Dear Commons Community,

I just finished reading,  A Black Women’s History of the United States, by Diana Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross.  Berry is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, and Gross is a professor of history at Rutgers University. It is an engaging book that documents how “African American women put their bodies and souls on the line for the cause of freedom.”  Berry and Gross detail well the contributions of African American women from the age of exploration in the 1500s to the present day.  While I was familiar with many of the women depicted in the 20^th century such Shirley Chisolm, I knew little about those in the earlier centuries.  I was grateful to Berry and Gross for filling a gap in my knowledge.   As one reviewer stated:  “It is an essential, important, and fundamental account that is a must-read for anyone to know the history of the United States in its fullest, truest, and most gut-wrenching reality.” 

As an aside, I read this book at the same time I was reading, Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language by Nicola Gardini. While both dealt with history, these two books could not be more different in subject matter and had my head swirling at times.

I have added A Black Women’s History… to my recommended readings in a graduate course I am teaching at Hunter College.  Below is a review courtesy of Long Star Literary Life.

Tony

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Long Start Literary Life

By Chris Manno

A Black Women’s History of the United States

February 4, 2020

If you think you had a pretty accurate picture of United States history—and I thought I did—this book will make you think again. Because like most, I did not know about significant blind spots, gaps, and omissions in what passed for US history before this meticulously researched and entirely accessible history crossed my desk. After reading this compact yet compelling book, I’m a believer: this is an essential, important, and fundamental account that is a must-read for anyone to know the history of the United States in its fullest, truest, and most gut-wrenching reality.

The focus is United States history—really, North American history, from the start—with the added dimension of black womanhood in all the critical and pivotal waypoints in seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century life on the continent. Black women enduring the early years of US history did so against a daily existence of bondage, disenfranchisement, injustice, and inequality, a crucial part of the colonial narrative heretofore largely ignored by historians.

The asymmetrical racial power balance was appalling, the reality of enslavement draconian, and the heartbreaking, unyielding oppression inhumane and soul-crushing. This history restores the historical voice to many courageous, relentless black women who resisted enslavement and colonialism to advocate freedom for their succeeding generations.

The authors chose a unique historical methodology that offers rich detail and layers of research-based narrative, then lets the reader draw conclusions. Rhetorical questions follow the clearly drawn history: How could a black woman feel about herself and her children in the face of rape, murder, denial, oppression, and inhumanity that was the colonial order which persisted for centuries? How would anyone feel—particularly the reader—newly apprised of the atrocity unmentioned or barely spoken of in conventional histories of the United States?

The narrative is heartbreaking mostly, hopeful certainly, and a fitting, long-overdue tribute to the largely nameless, faceless, but powerful and unrelenting black women whose stories leap from the pages of this history. The reader loses the blinders inherent in the typical US history’s narrow account of the inhumanity black women in particular had to bear: their reproductive life was commodified as a saleable labor source by slaveowners. The authors carefully and effectively link this atrocity to another—infanticide—in a way that transcends typical US history and underscores the loss of humanity in a country that tolerated slavery for centuries.

The only troublesome narrative issue I encountered was a question of viewpoint, not history: in chapter three, the historian’s voice is overshadowed by personal bias when the authors intrude in their very well-supported history with a statement regarding enslavement of black people by black people. “This is a difficult history to report,” the authors state, “as many of those who read it will place blame on black people for contributing to slavery.” This forces the history into the background and foregrounds a misplaced, at least in the historical voice, concern over a desired conclusion they wish to induce. But should historians have a rhetorical agenda? And should that overshadow the history itself at any point?

Regardless, A Black Women’s History of the United States is a rich, vital, and must-read addition to basic US history. “African American women put their bodies and souls on the line for the cause of freedom,” the authors tell us, and their thoroughly detailed history foregrounds that reality poignantly, uniquely, and accurately.

Dear Commons Community,

In high school (1961-1965), I completed a four-year Latin sequence in three years and translated the works of authors such as Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil.  Every night, we were assigned a passage in Latin to read and had to be ready to discuss it the next day in class. For some reason, I took to this exercise and enjoyed the challenge of breaking down the declensions and conjugations that are the basis for Latin grammar.  It was very helpful later on in life especially as I studied other languages namely Spanish and French.  Also the Latin vocabulary provides the roots for many English words.   

About a month ago, I decide to read Nicola Gardini’s Long Live Latin:  The Pleasures of a Useless Language.  Gardini is a professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and knows his subject well.  In this book, he shares his deep love for Latin and tries to make the case for why it is still important in modern times. He focuses on its beauty, organization,  and logic. I found it full of insights into language in general and it kept taking me back to my high school days.  Anyone who has ever studied Latin, will find Gardini’s treatment a deep yet fun read.  For those who haven’t studied Latin, it will be tough going.  Below is a review that captures a lot of this book’s essence.

Tony

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National Review

Why Study Latin?

By Diane Scharper

Oxford professor Nicola Gardini urges people to read and study Latin. He believes that Latin is the antidote for the modern age, which seems transfixed by the spontaneous, the easy, and the ephemeral.

His new book, Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language, argues that Latin combines truth and beauty with the timelessness of art. People should study Latin for all the reasons people should read literature.

In his Confessions, St. Augustine (354–430 C.E.) “placed the learning of Latin under God’s purview,” Gardini writes. Augustine believed Latin drew a child closer to God, “the truest truth.”

Gardini argues that Latin contains the logic and precision of math. He uses Caesar’s De bello Gallico as an example of language trying to “re-create the world mathematically and geometrically, its sentences organized according to precise cause-and-effect relationships.”

The syntax of Latin stimulates logical reasoning, Gardini says. Its morphology jogs memory. Most important, Latin is the language of civilization. “The western world was created on its back. . . . Inscribed in Latin are the secrets of our deepest identity.”

