The Counterpublic Papers vol. 4 no. 16

I don’t watch much television anymore. Not even Netflix. One of the consequences of the gig. There’s always something to do, always something I think I’m supposed to be doing. And if I’ve a choice between tv and that something else? Getting ready for class, reading an article related to one of the books, writing, parenting, cooking…usually that other thing wins. Usually.

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been able to do over spring break is give myself the leeway to binge watch.

I finally got around to Russian Doll.

Takes the “die and repeat the same day over and over again until you get it right” conceit most recently made popular in the Tom Cruise action-movie Edge of Tomorrow (and for me the classic is Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day—“you never thank me! you never thank me! see you tomorrow!!”) and turns it into a rumination on urban thirty-something life. Perfect for netflix and binge watching—I don’t have time to do it (because, well, work) but this is the type of show you can watch over and over again just to see what slight changes happen between the different iterations of the same 36th birthday party.

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For the last several years I’ve been taking the megabus to NYC only to be let out next to a development monstrosity that features an Escher-like stairway structure that goes nowhere but up, down, and around. Hudson Yards.

It’s finally done.

$25 billion. $6 billion from public coffers.

That stair thing?  “The vessel.” (You can’t make this stuff up. Ostensibly for the public, people don’t have to pay to go up and down the 2500 steps…but they do need tickets.)

The developer responsible? “This is New York as it should be, with everything you want at your doorstep.”

I don’t think Kimmelman got the headline right. “Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community…” should say instead “Hudson Yards is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Sickest Gated Community.”

It’s this…and things like Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse (which won’t be his permanent residence—that’s Chicago) …alongside political organizing that may be finally turning the corner in NYC. Support is growing for a tax that would force “homeowners” like Griffin to pay a yearly surcharge. With somewhere in the number of 70,000 NYC residents living in temporary homes worth over $5 million, even just a 1% tax could generate at least $3.5 billion in revenue. The city faces almost a $50 billion gap in infrastructure.   

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So last week the Justice Department charged over 50 celebrities, coaches (admissions coaches and college athletic coaches), and CEOs with participating in an admissions scam. Details here.

(Sad. I know someone’s going to make a movie out of this or perhaps better yet a Netflix show…Felicity Huffman—who I have and probably will always like, albeit ruefully now—would be absolutely perfect casting for the character of….Felicity Huffman. Not sure who’d play Lori Laughlin.)

Now it isn’t as if schools don’t routinely offer admission to the sons and daughters of wealthy donors and to legacies in general (in fact my son and I are both Michigan legacies). And SAT/ACT scores while not predicting college success track pretty well alongside family socioeconomic background, before we even get to the millions of dollars middle-to-upper income earners spend on SAT prep, academic tutors, and the like. But this is a particularly egregious violation, and when we have examples of poorer women serving jail time for simply using the wrong address in order to try to get their children in a better public school district, and people railing against affirmative action in college admissions it isn’t that hard to gin up enough outrage to suggest the book should be thrown at violators.

(I routinely tell my students that no one really likes “small government.” they only want “small government” for things they don’t like. In this case, it’d be interesting to see how many people who on other issues would say that the prison industrial complex should be smaller would make an exception here. Seems to me the real play is suggesting that the entire system is so corrupt that even seemingly wealthy people like Loughlin and Huffman feel as if they have to cheat to get in. And building a politics that’s primarily about changing the system by, for example, making public colleges like Michigan free and ending k-12 reliance on property taxes.)

((One more thing. If I hear or read one more person writing or saying “this is the real affirmative action” i’m going to jab a thumb drive into someone’s eardrum. I mean I get it—when people critique affirmative action they’re critiquing it because they believe black and brown students are given an unfair privilege because of their race and if this scam isn’t an example of unfair privilege at work I don’t know what is. Yet and still, it’s important we re-redefine affirmative action as an attempt to expand college admissions and the public good that is college education, an attempt largely won through political struggle waged by black and brown students and their white accomplices.))

