We begin today with Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Miami Herald writing about President Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston this past Monday. It commemorates the 60th anniversary of JFK’s “moonshot” speech delivered at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Monday, on the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s speech, President Joe Biden committed America to ending cancer as we know it. And it was winter.
Again, that has less to do with the calendar than with the national spirit. As singer Gil Scott-Heron once said, “Politically and philosophically and psychologically, there has only been the season of ice. It is a season of frozen dreams and frozen nightmares, a scene of frozen progress and frozen ideas, frozen aspirations and inspirations.” He said this in discussing his song, “Winter In America,” a bleak survey of “a nation that just can’t stand much more.”[...]
To understand what season it is is to understand that Biden’s speech was about more than cancer. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t about cancer. Speaking from the Kennedy Library in Boston, the president, who lost a son to the disease in 2015, spoke of cutting the U.S. cancer death toll by half within 25 years. He announced a new agency — the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H — tasked with speeding up research.
He spoke of how his “cancer cabinet” is coordinating government efforts. The renewed attention to what has been dubbed Biden’s “moonshot” gives hope of progress for an initiative that has been largely stagnant since it was created by President Obama in 2016.
I liked Pitts’ essay but President Biden’s insistence that the nation is at an ”inflection point” seems truer not only to this moment in American time but also does justice to the various shadings that Gil Scott-Heron meant to invoke in for Winter in America.
More on the other side.
Gil Scott-Heron had other, more hopeful interpretations of Winter in America beginning with the album’s liner notes (yes, I looked at Wikipedia).
At the end of 360 degrees, Winter is a metaphor: a term not only used to describe the season of ice, but the period of our lives through which we are travelling. In our hearts we feel that spring is just around the corner: a spring of brotherhood and united spirits among people of color. Everyone is moving, searching. There is a restlessness within our souls that keeps us questioning, discovering and struggling against a system that will not allow us space and time for fresh expression. Western iceman have attempted to distort time. Extra months on the calendar and daylight saved what was Eastern Standard. We approach winter the most depressing period in the history of this industrial empire, with threats of oil shortages and energy crisis. But we, as Black people, have been a source of endless energy, endless beauty and endless determination. I have many things to tell you about tomorrow’s love and light. We will see you in Spring.
Pitts captures the moment, bleak as it is, perhaps. But … seasons do change.
Philip Bump of The Washington Post, expanding upon the story of the confiscation of Mike Lindell’s phone by FBI agents, concludes that, sadly, political misinformation does have an intrinsic advantage over reality and objective facts simply because it moves faster.
I’ve long wondered why, if Lindell has all this evidence, he doesn’t simply turn it over to law enforcement. If he has any proof, anything at all, why not just make it public or hand it to the police? Lindell seems to think his data is unalterable (which isn’t true, but regardless), so why not loop in the FBI?
Rebecca Solnit writes for the Guardian that we need to learn and embrace incremental change.
Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them either in real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. And yet these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation and apparently the conception of how something came to pass.
Remember: federal laws mandating the racial desegregation and integration of all forms of public accommodations was a product of the 19th century and not the 20th century, just for one example. Sometimes it takes decades for a culture to catch up with the law. And vice versa, for that matter.
E J Montini of the Arizona Republic thinks that Arizona’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs’ refusal to debate the Republican candidate Kari Lake may cost Hobbs votes.
I don’t believe a single person’s mind, or a single vote, is changed during a debate, though reporters eagerly seeking out citizens for reaction will invariably find one or two individuals who may claim as much, probably to see their names in print or their faces on TV.
I do believe, however, that refusing to participate in a debate can – and will – cost Democrat Katie Hobbs votes in her campaign to become Arizona’s governor.
It’s a weak move.
Hobbs is refusing to appear face to face on stage with Republican Kari Lake because doing so “would only lead to constant interruptions, pointless distractions and childish name-calling.”[...]
Avoiding such a debate doesn’t only make Hobbs look wimpy. It’s offering proof that she is.
Has no one on her staff talked Hobbs about Jan Brewer?
It’s not exactly ancient history.
Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times writes about the cruelty of the abortion ban being proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Most people who have gone through a pregnancy, or watched someone close to them go through one, know that there are certain white-knuckle benchmarks. At 10 weeks, you can get a blood test that checks for some prenatal genetic disorders, but it can tell you only your risk level. “Most of the time we make diagnoses around things like fetal abnormalities, genetic abnormalities, at around 15 to 20 weeks, when we can do an amniocentesis,” said Dr. Kristyn Brandi, an abortion provider in New Jersey and board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health.
William H. Frey of The Brookings Institution analyzes the “new great migration” of Black Americans returning to the South.
