But He's So Articulate!

 

I don't get excited over politicians as orators; they're usually overrated anyway. (Remember when Ronald Reagan was promoted as "the Great Communicator"?) I usually prefer to read transcripts so I can concentrate on the content instead of the packaging. It's how I got through the Obama years. When I did listen to him, I was put off by his scolding tone, his fake folksiness, etc.; his dishonesty was just the icing on the cake. I never agreed that he was a good speaker. (Yeah, Dubya was worse - that's supposed to be a recommendation?) 

But I was impressed by this short video from Zohran Mamdani. I watched it all the way through without wanting to bang my head on the table. For one thing, he doesn't talk down, doesn't hide that he's bright, but without being professorial. The content is good too, which is why it infuriated so many of the usual suspects. Which doesn't mean I'm uncritical of him; I reserve the right to be as harsh about him as I am about Obama, Trump, Dubya, Clinton, Harris, and the rest. This clip is just refreshing, that's all. 

You don't have to agree with me, either: whether a pol is a good speaker is a subjective aesthetic judgment, which takes me back to my original point: that it's unimportant compared to the pol's words and actions, which loyalists prefer to downplay if not ignore. In Mamdani's case, it's often difficult to sort out reality from the flood of hydrophobic propaganda directed against him, but as far as I can tell, he's doing pretty well. Compared to his centrist-Dem attackers, he's wonderful.

Premature Exultation

I'm glad that Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election, but as usual I'm uneasy with the premature triumphalism a lot of progressives and leftists have indulged in.  He's not even mayor yet: he won't be sworn in until January 1. I remember similar exultation among Obama fans when he was first elected in 2008. Admittedly, the right is equally confused, as in the rumor that his swearing-in was canceled because he refused to swear on the U.S. Constitution.  Congratulations, comrades, you're on the same page as the Right!  I did enjoy this satirical swipe at the foolishness, though.

It's certainly satisfying and encouraging that Mamdani defeated a well-funded, viciously defamatory campaign by a corrupt establishment, including Democratic Party leaders who developed a sudden amnesia about their own "Vote Blue No Matter Who" slogan.  When he'd won they then exhibited similar amnesia about their refusal to endorse him.  Bill Clinton, for example, endorsed sex-pest Andrew Cuomo, like his co-Epstein buddy Donald Trump, but flipped when it was all over.  Hillary Clinton protested that she had no connection to New York, so why should she have an opinion?  (Because she's a prominent Democratic politician who still feels free to comment on national politics the rest of the time, that's why.)  The abrupt change of stance is classic doublethink.  Even Barack Obama only praised Mamdani's campaign on November 3 (a day before the election); he stopped short of a formal endorsement, but offered to be a "sounding board" later on.

What I find more encouraging is that Mamdani's wasn't the only Democratic victory this month. It was an off-off-year election, and numerous Republican candidates went down in defeat.  California voters passed Proposition 50 to redistrict in favor of Democrats.  I'm ambivalent about that, but with MAGA Republicans in several states pushing redistricting to favor themselves, it shows that the move can backfire.  Corporate media have tried to minimize the outcomes by declaring the Democratic winners "pragmatic" or "more pragmatic" than the "radical" Mamdani, but I call that damage control.  Those media usually favor right-wing outcomes; remember their determined anticipation of a Red Wave in the 2022 midterms that didn't materialize?  A lot can happen in the next year, but I doubt Trump will be able to buck the traditional midterm losses that Biden evaded.

At the same time, it's important to remember that Mamdani won his election with a 50.4 percent majority.  That's not a mandate, though the media have assigned mandates to winners with smaller or no majorities.  (Trump got only a plurality in 2024, and he lost the popular vote in 2016.)  That doesn't diminish Mamdani's success, since he came out of almost nowhere to defeat a favored (if unpopular) party choice in the primary.  Cuomo only got 41 percent of the vote in the election itself; even if Curtis Sliwa had withdrawn from the race, the votes he got weren't enough to defeat Mamdani, not even if all who voted for him had switched to Cuomo.  Mamdani has his work cut out for him, and many observers have noticed that.  He's already moderated his positions on some matters, such as the police, and his worthy "affordability" promises can't be fulfilled by edict. I want him to succeed, but winning the election was just the beginning.  His enemies know this even if some of his fans don't: the smear campaign against him is still going on.