According to Gardini, those secrets are concerned with the power of words to enhance thought. Words, he says, are humanity’s greatest gift, and literature heightens the value of that gift. Referencing Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gardini says that Latin is able to link the smallest blip “to the cosmic order, which . . . invests all with . . . a profundity that stretch[es] beyond the terrestrial.”

Early on, Gardini discusses Nicolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) and his warmly felt connection to Roman literature. Author of The Prince and the father of modern political theory, Machiavelli, Gardini says, occasionally took a break from politics and read the Latin classics.

As Machiavelli describes it, he didn’t just read, he encountered the authors of these ancient books: “I speak to them without inhibition,” he wrote in 1513 to a friend, “and [I] ask them the reasons behind their actions; and in their humanity, they reply.”

Machiavelli’s approach evidently inspired Gardini, who crafts each chapter so that it feels like an encounter. Offering numerous personal anecdotes from his own life, Gardini’s writing is warm and conversational yet scholarly.

His text considers the form, style, purpose, influence, and themes found in the works of these authors; quotes liberally from their work; and offers Gardini’s own translations while noting the rhetorical devices and figurative language appearing in the original Latin.

Calling his book both an ode and an essay, Gardini defends Latin from those who consider the subject superfluous. He is especially drawn to Latin’s poetic qualities and frequently comments on the musicality of the language with its figures of sound as well as its metaphors, which he says have an almost magical effect.

Studying Latin, Gardini says, taught him the importance of discrete sounds and syllables. It showed him “the importance of musical language, the soul of poetry.” Words he used every day began “disassembling in my mind and swirling around like petals in the air,” Gardini writes in a nod to poetry

Gardini suggests that his book is for a general reader—especially for young students. But it’s hard to imagine many young students from the U.S. responding well to the “critical and aesthetic genius” of a writer like Horace (65 B.C.E.–8 C.E.) or to his Ars Poetica, excerpts of which Gardini translates and discusses. As Gardini observes, “There’s nothing easy about Horace’s Latin, even when it’s dictated to by occasion.”  Yet Horace’s advice for poets would resonate in today’s university writing courses: “Poetry is like painting: some things catch you / more if you stand in front of them, other things from a distance.”

The book is somewhat hard to follow because Gardini doesn’t present his material in chronological order. The authors don’t appear as they would in a history of Latin literature. Instead, he shows them in media res, in what he calls, “linguistic instances, . . . as examples of what Latin has gained at a certain moment . . . and handed down to its long—and still living—tradition.” But this is a quibble with an important and informative book.

Currently, Gardini teaches Renaissance literature, which he describes as heavily dependent on Latin. Given that college semesters consist of approximately 22 classes and that Gardini is a visiting professor (at Oxford University, Columbia University, etc.) it’s conceivable that this book, which contains 22 chapters (each focusing on one writer or one quality of Latin), was inspired by a syllabus that he created for a Latin literature course.

Latin, as Gardini points out in the early chapters, is used in science, law, and formal documents—and in religious worship, which is where Gardini first heard the language when his mother recited the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and other prayers. Gardini, though, doesn’t appreciate church Latin as much he does literary Latin, which is the focus of this book. He emphasizes the influence that Latin literature had on figures as diverse as St. Jerome, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Castiglione, Dante, Milton, Nietzsche, J. D. McClatchy, Margaret Atwood, and others.

Gardini is passionate about his subject and tends to be wordy. Wishing to inspire passion in his readers, he repeats himself several times, each time becoming (metaphorically) louder. He seems fond of alliteration and points out that this figure of sound as well as repetition were favorites of Roman poets. He seems to prefer the Roman poets over its prose writers.

Gardini begins with a discussion of Old Latin authors, mentioning the playwright Plautus (250–184 B.C.E.), whose comedies influenced dramatists through the ages including William Shakespeare (in The Comedy of Errors), George Bernard Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht. Gardini also notes that Cato the Elder (234–149 B.C.E.) produced a vast body of work, but only a farming manual, De agri cultura, survives. Gardini considers the work the beginning of Latin literature and an influence for “the giant Virgil” and his Aeneid.

Poetry, Gardini says, represents the human word at its finest, and in a chapter on Virgil’s Eclogues, Gardini argues that the word “umbra,” meaning “shadow,” is “the most beautiful word in the Latin language.” In the word, he says, “the semantic and emotive ambivalence of Virgil’s Latin finds its most eloquent symbol.”

Gardini admires the poet Catullus (87–54 B.C.E.), considering him to be one of the greatest influences on Western poetry. Today, only 116 of his poems survive, including “The Death of Lesbia’s Sparrow,” which Gardini calls “one of the most celebrated texts in Western literature.”

Although Gardini mentions the inspiration of goddesses, the only woman quoted here is Sappho, whose poetry influenced the father of Latin (and all) poetry, Ennius (239 B.C.E. –169), who is noted for the epic poem Annales. Gardini calls Ennius “the linguistic conscience” of Latin poetry.

“Of all the ancient writers,” Gardini says, Seneca (4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.), “the Stoic philosopher, is the one who has most taught me how to live.” Gardini uses as testimony excerpts from Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. For example: “All we are surrounded by is one and it is god; and we are its allies and its limbs.”

“Virgil [(70 B.C.E. to 19 C.E.)],” he continues, “moves me; Tacitus [(56 to 120 C.E.)] draws me toward cruelty; Lucretius [(94 to 52 B.C.E.)] sends me whirling and drifting and sinking; Cicero [(106 to 43 B.C.E.)] has me dreaming of perfection in all—thought, speech, behavior. Seneca teaches me happiness.”

