Open Thank You to Author-Historian, Mike Davis

September 7, 2022 by J. Nelson

Dear Mike,

I moped for a minute when I learned of your esophageal cancer and transition to quality of life care, then swiveled from the keyboard to my view of downtown Los Angeles. It’s a romantic, rent controlled, southeast panorama you might appreciate, stretching from Griffith Park all the way to wonderful, ill-favored Vernon. As the street elevation rises, this 96-year-old brownstone is a last stop before the Tesla Hills, allowing me to joke about living “at the feet of the snobs.”

*Mike Davis at the Los Angeles Sixth Street Viaduct Entrance*

It seems fitting writing you on a 104° day, but despite my window capturing so much of LA’s heat dome, it isn’t big enough to hold my gratitude for raising your critical theorist’s fist high in the air.

Thank you, Mike, for City of Quartz, a treasure of tormented topographies and asshole suits. That book warned me of “lurking cyber-fascism” at a time when “cyber” seemed strictly limited to William Gibson. While I admittedly struggled to understand some of it, it still felt like holding a road flare.

My dawning awareness of the “spatial apartheid” of private and pseudo-public spaces through the lens of LA redevelopment –Bunker Hill and Century City most alarmingly– was as perception-altering as any figurative burning bush I’ve encountered. Although to me, your work is more akin to witnessing a burning bank.

And thank you for that Ecology of Fear chapter, “Beyond Blade Runner.” What a fun and horrifying read! There’s no better narration of the ominous social organization of urban environments. Your all-too brief look at Columbia Savings and Loan CEO Thomas Spiegel’s office-turned-Alamo-war-bunker alone was worth the 1998 dollars I spent to own a copy. I imagine you smiling as you wrote it, so here’s where I’ll also thank you for your humor. It runs rampant through your darkest of examinations of anti-utopia. No, you’re not exactly known for Chavez Ravine zingers, but to those who say Mike Davis isn’t funny I ask, uh, “In Praise of Barbarians,” anyone? Also, I call you oppressors.

6th St. Viaduct pre-2016 Demolition • Author Photo

Speaking of oppression, thank you, Mike, for affirming that my indignant rejection of bread and circuses is neither sick nor wrong. I’ve faced the fallout from questioning mass consumption since my fellow sixth graders were writhing and squealing over Rod Stewart’s 1978 radio hit, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (gross, no).

Further, thank you for corroborating –in spirit at least– that it isn’t mentally deranged to envision oneself dying a worthy death at the hands of the state. Try explaining that one to the nuns (and then family therapists).

Thank you, Mike Davis, for wondering aloud why the American working class has no political party of its own.

Thank you for inspiring me to graduate from my post-punk, Generation X naiveté by revealing enemies far more insidious than Daryl F. Gates, Tipper Gore, and Pete Wilson.

Finally, thank you for whatever input you had in choosing LA’s Metropolitan Detention Center as the City of Quartz cover photo: I read a copy machine bundle of the LA Weekly’s lengthy excerpt of the book during my stay at MDC, as well as while confined to the modules of Men’s Central Jail. You connected me to resistance, yes, and to municipal and policy wrongdoing, which were helpful to my understanding of the city I love. You insisted I learn civic responsibility, too. But finding MDC on that cover just as I was learning the value of human endorsement no less than anointed my own pencil-on-yellow-legal-pad observations. As a pretrial prisoner facing the wake-up call of a lifetime, your work made me feel recognized. What I and those around me endured at the hands of our LA Sheriff’s jailers was authenticated by the presence of that image.

Goodbye and thank you Mike Davis, Urban Theorist–Activist–Scholar, for this lump in my throat.
Mine is just one of the many Los Angeles minds you’ve enlivened.

John

Mike Davis Bio
(marcuse.org)

^UPDATE: ^10/26/2022

Mike Davis • March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022

Mike Davis, ‘City of Quartz’ author who
chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies

2021 Excuse of the Year: Moving Goal Posts

December 24, 2021 by J. Nelson

Expect an answer, get an accusation. Request specifics, get whataboutism. Ask for sources, listen to the claims of invalidated media. Try and catch even a hint of responsibility, and reach the end of the discussion hearing none.

We zig-zag, rather than discuss. We dodge debate like an NFL quarterback running for the end zone.

Sharing information is less about reading, considering, and proposing than about tossing headlines and social media posts at one another. We might as well bestow “Blame” and “Me” with special interest group status.

