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American Dolchstoss

American Dolchstoss: Pimping the Struggle in Trump’s America

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[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…

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Gun Violence

Collateral Damage – The Prototype Lee H. Oswald

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[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…

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Essays

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

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[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…

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Essays

Invisible Men

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[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…

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Essays

Freedom Fries: McDonald’s and the 14th Amendment

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[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…

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