Looking at Cicero, Gardini notes that Petrarch considered him “the supreme father of the Latin language.” Cicero’s Latin, according to Gardini, is “self-describing and self-analyzing”; it debates and speculates while thoroughly examining every aspect of a discussion. Cicero disdained excessive imagery but appreciated the just-right metaphor—“stimulating our imagination and engaging . . . our senses, particularly our vision.”

Above all, Cicero advocated clarity of expression, as can be seen in his advice to writers and orators: “Oratio . . . lumen adhere rebus debet.”

Or, as Gardini translates it, “Language must shed light on things.”

Dear Commons Community,

NBC News and ABC News are reporting that several hundred former aides to President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain announced yesterday that they are endorsing Joe Biden for president.

“Given the incumbent president’s lack of competent leadership, his efforts to aggravate rather than bridge divisions among Americans, and his failure to uphold American values, we believe the election of former Vice President Biden is clearly in the national interest,” they said in a letter.

As president, Biden would lead a comprehensive effort to contain the coronavirus in the U.S., they said.

Some of McCain’s former aides who signed the letter include Mark Salter, the senator’s former chief of staff; Christian Ferry, who was deputy manager for McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign; Joe Donoghue, the senator’s former legislative director; and Mike Murphy, a GOP political consultant who was a strategist on McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.

Trump and McCain frequently clashed, including over efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

This endorsement, the latest in a string of GOP statements of support for Biden, comes two days after the two-year anniversary of McCain’s death from brain cancer.

Earlier this week, than two dozen former Republican Congress members backed Biden for president, and at the Democratic National Convention last week, several other Republicans endorsed the former vice president. They included former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former eBay and Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman and former Rep. Susan Molinari of New York, who was among those on the list the Biden campaign released Monday.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I watched parts of the Republican National Convention last night.   I could not watch it all given it was the first night of the new semester and my online class on Major Issues in Contemporary Education that ended at 9:30 pm. Also Trump’s closing speech (70 minutes) went on far too long and became a rather boring spectacle. Below is a recap of the highlights of the evening courtesy of several media outlets and compiled by Yahoo News.

Tony

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President Donald Trump took center stage on the final night of the Republican National Convention and delivered a speech that sought to assure voters that despite more than 180,000 COVID-19 deaths and a badly damaged U.S. economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, he had made good on his promise to “make America great again.” Like incumbent presidents before him, he also spent much of his speech laying out his proposed agenda for a second term. He saved plenty of time to attack Joe Biden, the man hoping to succeed him in the White House.

Here are several key takeaways from day four of the RNC, whose theme was “America, Land of Greatness”:

Flouting coronavirus guidelines, Trump delivers defiant acceptance speech

In a defiant speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination that went on for more than an hour and contained 5,600 words, Trump repeatedly mocked his opponent and trolled his political enemies.

Gesturing to the White House behind him, an unprecedented setting for a political convention speech — and one that Democrats say was in violation of the Hatch Act — Trump chided the opposing party. “The fact is, I’m here,” he said. “What’s the name of that building? But I’ll say it differently. The fact is: We’re here, and they’re not.” His crowd of nearly 1,500 supporters, seated closely together on the White House South Lawn, cheered the insult.

“Joe Biden may claim he is an ally of the light, but when it comes to his agenda, Biden wants to keep us completely in the dark,” Trump joked at another point. “He doesn’t have a clue.”

In some respects, Trump’s entire speech felt like a protest against the social-distancing restrictions intended to slow the spread of the virus, which he has been chafing under for so long. His campaign issued a statement Thursday saying it was following “strict protocols.” It did not specify, though, which protocols were being followed, and many in the audience did not wear masks.

Like the speakers on the RNC schedule this week, Trump painted the choice between him and Biden in stark and absolute terms. “This election will decide whether we save the American dream, or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny,” he said, as protesters outside the White House leaned on car horns and blew vuvuzelas in the background.

When he did speak about the pandemic, the single biggest threat to his chances of being reelected, Trump depicted a string of successes. Nevertheless, the United States has reported far more cases and deaths from the virus than any other country.

“We developed, from scratch, the largest and most advanced testing system in the world. America has tested more than every country in Europe put together, and more than every nation in the Western Hemisphere combined. We have conducted 40 million more tests than the next closest nation,” Trump said. “We developed a wide array of effective treatments, including a powerful antibody treatment known as convalescent plasma that will save thousands of lives. Thanks to advances we have pioneered, the fatality rate has been reduced by 80 percent since April.”

He did not mention that the head of the FDA recently walked back earlier remarks in which he seemed to endorse Trump’s positive assessment of the promise of convalescent plasma. Recent results have apparently yet to show the results the president has claimed.

The president was much more comfortable attacking Biden and the liberal Democrats he portrayed as controlling his rival.

“How can the Democrat Party lead our country when they spend so much time tearing down our country?” Trump asked at one point. He also quipped, “Joe Biden’s agenda is made in China. My agenda is made in the U.S.A.” Biden, meanwhile, has also called for an increase in American manufacturing.

As to Trump’s agenda for a second term, he made a long list of pledges, some of them difficult to square with reality. Trump promised to expand charter schools, hire more police officers (something that in fact falls to local jurisdictions), ban “sanctuary cities” and bolster the manufacturing sector. He said he would reduce taxes and regulations “at levels not seen before” and create 10 million new jobs (although the country has lost millions of jobs during his first term, thanks to the virus).

Also on his list: to strike down terrorists, appoint more conservative judges (which would be more difficult if the Democrats were to retake control of the Senate) and to protect Medicare and Social Security (which are threatened by his own spending proposals). Meanwhile, he said he would protect medical coverage for preexisting conditions (despite his administration’s lawsuit to kill the Affordable Care Act), expand oil drilling and land the first woman on the moon.