This has been the experience of many Americans lately, whether discussing restaurants, mandates, or Covid common sense. Co-workers, family, friends, and every other swingin’ TikTok in between argue over justifications and resentments, all of which leap from a narrow “yes” or “no.”

Agreeing to disagree isn’t what it used to be. Rarely are so many so proud of being so obstinate. It’s as if someone started a rewards programs for foot stomping and blindfolding. Trying to get a straight answer from a devout anti-vaxxer, for example, is like debating a barking dog.

Why?

Maybe we’re lazier now. It’s easier to follow a politician who exists on Likes, baiting, and tantrums than to read policy, and maybe frequently renewed health and science data has normalized our being unable to keep up. But someone’s got to, and too many Americans seem tired of caring: about public health and safety, about equity, and frankly, about each other.

Such a degeneration of discourse has worsened one of America’s current perfect storms. It has enabled our individual-obsessed, consumer natures, making it easier to anticipate less, expect more, and attach conditions to rare concessions.

“Yeah but..”

It’s no way to get anywhere and there’s no excuse for it, but such is the result of becoming a calculating, self-congratulatory, sound bite society.

I can only separate myself from the obscuring of accountability and the grinding down of fellowship when I remember to get character or become one.

Inmate-Convict-Felon-Guest?

September 24, 2021 by J. Nelson

“What’s in a name?” isn’t a trick question.
It’s a dumpster for opinions.

Before Andrew Cuomo walked out the door, the 56th Governor of New York signed Senate Bill S3332, amending the language of New York state law to replace all instances of the words “inmate” or “inmates” with the words “incarcerated individual” or “incarcerated individuals.”

Our national dialog on the power of names, be they for sports teams or co-worker pronouns, gave rise to SB S3332 and its approval. To those who wonder what purpose the bill might serve, the idea is to leave no stone unturned in seeking ways to lift negative reinforcement, terminology, and training. And considering how indelibly the American public has been trained to recognize those behind bars, it’s no surprise that some are crying, “Them too? What, they’re guests now?”

As if the premise of recognizing humanity wouldn’t include people who have broken the law.

But yes, widening the front lines of the identity war to include the incarcerated is already goading some into throwing up their hands. “New York lawmakers must have tortillas for brains,” whistles a Law Enforcement Today editorial, “because that’s the only way someone could wrap their mind around this legislation and think it actually is going to somehow make attaining gainful employment and housing easier after someone is released from prison.” The piece goes on to call the legislation dumb and pointless.

Which it might be, if SB S3332’s aim was to make those things easier. Instead it’s an attempt––finally––to limit the countless ways in which we make it unnecessarily harder to prevent recidivism and promote post-incarceration success. The same dismissive article also quotes the text of the bill:

“Studies have shown these terminologies have an inadvertent and adverse impact on individuals’ employment, housing and other communal opportunities. This can impact one’s transition from incarceration, potential for recidivism, and societal perception. As a result, this bill seeks to correct outdated terminology used to refer to incarcerated individuals.”

Since humanitarian acknowledgement isn’t revoked at sentencing, what’s so objectionable about putting it on paper? When you live in a concrete box, simple gestures are magnified. Encouraging offenders to see their bottom as a bounce is a matter of life-and-death. It’s something that starts with correction’s leadership and lives in the very paperwork of confinement.

Imagine living inside a Department of Motor Vehicles, say, one that’s located inside of a parking structure. If you can picture this, you have a good grasp of what it’s like to live in prison. Forget about having a visitor or buying Chapstick without the right authorization: white, blue or canary. And 20 to 40 times a day, you identify yourself using only your last name and inmate number, a number technically assigned to a case file, not a person. But nobody knows the difference after a while. We’ve gotten used to thinking of inmates as numbers, and the narrowness of this thinking is reinforced with every “Inmate, wait here!” and “Inmate, where’s your permission slip?”

“If you can’t do the time…” yeah-yeah-yeah.

This continual degradation or any of the other downsides to human warehousing is not actually a part of the punishment to which one is sentenced in a courtroom. One is sentenced to a period of confinement and/or time during which one is disqualified from fully participating in society. Everything else––including the dehumanization that we enable by allowing it to persist beyond the perimeter walls––is “bonus justice.” I’ve written about that before here and here, and it’s just as true for names as it is for actions.