By the 1970s, national deindustrialization was underway and conditions in the North changed, adversely affecting Black workers. Deindustrialization led to the demise or relocation of large numbers of blue-collar jobs, many of which Black urban residents had filled. At roughly the same time, the “promise” of northern cities was rapidly diminishing, with many Black residents residing in less advantaged, segregated city neighborhoods. Widespread “white flight” to the suburbs further isolated these neighborhoods from communities where employment opportunities and tax bases were growing.
Black frustration over deteriorating employment opportunities, discrimination, and de facto segregation in northern and western cities led to a series of well-publicized urban race riots in the 1960s. Meanwhile, a favorable business climate coupled with new infrastructure (such as interstate highways) and other improvements (such as the widespread availability of air conditioning) paved the way for industries and employers to head to southern states, marking the emergence of the “New South.”
More on the Brookings report about the “new great migration” of Black Americans to the South from Charles Blow of The New York Times.
I have learned that the assumption or accrual of political power is almost never a primary consideration for people who migrate. Power is always an undercurrent, but almost never an articulated rationale. The ability to feel safe, to have opportunities, to feel culturally celebrated, are in fact expressions of power and require the maintenance of power, but people don’t necessarily link them.
I have talked to many Black people who simply became tired of struggles that life posed in Northern and Western cities, people who simply wanted to slow the pace, to improve their quality of life — afford a home, raise a garden, breathe pine-scented air, just relax and release the tension in their shoulders.
One of the more depressing things I’ve picked up on is that there are many Black people, particularly successful ones who have been able to surround themselves with luxuries and who have insulated themselves from what they might call “typical” Black struggles, but who also don’t want to be in Black-dominated spaces.
They don’t use that language — they would never! — but it is clearly insinuated. Their concept of their blackness is elite blackness. Their challenges are primarily navigating the upper rungs of the ladder. Their struggles are largely against micro aggressions and déclassé racial displays.
Daniel Chang and Colleen DeGuzman of Kaiser Health News report that Southern LGBTQ communities feel that discrimination is at the core of a lackluster effort by state and local health departments to coordinate a response to the monkeypox virus.
The perception that the response to the monkeypox virus in the South has lacked coordination has rekindled familiar concerns about recent state policies that leave members of the region’s LGBTQ+ communities feeling marginalized and discriminated against. More urgently, it raises questions about whether state and local health departments are doing enough to protect the people principally affected by the virus: men who have sex with men.
States like New York and California have followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation to prioritize gay and bisexual men in outreach, vaccination, and treatment for monkeypox. Such states have declared a public health emergency and initiated aggressive, targeted vaccination campaigns. Although New York and California are the states with the highest number of cases, Florida, Georgia, and Texas are home to robust gay communities and together have just over a quarter of the country’s confirmed monkeypox cases.
But in Florida, and in other areas of the South, gay men fear that the monkeypox response is not being consistently prioritized because the virus affects the health of gay men, especially those who are Black or Hispanic. And they worry that local governments are not responding with urgency to diseases that primarily affect marginalized communities.
“They are not going to go out of their way to help us,” said Hank Rosenthal, 74, a gay man and retired emergency medicine physician who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Adam Serwer of The Atlantic goes off on the conservative whining about the casting of non-white actors as fictional peoples.
Earlier this month, CNN published a news story featuring an interview with Brandon Morse, an editor for the right-wing website RedState, in which he complained that Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings show, The Rings of Power, is integrated: “He says ‘The Rings of Power’ producers have cast non-White actors in a story based on European culture and who look wildly different from how Tolkien originally described them,” CNN reported. “He says it’s an attempt to embed ‘social justice politics’ into Tolkien’s world.” Morse told CNN that “if you focus on introducing modern political sentiments, such as the leftist obsession with identity issues that only go skin deep, then you’re no longer focusing on building a good story.”
It’s worth noting how rapidly right-wing language about colorblind meritocracy melts away when it does not produce the desired results. Perhaps the actors cast were simply the most qualified?
Demanding Jim Crow casting requirements for a show on which the concept of race applies to elves and hobbits indicates a rather profound “obsession with identity issues that only go skin deep.” The primary tensions in Middle Earth are among races even more fictional than the ones that divide contemporary society. The fact that its cultures are inspired by real-world history does not rationalize imposing patterns of migration, conquest, and exploitation onto a fictional universe in which they did not take place. J. R. R. Tolkien’s tendency to essentialize his fictional races, giving them intrinsic moral qualities, is the subject of a great deal of research and commentary, but that’s not really the issue here. There are stories set in universes where race works similarly to how it does in contemporary society and where it should influence casting choices, but this isn’t one of them.
Honestly, I’d be VERY impressed if Disney DID make all of these remakes EXACTLY as they were originally written. Imagine a big budget Cinderella where her stepsisters hack off their own toes leaving bloody stumps. pic.twitter.com/KSIYsRfM3J
Because I worked for a year and a half editing K-6 math books, I can tell you that the state of Texas mandated that talking animals could not be used in any of their texts or computer learning materials. (IIRC, it was because they thought that textbook companies were trying to slip in the teaching of evolution.)