The central message of the convention and of Trump’s speech was that Biden is not, in fact, a moderate Democrat, but a radical “Trojan horse” controlled by people intent on tearing the country to shreds.

Standout speaker Ann Dorn

One standout moment at Thursday’s convention came courtesy of Ann Dorn, the widow of a retired St. Louis police captain who was fatally shot by looters in June amid unrest after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

It was a deeply personal speech.

“Violence and destruction are not legitimate forms of protest,” said Dorn, her voice breaking with emotion as she recounted how her husband, a retired Black police captain, David Dorn, 77, was killed. “They do not safeguard Black lives. They destroy them.

“I relive that horror in my mind every single day,” she said, often close to tears. “My hope is that having you relive it with me now will help shake this country from the nightmare we are witnessing in our cities and bring about positive, peaceful change.”

Her speech was undeniably powerful, offering a graphic illustration of the consequences of lawlessness that Republicans at the convention had warned about all week.

“How did we get to this point where so many young people are so callous and indifferent towards human life?” she asked. “This isn’t a video game where you can commit mayhem and then hit ‘Reset’ and bring all the characters back to life. David is never coming back. He was murdered by people who didn’t know, and didn’t care, that he would have done anything to help them.”

At the same time, Dorn’s decision to tell her story at the RNC did not sit well with her two stepdaughters.

“We know his wife is a Trump supporter, but he was not,” Dorn’s daughter Debra White told the St. Louis American. “He frequently said they were not able to talk about politics because they were at the opposite ends of the spectrum. I know he would not want his legacy to be for his death to be used to further Trump’s law-and-order agenda.”

Giuliani rails against Black Lives Matter

Giuliani, never one to pull his punches, declared: “If Biden is elected, along with the Democrats who are unwilling to speak out against this anarchy, then the crime wave will intensify and spread from cities and towns to suburbs and beyond.”

He did, however, go even further than many other Republican speakers this week, portraying Biden as a pawn of “Bernie, AOC, Pelosi, Black Lives Matter and his party’s entire left wing.” The inclusion of Black Lives Matter with the GOP’s list of usual suspects was noteworthy, and Giuliani went on to elaborate a theory implicating antifa, the umbrella term for left-wing groups that sometimes engage in street brawls, in a more sinister conspiracy.

“It seemed for a few brief shining moments like Democrat and Republican leaders would come together with a unified proposal to reduce police misconduct,” Giuliani said. “This possibility was very dangerous to the left. They had a president to beat and a country to destroy, and although a bipartisan coalition agreeing on action against police brutality would be very valuable for the country, it would also make President Trump appear to be an effective leader. So, BLM and antifa sprang into action, and in a flash, hijacked the protests into vicious, brutal riots.”

Twice in his speech, Giuliani conflated Black Lives Matter with antifa.

“The single biggest signal to encourage wanton lawlessness was surrendering a police headquarters to criminals in Minneapolis,” he said. “From then on BLM, antifa and their criminal co-conspirators were in charge.”

Giuliani closed his remarks by saying, “Mr. President, make our nation safe again.”

It’s a theme Trump touched on at a different RNC. In his GOP acceptance speech four years ago, Trump had pledged that in his first term: “Beginning on Jan. 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”

Dear Commons Community,

Last night, the Republican National Convention (RNC) came to a close with a lot more vitrol coming from the likes of Rudy Guiliani and Donald Trump.  They represented what David Brooks termed a “mean world” in his New York Times column this morning.  Brooks compared the performances of the Bidens and Trumps over the past two weeks as:  “The Biden family is emotionally open, rendered vulnerable by tragedy and driven by a powerful desire to connect. The Trump family is emotionally closed, isolated by enmity and driven by a powerful desire to dominate.”  Unfortunately, Brooks sees “the mean world” as coming to dominate Washington politics.

Brooks concludes:

“The upshot of the mean world war is the obliteration of normal politics, the hollowing out of the center and the degradation of public morality. Under the cover of this souped-up, screw-or-be-screwed mentality, norms are eviscerated, truth is massacred, bigotry is justified and politics turns into a struggle to culturally obliterate the other side.

Joe Biden is going to have to take on this widespread anxiety about personal safety by insisting that the real source of danger is Trump’s chaotic incompetence and that Trump’s mean world extremism is corrosive to the social order. When the social order dissolves, people suffer.

Biden could point out that disorder from left and right will only accelerate so long as Trump is in the White House. He could make clear that compassion is not weakness, that the toughest thing is to stand in a hailstorm of hatred and insist on kindness and consideration.

In a civilized society law and order is not established with a bullying jackboot. Law and order is established through the calm, regular enforcement of decency, so people across society behave like stable, honorable human beings.”

Brooks entire column is below.  It would be good for Joe Biden and his camp to read it carefully.

Tony

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New York Times

David Brooks

August 28, 2020

Trump and the Politics of ‘Mean World’

I’ve been thinking about the two families we’ve encountered over the past two weeks.

Occasionally this week one of the female members of the Trump family would struggle to stick her head above the muck of her family’s values and display some humanity. But Donald, Don Jr. and Eric showed no such impulse.

Trump family values are mean world values. Mean world syndrome was a concept conceived in the 1970s by the communications professor George Gerbner. His idea was that people who see relentless violence on television begin to perceive the world as being more dangerous than it really is.

By the 1990s it was no longer violent programing that drove mean world culture, but reality television. That’s an entire industry designed to give the impression that human beings are inherently manipulative, selfish and petty. If you grow up watching those programs, or starring in them, naturally you believe that other people are fundamentally untrustworthy.