What do we civilians know about the soul grinding effects of this genericized use of “inmate,” “felon,” and “convict,” be these “names” spoken or documented in court transcripts, work assignment evaluations, or in the language of social services law, county and general municipal law, civil rights, election, and labor law? It’s long past time we end this bonus justice.

Personally, I favor “adult offender,” because one can stop offending, whereas one can’t stop inmating or feloning. It can be damaging to conflate one’s actions with who they are, and downright damming to assign that misnomer linguistic permanence.

Yet some folks still can’t or won’t see past a name. There will be those who hear about the NY legislation and insist, “They did something wrong: No special treatment for inmates!” These taxpaying geniuses couldn’t care less about how a reduction in denigrating terminology can serve the ultimate goal of redirecting offenders rather than simply recycling them. But if they don’t care what certain names can do to a person, could they grasp what their continued use will do?

Because:

-They will reduce self-direction, until “follow the yellow line to the showers” becomes the only way to live.
-They will reduce self-image to the point where scoring oneself a roll of toilet paper (or a fix) = a good day.
-They will reduce self-esteem in such a way that it can only be regenerated via prison codes and philosophy.
-They will reduce a need for self-expression and replace it with a need to enforce.

The question is, then, are we so unwilling to let go of our preconceived ideas of what others “deserve” that we’re ok with such a cost?

“I confused things with their names: that is belief.”
––Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words

The Story of Everybody

June 25, 2021 by J. Nelson

How a story makes us feel should not be the measure of its historical worth.

America’s Interstate Highway System, constructed from the 1950’s through the 1970s, saw massive multi-lane middle fingers run through poor neighborhoods and communities of color. These were districts lacking tourism, valuable land, and political power. In many instances, like in Oak Park, Alabama, they had targets on their backs.

Obliterated in the late 1950s to make way for Interstate 94, Rondo was the backbone of the Black community in St. Paul, Minnesota. By the time I-94 opened in ’68, Rondo had lost “homes, churches, schools, neighbors, and valued social contracts.” With 15% of its population displaced, 300-400 Black-owned homes destroyed, and the loss of its chapter of the NAACP, Rondo would never see its diverse and thriving trajectory fulfilled as it might have.

Alabama’s Highway Director Sam Engelhardt, whose State Senate campaign cards read, “I STAND FOR WHITE SUPREMACY SEGREGATION,” ensured that Interstate 85 would wipe Oak Park, a neighborhood of Black civil rights leaders and its active voters, right off the map.

In other states, transportation infrastructure indiscriminately zigzags where it could have continued along a straight path, flattening Black neighborhoods despite the availability of alternate routes. So went the golden age of American road building.

Yet today, “Remember Rondo!” hardly has the same ring of social acceptance as other historical reminiscences about harm caused, like “Remember Pearl Harbor” or even “Remember the Alamo.”

And why should Remember Rondo —despite its grounding in historical fact—be considered by so many these days to be anti-American blasphemy? Does its viability make you hate America, as The Heritage Foundation, Turning Point Academy, and GOP Senator Ted Cruz all insist it will? Is it really an “attack on white people,” such that teaching history of this sort is, in the words of radio talk show host Michael Savage, “exactly what was done to the Jews in Germany in the 1930s…the road to the death camps”?

Yikes! Here I thought it might inspire someone to help protect us from future historical offenses.

Critical Race Theory and culturally responsive education aren’t the same, but they are under attack by those intent on misrepresenting them. And enemies of either would have you reject unheard voices and believe that racial equity is anti-American. It’s not.

Cruz’s recent claim that Critical Race Theory, originally conceived as a framework for understanding the relationship between race and American law*, “is every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets,” is idiotic. Lawyer Cruz well knows this. In its broader conception (also never shamefully hidden behind white robes) CRT provides a path to addressing the inequalities that are historically embedded in our political, social, economic systems—because only by acknowledging them can we work to change them.

Former economics professor Michael Harriot puts it this way: “A complete understanding of economics includes the laws of supply and demand, why certain metals are considered ‘precious,’ or why paper money has value. But we can’t do that without critically interrogating who made these constructs and who benefited from them.” And he’s not even talking about changing those constructs. Neither, for that matter, is enlightening students about the literally structural racism found in the Interstate Highway System a) a statement about individual racism or b) necessarily a demand for change. It’s really just an acknowledgement of a more complete historical truth.

