The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 13

January 11, 2020

I was in Giant last night grocery shopping. Because the Baltimore Ravens were playing in the AFC playoffs last night the store was empty. I thought that this was the year I’d finally change my football fan preferences—Baltimore’s got a great team, great management, an all-world quarterback—Lamar Jackson is a once in a generation talent that embraces working class black southern culture, a good coach (who recognizes Jackson and embraces him), and even the right team colors. Detroit on the other hand?     But it didn’t happen. So instead of watching the game with the rest of Baltimore (including the two people in the parking lot watching the game on their phones), I was in the grocery store. I thought that I was just going for a few items…but when I got to the dairy section in the back of the store, I realized that I was going to do some “real” shopping. So I needed a real cart. Like the one right next to the dairy section with only three or four items in it.

I took it. Exchanged it for my little hand cart and went on my business.

Only to find out that there was one other person (a senior citizen) in the store who probably had the same idea I did. But had to go to the bathroom—leaving her shopping cart right next to the dairy section. The one now full with all of my stuff. 

She let me know in no uncertain terms what I’d done. 

Just like I would have had our roles been reversed.

Twelve days into the New Year and I’m just getting my bearings.

And to an extent it seems as if the world is as well. As if we haven’t really gotten the memo that we live in the future.

….

Here’s what I mean.

Last week one of the most common hashtags was “WW3” after it seems as if we came this close to initiating war against Iran. And on the one hand that seems like common sense.

But by my reckoning what we call “the Persian Gulf War” certainly seems in hindsight like it qualified. The war to depose Saddam Hussein in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the US seems like it qualified. And when I asked some of my IR and Comparative colleagues one of them brought up the Second Congo War, which involved a large strip of states from Libya to South Africa from 1998-2003 and led to over 350,000 violent deaths. It’s probable that we’re still stuck on some type of nuclear exchange, or perhaps the idea of the US and Russia on opposing sides (which, given current realities really seems anachronistic). That’s the point though. We shouldn’t be concerned about World War 3. More like World War 7.

Along similar lines, the fires in Australia, which have claimed the lives of over 200 people and over 1 billion animals, and have been so extensive they’ve generated their own extreme weather systems, represent a vicious reminder that the climate has already changed. “Climate change” isn’t something that’s coming in the not too far off future. It’s here.

(Tom Cruise’s 2002 film Minority Report, which was somehow based in a DC that didn’t actually have any racial minorities, revolved around the idea that we’d gotten to the point where we could predict crime before it actually happened. This really is science fiction, but thinking back on it, one aspect of the world that seems particularly prescient is the way consumer ads were directly targeted to specific consumers. And in fact the city-wide optical system that helped to generate these ads kind of exists already.)

How do we truly live in the present, how do we generate ideas and institutions and a politics geared towards the present as it actually exists?

…

Last month Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels gave an interview to the Hopkins News-Letter, talking about among other things the recent move to establish a private police force:

Daniels expressed a desire for the new police force to strive for transparency and equity in policing. He described the meetings that the University has held with various stakeholder groups, noting that there had been over 125. 

“A key theme that came out of those meetings was a sense of post-Black Lives Matter,” Daniels said. “People wanted to have confidence in the accountability of a proposed police force, and the traditional mechanisms of accountability that had been used in the past would not suffice in this moment, in this country.” 

I’d read the Daniels interview against three other stories.

We are not simply facing Trump and the tendency he represents, but one far broader and far deeper.

Here’s the last paragraph of that Baltimore piece:

Baltimore’s problems can be solved over time if resources are prudently and consistently applied, which means the application must be guided by expertise rather than by politics. It’s time to try something new.

A picture of the Johns Hopkins medical campus accompanies the story. I don’t know Plymer. But Plymer’s take is the problem—I wouldn’t be surprised if he has the same take on the idea of a private police force with technocratic modes of transparency and accountability (complete with implicit bias testing!) Daniels has been touting. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if he was one of the people who supported Hogan as an antidote to Trump.

If we’d even had a halfway decent newspaper—one as dedicated to examining state and corporate corruption as it is city government corruption (which, given Baltimore’s racial makeup, ends up reifying a set of troubling assumptions about black governing capacity) Cortellessa’s story would’ve been reported much earlier—definitely before the last gubernatorial election—and connected to the deep corruption that besets not only the city (and its public and private institutions) but the state.

…

Yet another set of polls suggest that African Americans support Biden in large numbers leading up to the Iowa primaries. Which brings up a set of questions, given that I’d have to go on his website right now to see what his policy platform is. Are black voters that invested in electing someone they know can defeat Trump? With people like Booker and Harris in the race at the outset is it that black voters don’t trust black candidates? Is it that black people are secretly centrist voters with no real policy acumen?

I’d draw folks attention to 2008 before the Iowa primaries. Before the primaries Clinton was up by sixteen or seventeen percentage points, and had a large lead among black voters. After the Iowa primaries, things changed pretty quickly.

Black voters are risk averse. And black voters are particularly sensitive to the potential of another four years of Trump. In the absence of proof that white voters are sophisticated enough to vote for their material, social, and psychic long term interests, they’re going to go with the candidate they feel has the best chance to beat Trump. The moment it appears as if white voters actually have some degree of sophistication….they’ll go with the closest thing to their real preferences it’s possible to get in a US democratic primary.

I have enough….I don’t like the word “hope” but enough of something that sounds like hope on the eighth day of the week…to be pretty sure that Biden won’t do well in the Iowa primary. It’ll be either Sanders or Warren or maybe even the kid-mayor. And then we’ll see black voters make a different set of choices.

….

I’m still thinking about Watchmen. What I will say though is that one of my readers suggested a second season set in Vietnam. I think that would be groundbreaking. But I think the best thing that they could do is let the show function like the comic. It took decades before DC touched the Watchmen universe again—first with a series of prequels and then most recently with a limited series that saw the Watchmen characters (including Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan) interact with the traditional DC universe (ending, in traditional style, with a fistfight between Manhattan and Superman). When the show runner argued that the tv show was self-contained I didn’t know what he meant. I know now.

….

I haven’t gotten around to doing my normal end of the year beginning of the year assessment. But I’ll say this. Turning fifty—my official birthday is June 5, but last year I started celebrating January 1—presented me with a set of stark reminders that the world will consistently force you to think about your values, your ethical commitments, your politics, and commit to them or put them aside. And as you grow older the stakes of that choice become higher and higher.

2020 is going to be a year in which we’re all forced to make choices. Let’s hope we make those choices together.

(Oh. The senior citizen and I went to pay for our groceries. She got there first, and laughingly teased me about it. I laughed too…then left my cart in our aisle, walked through the aisle next to us both, and then used my phone to pay for her groceries before she could respond. No way in hell was I going to metaphorically start the New Year being a cart stealer. Happy New Year.)