These days mean world culture is everywhere. It’s a siege mentality. Menace is everywhere. We’re on the brink of the cataclysm. This week’s Republican convention was a four-day cavalcade of the mean world alarmism.

Mean world thrives on fear and perpetuates itself by exaggerating fear. Its rhetorical ploy is catastrophizing and its tone is apocalyptic. The Democrats are not just wrong, many speakers asserted this week, they are “subverting our republic,” abolishing the suburbs, destroying Western civilization and establishing a Castro-style communist dictatorship. The Democrats, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida said, want to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.”

The St. Louis couple Mark and Patricia McCloskey are the team mascots of mean world. They see Black Lives Matter protesters walking past their mansion and decide they’re in the middle of a race war. They come out waving their guns.

Mean world transforms people. When Kimberly Guilfoyle appeared on the Charlie Rose Show in 2004 with her husband at the time, Gavin Newsom, now the governor of California, she seemed eminently normal and kind. But now she’s playing by mean world rules and at the G.O.P. convention she seemed like a bellowing lunatic.

The implicit argument of the Republican convention was that Joe Biden is too old, or soft, or compassionate to survive in mean world. He’ll cower before rising crime rates. He’ll get pushed around by the hard left. He’ll get swallowed in the maelstrom. “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” is how Mike Pence put it.

This is the Republicans’ strongest argument, especially if murder rates continue to soar and if Portland and Kenosha-style mayhem becomes commonplace this fall. Democrats have foolishly allowed themselves to be portrayed as the enemies of policing. There’s a lot of fear floating around America right now, available to be exploited by someone.

But let’s also be clear about what the real threats are. In many ways this election is about two rival versions of threat perception. It will be won by whichever party more persuasively identifies what we should fear.

Yes, there have been disgraceful scenes of far left physical and verbal brutality, which get magnified on Twitter. The far bigger threat, however, is that we have a president too busy fighting a culture war to respond to a pandemic and an economic crisis, or even to perform basic governance. What part of 180,000 coronavirus dead does Donald Trump not understand?

The larger threat is that we’re caught in a polarization cascade. Mean world fanatics — on the left and right — are playing a mutually beneficial game. Trumpian chaos justifies and magnifies the woke mobs on the left. Woke mobs magnify and justify Trumpian authoritarianism on the right.

The upshot of the mean world war is the obliteration of normal politics, the hollowing out of the center and the degradation of public morality. Under the cover of this souped-up, screw-or-be-screwed mentality, norms are eviscerated, truth is massacred, bigotry is justified and politics turns into a struggle to culturally obliterate the other side.

Joe Biden is going to have to take on this widespread anxiety about personal safety by insisting that the real source of danger is Trump’s chaotic incompetence and that Trump’s mean world extremism is corrosive to the social order. When the social order dissolves, people suffer.

Biden could point out that disorder from left and right will only accelerate so long as Trump is in the White House. He could make clear that compassion is not weakness, that the toughest thing is to stand in a hailstorm of hatred and insist on kindness and consideration.

In a civilized society law and order is not established with a bullying jackboot. Law and order is established through the calm, regular enforcement of decency, so people across society behave like stable, honorable human beings.

Dear Commons Community,

The National Basketball Association’s playoffs came to an abrupt halt last night after players boycotted scheduled games to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, by a white police officer.

What began with a boycott carried out by a single professional basketball team quickly spread across the league and the rest of the sports world, with two other NBA games and two Major League Baseball games called off as additional players joined the cause.

The Milwaukee Bucks were supposed to play the fifth game of their first-round series against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday afternoon, but Bucks players refused to leave the locker room for the start of the game. After initially warming up in the arena, players for the Magic walked off the court before the scheduled tip-off. With other teams reportedly planning similar boycotts in upcoming games, the NBA made the decision to cancel Wednesday’s entire slate of playoff games.

“Some things are bigger than basketball,” Alex Lasry, the Bucks’ senior vice president, said in a statement. “The stand taken today by the players and (the organization) shows that we’re fed up. Enough is enough. Change needs to happen. I’m incredibly proud of our guys and we stand 100 percent behind our players ready to assist and bring about real change.”

Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Blake was shot in the back at point-blank range at least seven times on Sunday afternoon, is about 30 miles south of Milwaukee. The small city has been wracked by violent protests in the days since Blake’s shooting, culminating in the destruction of several businesses and the deaths of at least two people.

The Milwaukee Brewers, a Major League Baseball team, canceled their game on Wednesday evening in order to protest Blake’s shooting. Other baseball teams are reportedly considering boycotting games as well.

The WNBA and MLS also cancelled games that were scheduled for last night.

NBA players and coaches have spent the past few days speaking out about Blake’s shooting. On Monday, Chis Paul of the Oklahoma City Thunder—who also happens to be the president of the NBA Players Association—used a postgame interview to share his thoughts on what had taken place in Kenosha on Sunday.

“It’s not right. It’s not right,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in the country. Sports—it’s cool, it’s good…but there are the real issues we have to start addressing.”

And on Tuesday night, it was Los Angeles Clippers head coach Doc Rivers who focused his postgame news conference on how police violence against black Americans has been politicized.

Shortly after the Bucks-Magic game was postponed Wednesday, superstar Lebron James weighed in on Twitter.

When the NBA restarted its season after a months-long COVID-19 disruption, the league allowed players to wear pre-approved political statements on the back of their jerseys. Many players have opted to wear expressions supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and other statements calling attention to police violence towards black Americans. The court where the NBA is playing all its playoffs games—at the Walt Disney World resort near Orlando, Florida, inside a so-called “bubble” to protect against the spread of COVID-19—is painted with the phrase “Black Lives Matter.“

On Wednesday, those sentiments jumped beyond what the league likely intended. Adrian Wojnarowski, an ESPN reporter covering the NBA playoffs, wrote on Twitter that the players’ boycott caught team owners and league officials by surprise. “This is a pivot point for the NBA and professional sports in North America,” he wrote.