But for the record, it’s highly unlikely that Critical Race Theory is being taught to your precious child: it’s rarely even taught to undergraduates for all its complexity. What is hopefully part of junior’s upbringing is culturally responsive education, which is less a thing than an overdue recognition that kids learn best when they have ways to connect what they learn to their own lived experiences. Brown University calls culturally responsive education, which was conceived in 1994, BTW, “a pedagogy that acknowledges, responds to, and celebrates fundamental cultures [to] offer full, equitable access to education for students from all cultures.”

Equitable access is muy anti-Americano, no?

And again, neither Critical Race Theory nor culturally responsive education explicitly advocate for, for example, calling out a Texas Legislature that threatens to withhold state funding to state universities refusing to “Remember the Alamo” the ‘right’ way, though it turns out, according to a consensus of historians, that the 13-day siege wasn’t about the mean old Mexican army after all. The Texians defending the Alamo—alongside their Tejano brethren, who have since been written out of the story—were fighting to preserve the slavery they depended upon for their cotton trade. When the Mexican government told ‘em to pay up in taxes and/or free their slaves, the ranchers turned to a carpetbagging former congressmen, a Louisiana con artist and knife-welding crackpot named Jim Bowie, for help. And they were defeated handily by the army of General Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Despite this defeat, and despite the widespread theory that Davy Crockett might have actually surrendered before he was executed, Texas lore demands fealty to the false narrative of white heroes who single handedly took on those dirty Mexicans and fought valiantly to the death.

Now look, I know everyone and their mother omits things from and/or embellishes their favorite personal stories. But when it’s a matter of a historical record on which the future gets built and funds get allocated, it’s not okay for the “natural” or “patriotic” way of seeing things to minimize the contributions of one group while inflating and celebrating the contributions of another. And if you care about truth in history, you’ll want to correct that record. Do we really want a government that deliberately stands in the way of that?

Of course, not everyone is interested in complex truths, which both CRT and culturally responsive education enable. Us-versus-them is much easier of a narrative to create, promote, and consume. The worst part is that recent politics, fake news, and American social trends all demonstrate that truth itself is beside the point these days.

But once more, how a story makes us feel shouldn’t be the measure of its historical worth.

*Should you take issue with the contention that race and American law are intertwined, may I direct you to: Dred Scott v Sanford, Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v Board of Education, and many, many other cases illustrating the U.S. Supreme Court’s evolving thoughts on that very matter.

The completed 10-405 interchange in 1964. Courtesy of the
Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, UCLA Library.

It’s the Abuse, Stupid.

May 21, 2021 by J. Nelson

Increased benefits or not, the past 15 months have exposed what little regard Americans have for waitstaff and retail help.

The entitlement of the Paid Not to Work narrative pales in comparison to clip after clip of retail and restaurant employees being yelled at and assaulted. Whether due to COVID protocols or the public’s general lack of coping skills, no wonder strip mall manpower isn’t rushing back to fill these domestic abuse scenarios disguised as employment.

I know a few hireable candidates who couldn’t care less about their old gigs, and it isn’t because Biden bought ’em a piece of Easy Street.

Relocation and career changes play a part, as do schooling, childcare, eldercare, and job applicants who remain unvaccinated. Clips of customer tantrums are the new Cops!, and all that viral phone footage plays an arguably bigger part in why 42% of restaurants and small businesses report an inability to fill job openings. Tik-Toks showing rage and verbal harassment reinforced the service-business dread of countless grocery workers. Infrared depictions of how our sneezes end up in Alaska don’t help.

From fast food to gourmet and everything in between, no food service employee is free from questioning whether or not it’s worth going back.

According to a server-friend at a popular LA eatery, neither do efforts to match pre-COVID efficiency while being met with insults and accusations of laziness — including from one’s own employer or corporate overlord.

Even the energy of those thrilled to finally be out and about can contribute to a lack of awareness about the many new obstacles to rapid service waitstaff now face. With a longer journey from grill to street table, this includes taking steps to ensure dishes remain piping hot for as long as possible. Says my friend, “If the food’s not hot, forget a decent tip.”

Ditto when a customer whose starting pointing is mask resistance instructs you to “go tell the chef to,” and you try to explain why you’re no longer allowed to do that.

There was also the post-Covid discovery that waitstaff had been assigned additional duties like busing their own tables (this was once the job of a bus staff). Wiping down the walls was a new one, and in between seatings, it’s now mandatory. So far the employees agree: this new “side work” eats up the time it would take to serve a full table, effectively eliminating at least one potential tip. “And when you don’t have a lot, you count on your tips – a lot.”