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Saw Blackkklansman finally. A more or less true account of Ron Stallworth, who as a seventies Colorado Springs police officer infiltrated the local KKK, I both showed the film and read the memoir the film was based on for class. I wrote a much longer piece about it that will probably see print somewhere, but this bit should suffice:

The conception of racism that Stallworth employs in the book is a racism bereft of structure. It’s clear from Stallworth’s account that the Klan had at one time enough power in the state of Colorado that national writers spelled it with a K. By Stallworth’s account the Klan dominated the state legislature and had enough members in the Denver area (approximately 30-40 thousand in the 1920s by Stallworth’s take) to elect a Klansman mayor—in fact Denver’s international airport was named after him. But by the time that Stallworth becomes a police cadet and then a police officer racism to him is primarily a matter of what we would now call “micro-aggressions”. On more than one occasion, white police officers either mistreat Stallworth because he is black (at times inadvertently, and at times maliciously) or they exhibit problematic ideas about black people in general. When Stallworth for example has a talk with a police officer about beautiful women Stallworth talks about the sultry seventies era actor Lola Falana. The police officer can’t understand how Stallworth finds any black woman attractive, an idea which effectively ends Stallworth’s relationship with him.

This idea of racism as personal discrimination carries into the film. We see police officers refer to black male suspects (and Stallworth himself) as “toads”. We see the Klansmen call blacks nigger and in interacting with the black Ron Stallworth directly insult him. America’s longer problematic racial history is directly addressed by Lee in a few key instances—Spike begins the movie with a clip from Gone With the Wind which segues into a pro-segregationist speech by Kennebrew Beauregard, a fictional character played by Alec Baldwin, and paralleling Stallworth’s initiation into the Klan Lee includes a long scene featuring Harry Belafonte, who describes a real life lynching that occurred in Texas to the members of the Black Student Union. But we don’t see the types of structural dynamics these instances allude to at all—with the prominent exception of the fact that Stallworth is the only black police officer. Because the other blacks prominent featured in the film are Colorado College undergrads, we don’t see the type of class variance that would potentially enable Lee to examine the interplay of class and race.

Further, because Lee articulates racism in old school terms, he is able to depict the Klan (and Klan like individuals) as the primary proponents of racism and being uniquely antiquated. In this modern moment the two populations most blamed for racism are white working class men and then white women. In Lee’s movie as well we see white working class men and white women primarily blamed for racism with their racism articulated as being the product of them being unable to properly fit in the modern world. The white woman (Felix’s wife) is a throwback to fifties and sixties era television homemakers like June Cleaver, spewing racial epithets even as she offers coffee for guests with a smile. The two most virulent racists are mentally retarded and a southern hick. While this renders him able to articulate racism in ways that make most American filmgoers satisfied—few would see themselves or modern America in the racists and the racism that Lee presents—it neuters the ways racism works in the world.

Well done. But deeply flawed.

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Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh stepped down from the University of Maryland Medical System Board after it was revealed they purchased some 20,000 copies of her self-published “Healthy Holly” book at $5 each. But as the Baltimore Brew notes, this isn’t all. The Brew reports that loans from three UMMS directors totaling $200,000 a few days before the April 2016 primary were what caused Pugh to defeat former mayor Sheila Dixon (who herself was forced to resign for corruption charges over 10 years ago). Last week Pugh received campaign donations from Hopkins administrators during the same general period she provided testimony in favor of Hopkins’ private police force.

And take a look at the picture. Here’s your diversity at work.

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Going to see if I can spend at least a little bit of today’s off day to do more than work. But that’s later. The book calls.

This is the beginning of the beginning.

Keep this in mind.

And keep a lookout for our people while doing so. You know who they are.     As always, if you've stumbled on this quasi-accidentally, this is the Counterpublic Papers. Lightly edited. Lightly slurred.