The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 28

I’m writing this from the inside of one of the newer monstrosities lining the new Vegas strip. The last leg of the tour. I’d say it feels good to be almost done. But I don’t know for sure. The average temperature’s been about 110 degrees and I’m pretty sure the “feel good” feelings I’ve had have been hallucinations. Several years ago as part of an ad campaign designed to rebrand Vegas from a kid-friendly city back to a city with a bit more danger to it, someone came up with the brilliant slogan “what happens in vegas, stays in vegas.” 

I think they should change the slogan to something else. My mind doesn’t work well with titles and slogans and what not so I can’t say what the slogan should be.

But I know whatever that slogan is, however long it is, should have at least one word.

Hydration.

….

I spent a few days in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. 

Well. 

That’s not exactly true.

It was as scary as I thought it would be. The few speeches I heard showed that the Republican Party has moved about as far from facts and reason as it’s possible for a major American party to go (and writing that down I might have to revisit this in a bit). And the recent picture Paul Ryan took of his interns should further cement the Republican Party’s status as American’s White Nationalist Party. 

But the speeches did not translate into dozens of armed citizens walking the streets. In fact the city of Cleveland seemed more or less empty. I not only didn’t face traffic driving into or out of the city, I saw very few cars at all…suggesting that many Clevelanders likely stayed home and that the armed police presence that was there ended up scaring away anything that even smelled a little like Trump-style dissent. I’ve at least one piece of anecdotal data suggesting this happened. I was there for a counter-event of sorts. Even though Cleveland is what I call “slightly black” (53% if memory serves) the event itself had only three black folk including me…because a number of black women explicitly told the host they were too afraid to drive through the city to come. This weekend the American Conservative interviewed an author about Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir about a Family and a Culture in Crisis. There's a lot the author and his interviewer get wrong. However there are large swaths of the population that have been decimated by the neoliberal turn and the only person actually willing to speak to their problems seems to be Trump. Of course his solutions are horrific. But still.

If we don’t figure out how to reach this population, I don’t know what will happen. 

But here’s one doomsday scenario.

Right now the Republican Party controls somewhere around 30 state legislatures, as of 2014 they control a full 68 out of 98 state partisan state legislative chambers. There are two ways to propose amendments to the Constitution. The first is by getting 2/3 of both the House and the Senate to propose an amendment. The second is by getting 2/3 of state legislatures to propose a Constitutional Convention…during which amendments may be proposed. Not all of the republican representatives in the various state legislatures are Trump supporters or even represent that tendency. But I don’t think we’re that far away from a scenario in which Koch or some other big conservative donor bank rolls a serious attempt to hold a constitutional convention which could radically alter the political landscape going forward. The more we treat poor white rural voters as if they’re an alien species incapable of responding to reason, the more likely that scenario or something even worse—ever notice that the red states, the red red states are contiguous while the blue states are on the east and west coast respectively? Imagine the US becoming three nations. 

I’m not a futurist. I don’t even play one on NPR. But I do think we’re at the beginning of the beginning. And things are going to get very interesting over the next decade or so.

….

I am in Vegas for my fraternity convention. I was able to squeeze a radio interview, a book talk, and a meeting with local Vegas activists in, but the primary reason I’m here is my fraternity. Omega Psi Phi is not the first black fraternity (Sigma Pi Phi has that distinction). It isn’t even the first black collegiate fraternity (Alpha Phi Alpha has that distinction). It is, however, the first black fraternity founded at a black college (Howard University). Every two years we hold a national convention which is part social—well…a lot social—and part business. I am not an official delegate—in fact I haven’t been financial for several years (read the book). However I was asked to write a policy proposal designed to get the fraternity to think through solutions to the police murders.

I hadn’t done something like this before. But it’s an interesting writing exercise largely because the fraternity, while black and college-educated, is heterogenous. We’ve probably got dozens of folk in law enforcement and we’ve enough brothers in the military to have separate chapters JUST for them. And then there are younger brothers who are in college and are likely supportive of Black Lives Matter as well as Brothers who are pushing seventy who probably support the type of respectability politics that Black Lives Matter rails against. 

So I’m going to take the draft I’ve written for them, see where it goes, and then likely send it to a range of folk in my fraternity and in others. To at least get them to think about how we all might do something more than teach kids how to safely deal with police officers. 

(Along those lines Cedric Johnson (a member of Kappa Alpha Psi) wrote a powerful piece about police violence that brings class into the picture.)

….

A review of my book just appeared in The Crisis. A friend on Facebook sent a screenshot…from the looks of it they’re suggesting it’s at least as important if not moreso than Coates’ BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME. 

High praise. And a nice antidote to the review I received last week. But it makes about as much sense for me to stay high after that review as it did to put my head underneath a pillow last week. There’s still work to be done. 

Oh. The piece I wrote about policing and research appeared in the Chronicle. (There’s probably a firewall.)

On that note I’m tapping out. 110 degree heat will tend to do that to you.If you know folks interested in reading this newsletter (which I still don't believe people really read but the metrics don't lie) please send them here.

See you next week.