Welcome to Restauranting, post-COVID. For my friend and colleagues, being spoken to contemptuously has been yet another bonus, especially when managing the line of patrons waiting to enter an establishment. All staffers now get to help with this cattle call. “And out there,” I was told, “the insults are quicker, louder, and fueled by a mob.”

Further fun add-on expectations include:

Filling to-go orders, which have exploded in number for most restaurants
Prepping to-go condiment and utensil packets with all the usual landfill waste; never to exclude card-stock event promos and specials
Preparing bins of pre-wrapped table settings
Napkin folding and the resetting of street tables and fake plants
Answering phones using approved post-COVID etiquette
Navigating client demands related to food allergies and the substitutions the restaurant is no longer willing to make (all while car exhaust wafts across the “patio”).

It’s a post-COVID world, after all, and if the “undeserving poor” would just put down the Netflix and get back into their low wage boxes, everything would be so much better for everyone else’s 401k. Besides, some employers are even paying more than minimum wage, you greedy shirkers, and others are offering a handful of benefits. Not, like, sick days or paid family leave, but beggars can’t be choosers!

Or can they?? Can even underpaid people dare to dream that the supply and demand magic of capitalism might one day work for them, too? That the high demand for their labor might command a higher price paid in the form of livable wages and better working conditions?

Veteran waiters learn to take a lot in stride, like patrons who leave their dentures on the table, or a full diaper. Stuck ay home at the height of the pandemic, they may have even begun miss cranky regulars known for sending orders back, but that will sure disappear fast!

Of course some of these realities were present before the pandemic, but c’mon. After a year away from waiting tables and given the current climate, wouldn’t you be looking elsewhere, looking higher, or cozying up to connected friends and family? Wouldn’t you be digging at the dirt for a better environment to work in than a slop-trough with 16 televisions and a bunch of sniping customers?

So some are slow to go back. Duh. Many others are hesitant to put a target on their backs as first-timer restaurant employees. People do request interviews and then don’t show up. Is that because they’re on the white water rafting trip Congress gifted them, or did something better become possible?

Sure, there are those out there collecting and coasting on the government’s dime, middle fingers held high at this nation of chokehold apologists, oligarchs, sex-crime politicians, and groveling, racist swine. But it’s not the free ride the American way of life is paying for that’s keeping you from your bacon burger: in no small part, it’s the abuse, stupid.

Shaming someone back to your sports bar isn’t gonna work. But if you think it will, bring that burger over here so I can lift the lettuce myself and hock one for my friend.

Haunted House USA

April 17, 2021 by J. Nelson

Word of the day: PALIMPSEST
pal·imp·sest
noun
noun: palimpsest; plural noun: palimpsests
• something reused or altered still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
• a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

“Whites Only” and other racist palimpsests endure throughout America.

Rich Frishman’s photography can be both meditative and empowering. Meditative, because it inspires self-examination, and empowering, because it’s created to show and tell.

Frishman’s Ghosts of Segregation project offers us a contemplative and quiet study of America’s racist past, a practical exhibition of photographic evidence in which images are captioned most poignantly by their place in history. It’s also an incredibly useful, “when they go low, you go high” answer for when you’ve taken the bait of that family bigot or folks activated by the politics of ethno-nationalism (formerly known as “old friends”).

Personally, I want Ghosts of Segregation open on my laptop whenever I’m rejecting “woke” as an insult, explaining equity vs. equality, and discussing the difference between canceled and accountability. Not as some sort of a mic drop though; more like finding a common emotional truth. These powerful palimpsests can’t help but force a needed pause in such an exchange ––and could even offer an escalator up.

See what you think:

Ghosts of Segregation

**SLAVE EXCHANGE – NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA – PHOTOGRAPHED: 2019**
The enigmatic inscription “change,” floating above Chartres Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter, largely goes unnoticed. It is the vestige of the sign over the St. Louis Hotel Slave Exchange. The luxurious hotel included a bank, ballroom, shopping arcade and trading exchange. Six days each week from 1838-1862, under the hotel’s domed rotunda, auctioneers sold off land and goods as well as thousands of enslaved people.

