The Counterpublic Papers vol. 6 no. 9

February 20, 2021

First a housekeeping note. I’ve been using tinyletter since I started The Counterpublic Papers some years ago.      I might move to substack.Tinyletter is wonderful, except design wise there are a range of things I can’t quite do that I’d like to. I’d like to embed videos for example, and I can’t quite get the hang of it. Anyway if I do it, nothing will change except maybe the way to get out if you don’t want to read it anymore.   

.…

Four days ago I received word that Rush Limbaugh died. Limbaugh more than any other figure paved the way for modern conservatism and for Donald Trump—some might suggest Reagan and they wouldn’t be all wrong (Reagan was a virulent racist behind closed doors and a smiling one in public). But Limbaugh was able to take full advantage of Reagan’s successful attempt to deregulate the airwaves and make conservatism…into a cultural project. A cultural project that then created Fox, Breitbart, Newsmax, and a host of others. I’d write about his statements, but if you read this you know them.

Here’s what I wrote on fb:

Death creates space for new life. We mourn in instances because we see that space as a gaping hole. In this instance some may mourn the hole Limbaugh's death leaves. But not only does his death create space in the way ALL death does, but his death creates new possibilities for life in the way only a FEW deaths do. In that way i can say, wholeheartedly, i am glad that he is dead. And I wish it'd have happened earlier. 

I do think there are deaths worth....if not necessarily celebrating publicly, at least being happy about. This is one of them.        ….

It’s seventy degrees in Texas today. Seventy-one degrees warmer than it was last week, when a cold snap ended up in 17 deaths (including one 11 year old boy who died of hypothermia in his unheated mobile home). Two decades ago Texas state officials decided to deregulate their energy grid. And last week was sent into the late nineteenth century as a result. From what I understand the entire system was literally minutes away from a disaster that would’ve taken months to repair. While folk are correctly tarring Texas Senator Ted Cruz for abandoning the state for Cancun, the focus should’ve been on Texas Mayor Tim Boyd, who resigned after telling his residents that it was not the responsibility of local government to provide for the needs of its citizens in time like this, that individuals should stop looking for handouts. Or perhaps it should’ve stayed on Governor Greg Abbott who quickly blamed the Green New Deal and wind turbines.

I think of all the folk studying neoliberalism the geographers get it more right than most. It's the geographers who recognized that the turn had two stages, rolling back the previous common sense (I’d argue, through racist appeals) and then rolling out a new one. What we need to do here is something similar, using examples like this to end deregulation, but then coming up with a new language to then roll a new project out. One argument for deregulation was that it would be far more efficient and would eliminate waste. What would we replace this with? It’s not enough to simply point to Texas and say “see?” We have to replace the logic, swap it out with a new set of ideas that we can then connect to better policy.

I’ve been thinking about something like stewardship, here implicitly borrowing from religious language, but to an extent from language about the environment as well. Being good stewards implicitly means having enough to be able to provide not just for “just in time” issues—I order a book and rather than that book existing somewhere in a warehouse it’s printed on demand, energy doesn’t and shouldn’t work like this—but to provide redundancy in case everything fails. Being good stewards also means understanding our care taking as a social enterprise. If we don’t think of this at least in part as a linguistic project, as a cultural project, then we’re not going to be able to stem the tide we’re facing. And what happened in Texas will continue to happen.

…..

A little over 33 years ago Henry Hampton and Blackside Productions released Eyes on the Prize an award-winning documentary series on the civil rights and black power movements. The first part, with 6 episodes covering the period between the murder of Emmett Till and the Selma marches designed to restore voting rights, aired in 1987. The second part, with 8 episodes covering the period between the rise of Malcolm X and the election of Harold Washington, aired in 1990.

(As an aside after a few years both series were taken off of the air because the rights to much of the archival footage expired. When I first saw the series I was 18 years old. When the series aired again in the mid-2000s, I was 36. I remember being a 36 year old, watching the video, thinking to myself “who is this kid with barely enough hair to cover his upper lip?” Only to realize it was Martin Luther King jr.. When Eyes on the Prize first aired he was older than I was, but by the time it aired again I was older.)

The 12th episode of the entire series covered the rise and fall of Fred Hampton (no relation to Henry Hampton). Hampton was the charismatic leader of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was assassinated by the Chicago Police Department in a raid, a raid made possible by William O’ Neal, an FBI informant who’d become the chapter’s minister of security. O’Neal was interviewed by Hampton. He talked about his motives, he talked about providing the FBI with the maps.

He committed suicide after the series aired.

The documentary was incredibly powerful—if you haven’t seen it, you should. But of all the episodes, I think that episode was the most powerful, perhaps because it simultaneously revealed the power of the police state, the lengths they would go to in order to preserve their way of life, and the resilience of black communities. I vividly remembered the O'Neal interview from when it first aired (31 year ago last week). And remembered where I was when I found out the rumor that O'Neal killed himself was true. 

Fast forward, and the story of Hampton and O’Neal became a movie Judas and the Black Messiah. The casting was on point—from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton to LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal to Dominique Fishback as Deborah Johnson. The story was powerful—perhaps the most radical black politics story told on film. I never expected to see a story like this told on the big screen, never expected to see a story like this receive the budget it did.

Both Henry and Fred Hampton realized that we were in the middle of a war that had significant cultural elements. Unlike Limbaugh, they both died far too early.

….

Today we reached 500,000 deaths. That’s half the people who attended the Million Man March. That’s five Michigan football stadiums.

One of my favorite former students is now the Mayor of Kansas City. That’s about 5,000 more than Mayor Lucas’ city.

I expect I’ll write more about this in the weeks to come. But think on that.