It remains to be seen what will come of Wednesday’s boycott, or whether the protests will disrupt more games in the days to come. Already, the incident has demonstrated how much power professional athletes have to call attention to issues that stretch far beyond the arenas and playing fields. In 1968, some of the NBA’s star players discussed a similar boycott in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but couldn’t stir up enough support to make it happen.

Times have clearly changed. But as professional athletes made clear on Wednesday, they have not changed enough.

Joe Biden has commented (see video below) on the Jacob Blake killing and asked for the country to “unite and heal.”  We have heard practically nothing from Donald Trump on Jacob Blake during the three nights of the Republican National Convention.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Hurricane Laura pounded the Gulf Coast for hours last night with ferocious wind, torrential rains and rising seawater as it roared ashore over southwestern Louisiana near the Texas border as a life-threatening storm.

Authorities had ordered coastal residents to evacuate, but not everyone did in an area that was devastated by Rita in 2005. As reported by NBC and other various news agencies.

“There are some people still in town and people are calling … but there ain’t no way to get to them,” Tony Guillory, president of the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, said early Thursday morning over the phone as he hunkered down in a Lake Charles government building that was shaking from the storm.

Guillory said he hopes those stranded can be rescued later Thursday but he fears that blocked roads, downed power lines and flooding could delay that process.

With more than 290,000 homes and businesses without power in the two states, near-constant lightning provided the only light for some.

Officials said search and rescue missions would begin as soon as conditions allowed, along with damage assessments.

The National Hurricane Center said the storm, which intensified rapidly Wednesday before plowing into land with sustained winds of 150 mph (241 kph), came ashore at 1 a.m. CDT as a Category 4 hurricane near Cameron, a 400-person community about 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of the Texas border.

“Potentially catastrophic impacts will continue,” forecasters said in an ominous warning.

Early Thursday, Laura was centered about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north-northwest of Lake Charles and moving north at 15 mph (24 kph). It weakened to a Category 3 storm with maximum sustained winds of 120 mph (195 kph) a few hours after making landfall.

More than 580,000 coastal residents were under orders to flee in the largest evacuation since the coronavirus pandemic began and many did, filling hotels and sleeping in cars since officials didn’t want to open mass shelters and worsen the spread of COVID-19.

But in Cameron Parish, where Laura came ashore, officials said at least 150 people refused pleas to leave and planned to weather the storm in everything from elevated homes to recreational vehicles. The result could be deadly since forecasters said the parish could be completely covered by ocean water.

“It’s a very sad situation,” said Ashley Buller, assistant director of emergency preparedness. “We did everything we could to encourage them to leave.”

Becky Clements, 56, didn’t take chances; she evacuated from Lake Charles after hearing that it could take a direct hit. With memories of the destruction almost 15 years ago by Hurricane Rita, she and her family found an Airbnb hundreds of miles inland.

“The devastation afterward in our town and that whole corner of the state was just awful,” Clements recalled Wednesday. “Whole communities were washed away, never to exist again.”

Forecasters expected a weakened Laura to move northward through Louisiana and cause widespread flash flooding in states far from the coast. After turning eastward and reaching the Atlantic Ocean, it could again become a tropical storm and threaten the Northeast.

Laura hit the U.S. after killing nearly two dozen people on the island of Hispaniola, including 20 in Haiti and three in the Dominican Republic, where it knocked out power and caused intense flooding.

Laura was the seventh named storm to strike the U.S. this year, setting a new record for U.S. landfalls by the end of August. The old record was six in 1886 and 1916, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A white, 17-year-old Donald Trump and police admirer was arrested Wednesday after two people were shot to death during a third straight night of protests in Kenosha over the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake.

Kyle Rittenhouse, of Antioch, Illinois, was taken into custody in Illinois on suspicion of first-degree intentional homicide. Antioch is about 15 miles from Kenosha.

Two people were killed Tuesday night and a third was wounded in an attack apparently carried out by a young white man who was caught on cellphone video opening fire in the middle of the street with a semi-automatic rifle.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“I just killed somebody,” the gunman could be heard saying at one point during the rampage that erupted just before midnight.

In the wake of the killings, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers authorized the sending of 500 members of the National Guard to Kenosha, doubling the number of troops. The governor’s office said he is working with other states to bring in additional National Guard members and law officers. Authorities also announced a 7 p.m. curfew, an hour earlier than the night before.

“A senseless tragedy like this cannot happen again,” the governor, a Democrat, said in a statement. “I again ask those who choose to exercise their First Amendment rights please do so peacefully and safely, as so many did last night. I also ask the individuals who are not there to exercise those rights to please stay home and let local first responders, law enforcement and members of the Wisconsin National Guard do their jobs.”

In Washington, the Justice Department said it is sending in the FBI and federal marshals in response to the unrest.

The dead were identified only as 26-year-old Silver Lake, Wisconsin, resident and a 36-year-old from Kenosha. The wounded person, a 36-year-old from West Allis, Wisconsin, was expected to survive, police said.

“We were all chanting ‘Black lives matter’ at the gas station and then we heard, boom, boom, and I told my friend, `‘That’s not fireworks,’” 19-year-old protester Devin Scott told the Chicago Tribune. “And then this guy with this huge gun runs by us in the middle of the street and people are yelling, ‘He shot someone! He shot someone!’ And everyone is trying to fight the guy, chasing him and then he started shooting again.”

Scott said he cradled a lifeless victim in his arms, and a woman started performing CPR, but “I don’t think he made it.”

