OMG AT&T WTF ROFLMAO??!!
Today I received a message from World Beyond War asking me to boycott the United States government. Not Israel, (I signed onto the BDS Movement years ago), but the US. I'd love to, but I'm not really in a position to do that. As a blogger concerned with Net Neutrality, I am in a position to urge my friends, comrades in the struggle, and casual readers to boycott the living shit out of AT&T. I quit them forever eleven years ago, and they haven't shown any sign of growing a conscience since then. In fact, if anything, they become worse. Just savor the latest news about AT&T's more-than-nodding acquaintance with Michael Cohen. Do yourself a favor and click through some of the links to the sources that Fight for the Future cites. Then grab some of their Red Alert graphics for your websites or social media profiles. With apologies to a much younger Jim McIngvale for the title (and to those who could never stand his commercials), this entry in inspired by PDiddie's most recent post on an entirely different topic, in which he tangentially links to an Atlantic article about Ranked Choice Voting in Maine (to which I may have linked recently as well).
PD lives and votes in Houston's Council District K, one of the two districts birthed by the 2010 census, when Houston's population count breached two million and a provision in the city's charter kicked in. As we have discussed previously, K's thus far only council member Larry Green died suddenly last month, forcing a special election to fill his seat through 2019. Nine candidates queued up to take his place, including Martha Castex-Tatum (note: paywall), who had worked as his constituent liaison. When a Council seat is vacated by death, retirement, term limits, or a member seeking higher office, here in Houston we just expect a whole crowd of hats in the ring. (I haven't really looked, but I'm sure it happens in other cities as well.) The more candidates, the less likely any candidate will receive a majority, and thus the more likely a runoff election will be required. This is especially true when there are two or more well-known candidates in the race. Check it out, though: Castex-Tatum won handily. There will be no runoff this time. This is the exception to the rule. This is a terribly mundane entry, having nothing to do with third-party politics or other Big Issues (although a Green comrade passed along a tip about some potentially big doings in our local Green Party chapter—nothing worth reporting yet). It's mostly about my own personal life. So skip this unless you actually know and like me—or think you might.
I'm still mentally surfacing, and resurfacing, from this past May the Fourth Be with Cinco de Mayo weekend. In many ways, the activities weren't all that unusual, but the entire time I didn't feel as though I was actually experiencing any of it. There must be a fancy Greek word for that dreamlike state in which you feel as if you're experiencing something vicariously, but it's really you going through it. Previously, I had felt something similar when taking anti-depressants, but I haven't been on those for years. In the various Inner-Loop places I visited, I saw quite a few people I knew, because when I'm out & about inside the Loop, that's what happens. Many of these acquaintances asked me variations of "How are you doing?" If I were to answer with 100% honesty, I would have said, "I don't know." In this week's batch o' bloggage from last week, apart from Martha Castex-Tatum's big win in Houston's Council District K, I found particularly poignant the entry from Grits for Breakfast about Texas Democrats' attempts to out-"Law 'n' Order" Republicans in the 1990s. The phenomenon was not limited to Governor Ann Richards, the state of Texas, or Hillary "Bring Them to Heel" Clinton. It didn't stop at the prison-building binge that was oh-so-fashionable at the time: Richards also took pains to communicate that she favored capital punishment like her friend Bill Clinton, and that she liked guns just fine because, y'know, she liked to shoot birds.
Grits's brief stroll down Memory Lane had a Proust-meets-madeleine effect on me, bringing back the early to mid-'90s in multisensory detail. Unlike M. Proust, I promise to keep this reminiscence (relatively) brief. Mostly, it brings back memories of shock and outrage: It was shocking to see the Republican takeover of Texas, even after our popular governor had so narrowly defeated Clayton "Rape Is Like the Weather" Williams four years earlier; it was outrageous to see President Bill Clinton's rightward tack after the Republicans won a majority in both houses of Congress, after which I switched my allegiance to the Greens once and for all. During Richards's lone gubernatorial term, the state and the nation had genuine problems with gangs and hard drugs. Whatever the actual causes may have been, I saw the effects of the problem and the "solutions" up close when I was teaching at Pasadena High School. I had dozens of students who showed up at school primarily to sell or score drugs, as well as because their families would stop receiving federal or state benefits if they didn't show up. A generation later (crikey, has it been that long?), we are reaping the results of the git-tough policies implemented then, when very few voters saw just how profitable the prison-industrial complex was becoming—and how the "solution" to gangs and drugs would bring about more devastation in communities of color than the gangs and drugs themselves had. The school-to-prison pipeline did not have the stamp of academic recognition yet, but law enforcement agencies were busy criminalizing an entire generation of black and Latinx youth. Even in the 1990s, the worst gang in the working-class suburbs east of Houston was the Ku Klux Klan, which was clandestinely circulating recruiting materials in the schools. The main distinction was that the street and neighborhood gangs would generally commit violence only against each other, typically as reprisals, while the KKK advocated violence against people who had merely had the gall to be dark-skinned in public. Cracking down on Klan activity was a new practice in Pasadena, which had recently succeeding in pushing the Klan's headquarters out of the city to Channelview, just across the Ship Channel. In my first month at Pasadena High, I caught one of my students with what looked a lot like a Klan pamphlet; that same student later had a noisily public break-up with a girlfriend who had decided that black folks and Mexicans were OK by her. In an inservice workshop, Pasadena ISD brought in the leader of the police department's anti-gang task force, who identified the Klan as a gang and alerted teachers to signs and symbols we might see on students' clothing or drawn on book covers, just as the Blood- and Crip-affiliated gang members and wanna-be's might sport on theirs. Pasadena PD also identified anti-racist skinhead groups as gangs, which I thought was bizarre. The skinheads (including some of my students) had no organization or leaders; they hung out together, went to hardcore punk shows, and would come to defense of individuals or groups whom the Klan kids threatened or harassed. ============ With this week's lefty blog post and news roundup, the Texas Progressive Alliance welcomes Governor Greg Abbott to the New McCarthyism, a domain of paranoia and fake news previously occupied exclusively by sullen Hillary Clinton bitter-enders. Here comes the stampede! |
Blogging Sporadically since 2014Here you will find political campaign-related entries, as well as some about my literature, Houston underground arts, peace & justice, urban cycling, soccer, alt-religion, and other topics. Categories
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