So imagine Disney staying true to the original story of Little Red Riding Hood. The Wolf has about half of the dialogue, after all, and he spits up a whole and entire Grandma. Oh, and “Mark Dempsey” might want to be careful about what Hans Christian Andersen could and could not write about.
Robin Givhan of The Washington Post writes about the contradictions inherent in the final public photograph of Queen Elizabeth II.
The photograph, taken two days before her death, is a study in gray. It’s a mesmerizing, vaguely disconcerting close-up of a woman once so defined by resplendent grandeur, her boldly colored wardrobe and her ever-present corgis, that to see her alone in the stance of a well-heeled but stooped elder, is to find her almost unrecognizable. Almost.
The photograph was taken on the occasion of her meeting with Liz Truss during which the queen asked the prime minister to form a new government, a familiar ritual for the United Kingdom’s longest-serving monarch who this year celebrated her 70th year on the throne. That she carried on with all the requisite royal stagecraft to the very end of her life was a reflection of her commitment to her role and her duties — as well as a reminder of just how stubbornly she adhered to history and its troubling complexities until the very vibrancy was drained out of her.
Here, at the end of it all, is an old woman. She exuded continuity. She changed little even when so much called out to be changed.
In the aftermath of her death, these things are in tension. She was a stabilizing force; she was a reminder of the racism, colonialism and violence upon which much of that stability was built. She was graciousness and decorum in human form. Her dignity obscured a bloody trail from the African continent to the Caribbean that she herself did not create but that nonetheless led directly to her.
David Crouch of the Guardian reports that a coalition of center-right and far-right parties have won an extremely slim majority in the Swedish parliamentary elections.
The PM, Magdalena Andersson, called a press conference at which she accepted defeat, while pointing out that her Social Democrats remained Sweden’s largest party with more than 30% of the vote – and that the majority in parliament for the right bloc was very slim.
There is no formal agreement between the SD and the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals about how they will govern together, although the centre-right parties have said they will not countenance ministerial positions for the far right.
Sergei Kuznetsov of POLITICO Europe writes that after visiting the newly liberated city of Izyum, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed to regain all of Ukraine’s lost territory including Crimea.
Izyum, a city which had a pre-war population of around 46,000, was liberated last weekend during a surprise advance of Ukrainian troops in the Kharkiv region, after around six months of Russian occupation.
Photos published by the presidential media office showed a city scarred by burned and destroyed buildings around its main square, where the leaves on trees have started to take on a red-yellow tint as fall begins.
Zelenskyy also said that Kyiv plans to liberate all of the country’s occupied territories, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia without any Ukrainian military resistance in 2014.
“My signal to the people in Crimea: We know that these are our people, and it is a terrible tragedy that they have been under occupation for more than eight years,” Zelenskyy said. “We will return there. I don’t know when exactly. But we have plans, and we will return there, because this is our land and our people.”
Zelenskyy’s ambitious war goals are a clear departure from the initial aims stated by Kyiv in the early weeks of war.
Marian Blasberg and Jens Glüsing of Der Spiegel write about the fears of many Brazilians should Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro lose the upcoming election.
If the surveys are to be believed, then the race is boiling down to a duel between the incumbent and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former president who, after several difficult years overshadowed by corruption allegations, has once again thrown his hat into the ring at the age of 76. Pretty much all relevant survey institutes currently have Lula in the lead, with some even indicating that he may win outright in the first round of voting. But that isn’t the primary focus of attention for many Brazilians.
Instead, they are wondering how Bolsonaro might react if he does end up losing. Whether he would concede a loss at the polls or opt to plunge the country into chaos. They are wondering if the situation in Brasília might end up being worse than what happened in Washington, as Bolsonaro has hinted.
Similar to his idol Donald Trump, Bolsonaro has spent several months doing all he can to erode trust in Brazil’s voting system. His primary focus has been on the voting machines that replaced fraud-prone paper ballots in the mid-1990s. Although the machines aren’t connected to the internet, Bolsonaro insists that they are vulnerable to hackers. He has no proof, of course, but many have nonetheless come to believe the nonsense he is peddling.
Finally today, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party wanted some gummy bears made in the image of the party’s symbol and … well ...
Die niedersächsische #AfD wollte den Wahlkampfendspurt „versüßen“ und hat Gummibärchen machen lassen. Das ist dabei herausgekommen: pic.twitter.com/JuWiCoaVHv
The Lower Saxony #AfD wanted to "sweeten" the final sprint of the election campaign and had gummy bears made. This is what came out:
Have a good day, everyone!