According to witness accounts and video footage, police apparently let the young man responsible for the shootings walk past them with a rifle over his shoulder and his hands in the air as members of the crowd were yelling for him to be arrested because he had shot people.

As for how that happened, Sheriff David Beth portrayed a chaotic, high-stress scene, with screaming, chanting, nonstop radio traffic and “people running all over the place” — conditions that he said can cause “tunnel vision” among law officers.

Rittenhouse was assigned a public defender in Illinois for a hearing Friday on his transfer to Wisconsin. The public defender’s office had no comment. Under Wisconsin law, anyone 17 or older is treated as an adult in the criminal justice system.

Rittenhouse’s social media presence is filled with him posing with weapons, posting “Blue Lives Matter,” and supporting Trump for president. Footage from a Des Moines, Iowa, rally on Jan. 30 shows Rittenhouse feet away from the president, in the front row, to the left of the podium. He posted a TikTok video from the event. In a photograph posted by his mother, he is wearing what appears to be a blue law enforcement uniform as well as the kind of brimmed hat that state troopers wear.

The sheriff told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that armed vigilantes had been patrolling Kenosha’s streets in recent nights, but he did not know if the gunman was among them. However, video taken before the shooting shows police tossing bottled water from an armored vehicle to what appear to be armed civilians walking the streets. And one of them appears to be the gunman.

“We appreciate you being here,” an officer is heard saying to the group over a loudspeaker.

The sheriff later defended officers by saying, “Our deputies would toss water to anybody.”

Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, said in an interview with the news program “Democracy Now!” that the shootings were not surprising and that white militias have been ignored for too long.

“How many times across this country do you see armed gunmen, protesting, walking into state Capitols, and everybody just thinks it’s OK?” Barnes said. “People treat that like it’s some kind of normal activity that people are walking around with assault rifles.”

In Wisconsin, it is legal for people 18 and over to openly carry a gun, with no license required.

Witness accounts and video indicate the shootings took place in two stages: The gunman first shot someone at a car lot, then jogged away, stumbled and fell in the street, and opened fire again as members of the crowd closed in him.

A witness, Julio Rosas, 24, said that when the gunman stumbled, “two people jumped onto him and there was a struggle for control of his rifle. At that point during the struggle, he just began to fire multiple rounds and that dispersed people near him.”

“The rifle was being jerked around in all directions while it was being fired,” Rosas said.

Sam Dirks, 22, from Milwaukee, said he had seen the suspected gunman earlier in the evening, and he was yelling at some of the protesters.

“He was definitely very agitated. He was pacing around, just pointing his gun in general. Not necessarily at anyone specifically,” Dirks said.

Blake, 29, was shot, apparently in the back, on Sunday as he leaned into his SUV, three of his children seated inside. Kenosha police have said little about what happened other than that they were responding to a domestic dispute. They have not said whether Blake was armed, and they have not disclosed the race of the three officers on the scene.

On Tuesday, Ben Crump, the lawyer for Blake’s family, said it would “take a miracle” for Blake to walk again. He called for the officer who opened fire to be arrested and for the others involved to lose their jobs.

The shooting was captured on cellphone video and ignited new protests in the U.S. three months after the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer touched off a nationwide reckoning over racial injustice.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden posted a video saying he had spoken with Blake’s parents and other family members.

“What I saw on that video makes me sick,” Biden said. “Once again, a Black man, Jacob Blake, has been shot by the police in broad daylight, with the whole world watching.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times conducted a survey of more than 1,500 American colleges and universities that has revealed at least 26,000 cases and 64 deaths since the pandemic began.  The Times has also provided an interactive website where visitors can click on a college and see the results of the survey.  The list below represents the fifteen colleges with the highest number of cases of coronavirus.

This data shows where the virus has been identified over the course of the pandemic, not necessarily where it is prevalent now. The Times has counted more than 20,000 additional cases at colleges since late July. Many of those are new infections from this month, but others may have emerged earlier in the pandemic. Some universities just started reporting data, and The Times contacted others for the first time in August.

Because colleges report data differently, and because cases continued to emerge even in the months when most campuses were closed, The Times is counting all reported cases since the start of the pandemic.

With no national tracking system, colleges are making their own rules for how to tally cases. While this is believed to be the most comprehensive survey available, it is also an undercount. Among the colleges contacted by The Times, many published case information online or responded to requests for case numbers, but at least 600 others ignored inquiries or refused to answer questions. More than 150 have reported zero cases.

Given the disparities in size and transparency among universities, this data should not be used to make campus-to-campus comparisons. Some colleges remove people from their tallies once they recover. Some only report tests performed on campus. And some initially provided data but then stopped.

There are logical explanations for why some universities have so many cases. Many of them, including Central Florida, Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin, have some of the country’s largest student bodies. Others with high case totals, including the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the University of Connecticut and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, count students or employees who work in health care and are at greater risk of exposure.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning identifying how the coronavirus pandemic has shifted the way institutions of higher education operate, altered the college experience for students, and triggered protests by faculty members and staff against plans to reopen in the fall.  It has also affected the economies and normal operations of the towns that rely on their local colleges.

The data below paint a picture of the many ways that Covid-19 has tested higher ed, strained its students and work force, and spilled outward into surrounding communities, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Tony

——————————————————————————————————————

231

Class-action lawsuits filed by students to receive tuition or fee refunds

When college campuses shifted to remote learning in the spring, students and parents soon turned to the courts to make a customer-service complaint. The gist of their grievance? They didn’t get what they paid for.

As of August 26, more than 230 breach-of-contract lawsuits have been filed against institutions like the Universities of Kansas, Miami, and Washington, and Yale University, according to a law firm that has been tracking the litigation. Both university systems in California have been targeted as well. Some of the cases have been dismissed or withdrawn, including lawsuits against the governing board of Arizona’s three public institutions and institutions in the University of North Carolina system.

