Op-Ed

Here in Charlottesville, as in most places, we like our stories simple. Most books by local author John Grisham have good guys and bad guys. When a UVa sports team wins, everybody says “Yay, we won!” When it loses, three-quarters of the people say “Boo, we lost!” Reality that gets messier than a coyote and roadrunner adventure gives us trouble.

When we’re fed a fictional tale of sexual assault at a UVa fraternity by Rollingstone magazine, we like to declare that every other tale except that one is true or, alternatively, that every other tale is, just like that one, false. We’re less comfortable with the notion that a lot of tales are true and a lot of other ones false, and yet other ones partially true and partially false. It seems too sloppy. What are people supposed to wear, gray hats? How do we distinguish the angels from the demons, the bunny from the lisping hunter?

We particularly struggle with our national and international news stories that involve someone local dying: Humayun Khan, Otto Warmbier, Heather Heyer.

Sign this petition to The City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia:
Divest all public money from weapons companies, major war profiteers, and fossil fuel companies.
Sign Here.

The City of Charlottesville has approximately $3 million invested in fossil fuel companies ($1.4 m in energy company bonds, plus approximately $1.6 m through funds invested in by Charlottesville’s retirement fund). It may have about the same in weapons companies, as it has $1.1 m directly invested in four “aerospace and defense” companies: Boeing, Heico, Honeywell, and Moog. Boeing and Honeywell are two of the biggest war profiteers including through the wars of Saudi Arabia that even the U.S. Congress is now turning against.

Yes, is the unfortunate answer to the obvious question: The whole time that Charlottesville has discussed possibly considering finding the nerve to take down a couple of its many offensive statues, has it been investing public dollars in the mass killing of dark skinned people and the general destruction of a habitable planet?

Belgium has joined the list of countries that are rebelling against their elected leadership. Over the weekend the Belgian government fell over Prime Minister Charles Michel’s trip to Morocco to sign the United Nations Migration Agreement. The agreement made no distinction between legal and illegal migrants and regarded immigration as a positive phenomenon. The Belgian people apparently did not agree.

When I popped open the old laptop, the Geek Squad guy said maybe I should dust it off.

He slid a canister of Endust toward me. “Spray the cloth,” he said, “not the machine.”

I started choking on my sense of humiliation. This poor baby was covered with dust. How could I be so careless and lackadaisical toward the technology at the center of my life? And I hadn’t even realized the extent of my indifferent maintenance until the computer crashed and I had to rush it to the tech doctor.

I had been in the process of writing a column. I was researching the Central American refugees recently tear-gassed as they struggled toward the U.S. border. They were fleeing the violence and hopelessness in their countries, traversing 1,000 miles or more on foot, often with small children in tow, to find … something better.

I had wanted to reach into the core of this situation, reach into the barbed wire and tear gas canisters and the words of Donald Trump, who saw them as perfect scapegoats for the nation’s problems: the enemy of the moment, bedraggled, desperate and hungry. Terrorists, keep out! He would protect America from them.

Charlottesville is interested in improving its image after a bunch of hate-filled ralliers successfully google-bombed it. Now you search for the name of our town and you find images of all these people who don’t live anywhere near here and were apparently visiting here on their very worst day in terms of morality, wardrobe, and spelling.

What can Charlottesville do to change the subject? Even finally finding the nerve and the decency to remove the redundantly labeled “racist war monuments” would only remind people of the fascist rally and leave behind all the other racist war monuments — which make up all the monuments across Charlottesville unless you count Lewis and Clark as non-racist peacemakers.

Newly glorifying — with some tweaks! — long-dead plutocrats who enslaved lots of people or came up with imperialist Doctrines for Latin America seems tricky at best. I wonder how much of my tax dollar is going to pay a PR firm to mull that over. Any amount is too much.

There has been another defenestration of a television-based political commentator for touching the only real electrified third rail remaining in reporting what passes for the news. Marc Lamont Hill, a Temple University professor of Media Studies and Urban Education, who is a regular political commentator on CNN, was fired for what he said in a speech at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which took place last Wednesday at the United Nations. Hill called for a “free Palestine from river to the sea,” which CNN considered grounds for terminating his contract.

“What is seen with one eye has no depth.”

I’m thinking, as I ponder the wisdom of Ursula LeGuin, that American culture is at the end of what it can accomplish with its single-eyed vision. For all our material progress, for all our ability to dominate just about anything or anyone we encounter — this is our history, our manifest destiny — things are falling apart in every sector of society.

What’s left of the media can’t stop selling us our own desperation and anxiety. We keep piling on more of the same — more troops in Afghanistan, more surveillance cameras in our neighborhoods — but it isn’t working. Could it be that we’re not seeing the world the way we need to see it?

The promise the United States once represented to the world has spent itself, and what we have to offer in terms of opportunity, or at least hope, is dwarfed by the spreading shadow of our hubris. And it’s all coming home to roost.

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.
 

he integrity of the US judicial system is actively, albeit quietly, in play. A sitting federal judge, or more likely a panel of sitting federal judges, will be required in the near future to render an assessment of the honesty, integrity, and fitness of a Supreme Court justice to retain his lifetime appointment. The process and the result of the federal judges’ decision will, together, render a judgment as to the integrity of not just one Supreme Court justice but the federal courts as a national institution.

Remarks at Fellowship Hall at Berkeley, Calif., October 13, 2018.

Video here.

Slogans and headlines and haikus and other short combinations of words are tricky things. I wrote a book looking at many of the themes in how people commonly talk about war, and I found them all without exception — and the marketing campaigns before, during, and after every past war without exception — to be dishonest. So I called the book War Is A Lie. And then people who misunderstood my meaning started insisting to me that I was wrong, that war really does exist.