Tuck Me into Your Procrustean Bed, Big Daddy

If you need more evidence that our discourse around "race" and "ethnicity" stinks to high heaven, look no further than the freakout over New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college applications.  Corey Robin had a good post about it on Facebook today.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a blip of a story that temporarily seized the media and folks on Facebook about Zohran Mamdani's college application, where he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American, while specifying very clearly that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. The media, Mamdani's opponents in the race, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American.

In fact, Mamdani is Asian American and African-American.  His parents are South Asian by ancestry, and his father was born in Uganda, as was Zohran.  Robin continued:

Long story short: the Mamdani family, especially on his father's side, firmly identified with being African. It was critical to their identity and family story, particularly when Idi Amin kicked out people of Indian descent, claiming that because they were not Black, they were not African. (If you've ever seen Mississippi Masala, which I saw when it came out and recently re-watched, it tells that story, and of course Mississippi Masala was made by Zohran's mother and Mahmood's wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair.) Mahmood Mamdani has written at length on the importance of his, and his family, being African, creating a world for themselves in Uganda and Tanzania, not as part of an Asian diaspora, but as Africans, or as Asian-Africans, if you will.

The ethnicity boxes on college applications (and just about everywhere these days) are notoriously Procrustean, like the ethnicity boxes for the US census.  What box should young Zohran have marked, since there evidently wasn't a "South Asian" one, and as Robin says, "African" was also legitimate.  Africans aren't "racially" monolithic anyway; due to the slave trade, most black Africans in the US were from sub-Saharan western Africa.  White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't "white" as "black," and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds.  Racial categories on the US census have varied over the years.

Consider another complicated case: what "race" or "ethnicity" are Latin Americans?  Many have predominantly European ancestry, though Spaniards haven't always counted as whites in the US.  But Germans and Poles have also contributed to the mix.  So have Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians.  Many have predominantly "Indian" or "Native American" ancestry, and speak indigenous languages as well as or instead of Spanish, though Americans tend to limit both of those categories to North American Indians.

I've told before of the diversity training session twenty years back at the Big Ten University where I worked, whose instructors told us that "Sunni" and "Shi'a" are ethnicities.  They definitely are not, any more than "Catholic" and "Protestant" are ethnicities.  I protested, and the instructors insisted that they were so.  So I let it go.  As I've also indicated before, I don't object to university diversity programs and policies on general principles, only to the ignorance and incompetence of the people who manage them.

I've been collecting anecdotes on this topic for a long time around here, such as the white liberals who thought it hilarious that a white American woman could set herself up as a Zen master, or who mock the Bible as the work of old white guys.  (Wait, wasn't it written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds?)  I wish I could track down the white liberals who declared that race is as real as nappy hair, but that claim seems to be lost.  If hair color or texture were "racial" markers, then my brothers and I (born to the same parents) would be of different races. 

Then there was the Congressperson who threw a tantrum when a Sikh was invited to deliver a prayer in the House of Representatives.  First she claimed he was Muslim, then when corrected she insisted that non-Christian prayers should not be allowed in Congress even though Muslims and other non-Christians have led prayer there before.  Do I really care that she doesn't have a fine-tuned knowledge of racial, ethnic, or religious difference?  No, not really.

The people who attacked Mamdani's choices on his college applications postured as good liberals concerned for the well-being of real blacks and Asians, though they showed that they didn't understand the issues involved, and didn't care.  They're just throwing any mud they can at him, in hopes that some of it will stick.  One would think that in a time of resurgent US racism, they'd be more circumspect, but of course not.

In the Court of the Ochre King

Another month down, and I haven't been productive, at least not here.  I've been too active, if anything, in comments under some videos on YouTube and Facebook.  I hope to bring some of those thoughts here.

Meanwhile, I found Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary uplifting.  But I quickly began to worry.  As with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' upset against Joseph Crowley in 2018, I noticed that many celebrants forgot that Mamdani won a primary, not a general election. She did win and go to Washington, and has so far managed to defeat Democratic party-hacks and MAGA scumbags hired to try to dislodge her.  I hope Mamdani will do as well, but the struggle isn't over yet.  The frenzy of bigotry being hurled at Mamdani, not only by Republicans but by Democratic elites, outstrips what I remember seeing aimed at AOC.  On the other hand, Mamdani has a little more political experience than she had, and seems well-prepared to take on his bigoted haters.  But I'm taking nothing for granted.

