal at each iteration. He attempted to assassinate a right wing agitator and future Presidential named Major General Edwin Walker, but failed then practiced. He plotted the death of then former Vice President Richard Nixon, but abandoned the plot. He traveled and regrouped. The rifle that Hidell used – the Mannlicher Carcano – was also well traveled. It began as…

Essays

The Birth of Fuckery: Fuckery in Motion

By Shawn Hamilton February 13, 2017

In his first few days in office Trump and several members of his team attacked the media for underestimating the size of the crowd that attended the Inauguration. Trump argued that, “I turn on the networks, and they show an empty field. I’m like, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people.” This could have been labeled just another off-the-cuff remark that has endeared Trump to political-incorrectness-fundamentalists, but later that day the baton was passed to his Press Secretary Sean Spicer who expanded on Trump’s argument claiming that, not only had Trump’s crowds and viewership been larger than the media reported, but that it had been “the largest crowd ever to witness an Inauguration”. Ever. The largest crowd ever. With her eye on the finish line, Trump’s Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway took the baton and…

Essays

The Birth of Fuckery: How to think about Donald Trump’s lies…

By Shawn Hamilton January 28, 2017

[This article originally appeared on Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fuckery-donald-trump-lies_us_588126a8e4b096b4a230a23f?fx74o5hg6bf6tuik9] In his 1987 comedy film, “Raw,” Eddie Murphy jokes about an argument with fellow comedian Bill Cosby about Murphy’s use of profanity. According to Murphy, Cosby’s son Ennis watched Murphy’s stand-up special and told his dad of Murphy’s foul language. Ennis was a fan; Cosby was not. Being an elder statesman in business, Cosby called Murphy to express his outrage at Murphy’s cursing ― what Cosby called, in Murphy’s elaborate recounting of it, “filth, flarn, filth, flarn filth!” Eddie Murphy was offended. He had managed to “put some jokes between the curses” he argued. No audience would pay for a “curse show,” where a comedian walks out on stage, drops some profanity, grabs his crotch, then collects a check. To focus on Murphy’s foul language was to miss his command of the craft and the relationship a comedian cultivates with the audience, he…

Current Events

Published Posts…

By Shawn Hamilton April 15, 2015

I announced this a few weeks ago on Facebook and Twitter and a few other places, but not here. I was recently published in the Baffler and Salon.com. Here’s a link to my piece in the Baffler: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/freedom-fries/ Here’s a link to my piece in Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/07/march_madness_and_the_ncaa_purity_lie_how_the_billion_dollar_basketball_industrial_complex_blinds_us_to_our_biggest_flaws/ I wish I could think of a cooler way of incorporating this into my blog, but this is it. – Shawn

Essays

Invisible Men

By Shawn Hamilton March 29, 2015

[This article originally appears on the Society for US Intellectual History blog http://s-usih.org/2015/02/invisible-men.html.] In his seminal works – Shadow and Act and Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison created two metaphors that speak to one of America’s great dilemmas regarding African Americans: how do Americans reconcile their beliefs in ‘democracy’ with certain ‘anti-democratic’ practices? The first appears in Shadow and Act, a book of essays, in which Ellison describes the African American as a Giant upon whom all of American history ‘unfolds’, a ‘human natural resource’ that must be restrained to preserve national power and stereotyped to preserve national innocence.[1] The second metaphor, the ‘battle royal’, appears in an earlier work The Invisible Man which explores what happens when the metaphorical giant attempts to break the chains and shape its destiny.[2] While both metaphors spoke explicitly to slavery and Jim Crow, they echo today in a variety of American institutions, the…

Essays

The Ides of March Madness: Bread, Circus and the Truth of College Sports

By Shawn Hamilton March 8, 2015

[This piece originally appeared in Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/07/march_madness_and_the_ncaa_purity_lie_how_the_billion_dollar_basketball_industrial_complex_blinds_us_to_our_biggest_flaws/] In a nation split by partisan bickering, one of the few documents that both liberals and conservatives await with genuine enthusiasm is President Obama’s March Madness bracket. Liberals hope to match it or best it. Conservatives hope to obliterate it, but unlike most hot political topics, it’s all in good fun, right? For many, March Madness is the ultimate return and escape: a return to a simpler, purer time; an escape from the crass concerns of corrupt professional sports. This perception is, of course, rooted in myth. This year’s March Madness tournament will earn the NCAA close to a billion dollars in revenue. TV ratings for CBS, who aired the tournament games, skyrocketed to an 18-year high. That this tangled mess of contradictions and hypocrisies is cause for celebration for anyone other than the NCAA — and CBS — is a sign of both the…

Essays

Freedom Fries: McDonald’s and the 14th Amendment

By Shawn Hamilton March 8, 2015

[This piece originally appeared in The Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/blog/freedom-fries] In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser demonstrates the dominance of McDonald’s, not just in the context of the history of the fast food industry, but in the history of all industry. McDonald’s is the largest owner of retail property in the world. The company trains more Americans than the U.S. Army. The McDonald’s logo is more recognizable than the Christian cross. Ronald McDonald is second in popularity with children to only one figure—Santa Claus. By any (and every) measure, McDonald’s is a juggernaut. And yet the prospect of a $15 per hour minimum wage in Seattle has led this grand institution to turn, not to greater economies of scale or improvements in vertical integration, but to the Fourteenth Amendment—a law ratified in 1868, primarily to protect the rights of recently freed slaves. The McDonald’s corporation’s efforts to avoid the mandate…

Current Events

Truth and Reconciliation: IS and Iraq

By Shawn Hamilton September 8, 2014

Americans want answers. Several months ago Iraq’s second most populous city, Mosul was overrun by a well-armed, well-organized, well-funded group of ‘militants’ called ISIS (now the Islamic State). Since then, thousands of Iraqis have been displaced, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers have been murdered and two American journalists have been beheaded. And the American people want knowledge and reassurance – two goals that in this instance seem to be at odds. In an address a couple of weeks ago, President Obama said flatly that he didn’t have a strategy for dealing with ISIS yet, a statement that drew criticism from the professional left and right. Joe Biden several days later delivered his own address – a sort of save – in which he promised to chase ISIS to the ‘gates of Hell’, which is still not a strategy, but did reassure the likes of Chris Matthews and presumably Al Franken and…

Current Events

Recognizing Game: Why Levenson should keep the Atlanta Hawks…

By Shawn Hamilton September 7, 2014

Chris Rock tells a hilarious and revealing joke about the pristine and mostly white community of Alpine, New Jersey that he calls home. Chris Rock, we all know, began life in a working class community in NYC and began working in comedy clubs when he was in high school. After years of toil that led to global fame, he bought the home of his dreams. According to him he had to make ‘miracles happen!’ to buy that house. Of course he was probably expecting his neighbors to be equally famous people: titans of industry, world-renowned innovators, maybe a few heirs and heiresses. But Chris Rock’s white next door neighbor was a dentist. Not the guy that ‘invented teeth’ as Rock says, but a ‘pull your teeth’ dentist. Blacks often pay a surcharge in pursuit of a sense of accomplishment, but end wasting money in the process. Bruce Levenson, the majority owner of…