As more colleges make last-minute pivots to online instruction this fall, it seems likely that the number of suits will increase.

303%

Increase in student requests for assistance from Lehman College’s food bank

Lehman students line up for a grocery giveaway organized by the Bronx college’s food bank during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many students at Lehman College work to support themselves and their families. So when nonessential businesses in New York City were closed in the spring, and many students lost their sources of income, food insecurity followed.

Before the pandemic, the food bank served about 80 students a week. After the city shut down, that number jumped to 322.

Hunger was a widespread issue among college students even before the coronavirus surfaced. Nearly 40 percent of students reported being food insecure in the last 30 days, according to a survey conducted in 2019 by the Hope Center, which studies food and housing insecurity among undergraduates.

3 million

Disposable masks purchased by Ohio State University

Like everyone else, colleges are stocking up on hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. At Ohio State, officials tried to get ahead of the huge global demand for personal protective equipment.

Along with disposable masks, the university bought three million bottles of hand sanitizer, 300,000 cloth masks, 110,000 thermometers, and about 500,000 packs of disposable wipes. Then came the work of assembling return-to-campus safety kits for students, faculty, and staff.

As the start of classes approached on August 25, the university had assembled more than 85,000 kits — one disposable mask, two reusable masks, a thermometer, disinfectant wipes, and hand sanitizer. More than 64,000 of the kits were distributed to residence halls, regional campuses, and off-campus housing, said Karina S. Brown, Ohio State’s director of communications. Another 14,000 disposable masks went to libraries, for students who might show up without one.

312

Layoffs at the University of Texas at San Antonio

In the early summer, a projected $35.8-million revenue shortfall for the 2021 fiscal year loomed large. With reductions in state appropriations forecast for future years, the university said job cuts were necessary.

Most of the layoffs — 243 of them — were staff positions. Within this group, 67 were what the university calls “skilled labor” jobs. Another 176 people holding management, administrative, and other professional positions — such as program managers and academic advisers — also lost their jobs. Most of the staff layoffs, 137 of them, were in academic affairs.

All who were laid off on July 1 will be paid and receive benefits through the end of August. Another 137 vacant staff positions were eliminated.

On the faculty side, 69 non-tenure-track faculty members didn’t have their contracts renewed for the current academic year. Their appointments end August 31. The university president, in a letter to faculty and staff members about the job cuts, wrote that “they could be invited back to teach at any point based on need.” The university has more than 700 non-tenure-track faculty. The college also eliminated 12 vacant tenure and tenure-track positions.

4.7%

Drop in the number of the lowest-income students who renewed their Free Application for Federal Student Aid

For returning students, completing a Fafsa is a concrete sign that they intend to continue with their studies. But a decline in Fafsa renewals suggests that the coronavirus appears to be derailing their progress.

According to the National College Attainment Network, through June 30 — the unofficial end of the financial-aid season — total completions of the application by returning students whose family income was $25,000 or less fell by 170,605 students, compared with the last cycle. These students are among those who need federal and state financial aid the most.

65.6%

Decline in small-business revenue in Montgomery County, home of Virginia Tech

When Virginia Tech announced a pivot to online instruction in the spring, it emptied the college town of several thousand students. That exodus, coupled with the statewide shutdown of nonessential businesses, caused economic activity in the county to plummet.

The nearly 66-percent drop in small-business revenue, measured on April 7, was relative to the beginning of the year, according to data from an economic tracker created by Opportunity Insights.

Things could turn around for small businesses in the county soon; students are back on campus now, with the institution holding more than 60 percent of classes online.

155

Hotel rooms Mississippi State University rented to quarantine students

Colleges bringing students back to campus this fall are faced with a common question: Where will they quarantine students who test positive for Covid-19?

Rather than housing those students in a dormitory on campus for 14 days, Mississippi State rented two hotels for the fall semester — a Comfort Suites and a Hampton Inn.

In an email to Mississippi State faculty members, the institution’s provost said the university had talked about setting aside residence halls for students who needed to be isolated, but the hotels were more “effective and cost efficient.”

10%

Decrease in water usage in one New England college town

Worcester, Mass., is home to nine colleges — Assumption University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Worcester State University, among others. And, according to Worcester’s city manager, when 35,000 students leave campus to return home unexpectedly, it has an impact on certain parts of the local infrastructure.

“There are a lot of kids who were living in dorms and off-campus housing that are not using water or using sewage,” said Edward M. Augustus Jr. during a May city-council meeting. Restaurants operating at limited capacity contributed to the decline as well.

204%

Increase in total number of coronavirus cases in a single week at the University of California at Berkeley

With a total of just 23 coronavirus cases on campus since the pandemic began, Berkeley was set to have a mix of in-person and online classes in the fall. But then, in a single week in early July, an outbreak of 47 new cases that were linked to the campus’s Greek system brought the total case number to 70. That made the institution scrap its plans to teach in person. Berkeley became the first campus in the University of California system to say that its fall classes would be online only.

The college’s switch follows a familiar pattern of recent weeks. Some institutions, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, started the academic year in person before rising coronavirus cases on campus made them pivot to safer alternatives. Other colleges that were planning in-person instruction made last-minute switches to online classes.

10.4%

Increase in summer enrollment at Lone Star College

Even before the coronavirus, some four-year students would take community-college courses during the summer to get some general-education requirements behind them at a lower cost.

This summer appears to be no different. Some institutions, like Lone Star College, in Houston, point to an upswing in summer enrollment. The college said it enrolled 67,731 students in summer 2020, compared with 61,375 a year earlier.

It remains unclear whether the trend will continue into the fall.