For an old guy, I have to concede that Donald Trump has a remarkable level of energy.  He travels around the world, he posts a flood of deranged, subliterate junk online, he's face-to-face with the media constantly.  His speaking seems to be getting rapidly less energetic and coherent, but overall he's not slowing down. That doesn't make him good, it makes him even more dangerous.  What chills me is how little even people I know who dislike Trump know about what is going on.  This is boosted by a poll I saw reported today, which found that "Nearly half (48%) of Americans haven’t heard anything about the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’" and "Only 8% of all Americans name Medicaid cuts as a detail of the bill they have heard about."  While the corporate media should be criticized harshly, I think my fellow citizens need to be responsible for their inattention to matters that will affect them.  As I think Ta Nehisi-Coates said: you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

Speaking of corporate media, NPR continues to appall me.  In the wake of the shooting of two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses by a MAGA assassin, Morning Edition's A Martinez baited one of their colleagues on June 17:

Martínez: If you have a gun, are you thinking about taking it with you when you go places? And if you don't, are you thinking about buying one?

Scholten: Personal protection is certainly top of mind for lawmakers today and especially after this incident. We are reviewing a lot of our own internal safety protocols to see what else we might be able to do to keep ourselves safe, even in our own home. Even with the best security, we see here that it wasn't enough to stop or wouldn't have necessarily been enough to to stop the shooter in this instance.

I encourage everyone to read the whole story, and even more, to listen to the audio so you can hear Martinez working himself up to a peak of excitement at the idea of gun battles at political events in Minnesota.  State Representative Hilary Scholten stayed calm throughout; Martinez, who often confuses news with sports and action movies, should be fired.

There's so much more, but this will do for now.

Traditional Values

So much going on, I can't keep up.  I'm too old for this!

Right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg fell back on a long-standing talking point the other day:

The left does criticize the countries that Goldberg deplores here.  Not always, of course, and not always as consistently as I could wish.  But overall in the US it's the center (or near-right, to label it more accurately) and the right (meaning practically off the scale) that embrace them.  Trump, for example, conspicuously left Saudi Arabia out of his first-term Muslim ban, along with the other nations in Goldberg's list, but the embrace is bipartisan.  

As for China, it was the well-known leftists, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who brought the Chinese Communist Party into the community of nations. It's usually crazy feminists and leftists who object to Islamic oppression of women, and the Right denounces them for their atheism and contempt for traditional values - until, as with George W. Bush, they decide to invade them ostensibly to protect the rights of women.  (Whatever objections Israel has to the Kingdom, they have nothing to do with its treatment of women.)

The same leftists also criticize our own country for its violations of human rights at home and abroad, and are accused of double standards about that.  Or we criticize reactionary violence against gay people, and are accused of applying corrupt Western values to traditional societies; also false, we criticized our own country first, and still keep having to do it. 

As other commentators pointed out, this question came up in the context of the New York City mayoral race.  Candidates were asked about their allegiance to Israel, which ought to be odd in a local election. Yes, New York is a major city with a sizable Jewish population, but foreign policy shouldn't be a central issue. 

The rest of Goldberg's rant is predictably disingenuous, ignoring Israel's record of violence against Palestinians and its neighbors, which is hardly in the distant past. I believe that Goldberg is also distorting Zohran Mamdani's remarks, and the question he was asked.  It wasn't about recognizing Israel diplomatically, though that is not an unfair question.  He was asked if he recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.  No country has a "right to exist," and it's not clear what "as a Jewish state" is supposed to mean.  You'd think that it's proper to criticize any country that defines itself in terms of ethnic or religious purity -- but as always, "we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: 'Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!' When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism!' quickly alternates with: 'Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!'" Again, the left, especially in the US, has a long history of rejecting the idea of race as the basis of a nation; if I reject the claim that the United States has a right to exist as a Christian nation, why wouldn't I reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish one?  It's the right that defends, even celebrates it, and that includes Jonah Goldberg in his defense of Israel.