**REDLINING WALL – DETROIT, MICHIGAN – PHOTOGRAPHED: 2018**
When the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was founded in 1934, the process of “redlining,” the act of denying loans and financial services to black neighborhoods while granting them for white neighborhoods, was codified. The Detroit neighborhood of Wyoming was a redlined black neighborhood for nearly a decade until the early 1940s, when developers wanted to build a white development in the area. They were denied by the FHA because their plan placed the white neighborhood “too close” to the black neighborhood. Thinking quickly, the developers responded by building a half-mile long wall directly between Mendota Street and Birwood Avenue for a full three blocks. This was enough to be given the nod of approval from the U.S. government. The wall, now known as 8 Mile Wall, was the official racial divider for over 20 years, until the Fair Housing Act supposedly abolished such racist policies in 1968.

**NEGRO LEAGUE STADIUM – HAMTRAMCK, MICHIGAN – PHOTOGRAPHED: 2019**
Built in 1930, Hamtramck Stadium was home to the Negro National League Detroit Stars in 1930-1931 and again in 1933. The field was also home to the Detroit Wolves of the Negro East-West League in 1932, and to the Negro American League Detroit Stars in 1937.

Visit:

Ghosts of Segregation

Opening Day Privilege

April 1, 2021 by J. Nelson

My grandfather was hired by Gene Autry in 1961 to engineer-produce radio broadcasts for the Los Angeles Angels. The privilege of his world was easy to see, even as a kid.

I remember many drives out to Angel Stadium: my mom, my dad, my brother and I. We usually left the car a drunk-crawl away from the entrance turnstiles, but once or twice we’d get directed to spaces “far away,” like 20 or so cars further than our usual guest spot.

We, too, entered the stadium through the turnstiles but soon left the public promenade through a hip-high gate that was opened for us. I remember climbing exterior stairs and avoiding golf carts down a wide corridor, then going up more stairs. Finally we’d reach press-box row, which was constructed almost entirely of steel.

Whichever grown-ups were leading the way –my dad, grandparents, uncles or “friends”– niceties were exchanged with familiar employees, including the middle-aged woman who usually guarded the boxes and who made cheery eye contact with everyone. Then we’d follow that lady down a wonderfully curved hallway, under what seemed like countless fluorescent light tubes. Mini-skirted cocktail waitresses streamed in and out of doors, carefully eyeballing their drink trays and backing against the cold steel as we passed. The rising and falling, roaring angry joy of the crowd was, of course, the acoustic backdrop for this journey.

Insider associations with Major League Baseball had much more cultural cachet back then than they do today: they were less political, but more powerful for it. Every now and then when we walked through that middle door, former President Nixon, Nolan Ryan, or some other luminary would be in there and we’d be told not to point or talk. Foul balls were the only exception to red light rule, since they’d fire right into the unprotected box and nail the back wall. My grandfather would be sitting next to announcers Dick Enberg and former Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, the only one in the room tall enough to flinch when those fouls came in.

With his patent leather shoes and cardigan sweaters, my grandfather often appeared as though he’d just come from a golf course lunch or NASA briefing. I never once saw that man sweaty, sloppy, or demanding. Fans in the stands dressed like fans, but we dressed like for church or for the airport.

I revisit these memories each Opening Day (or during the first hour of “Casino“). To me, the very best times were when we accompanied my grandmother to say goodbye when my grandfather was boarding the bus with the team to hit the road. It was always late at night, right outside the Disneyland Hotel, and the whole club would be there, along with the player’s wives and kids. Talk about a hug fest.

My privilege was in being free to enjoy the unity I saw there for what it was, without being branded by the cultural significance of those memories to the point of relying on an imperfect era to define the way the world should be.

When I’d finally grown old enough to sit in the dugout, my honor came the day I exchanged hellos with Reggie Jackson, Rod Carew, Don Baylor and Brian Downing during what is considered to be the best Opening Day lineup in Angels history.

COVID-19 FATIGUE LICENSES Sold Here…

November 24, 2020 by J. Nelson

Are you grinding your teeth due to Coronavirus-related stress? COVID-19 FATIGUE is real. And so is your self-respect.

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Are you:
•   traumatized by supermarket hostilities?
•   upset at new-fangled telecommunications?
•   disappointed over lost vacations?
•   triggered by eyewear fog?

Health Medical Groups nationwide now recognize COVID-19 FATIGUE syndrome as a debilitating condition on par with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and other serious conditions such as Backward Retention and Panic Swirl.

The American Oral League says the coronavirus pandemic is causing “an epidemic of jaw pain” due to “New Normals” compelling Americans to adapt to high-handed procedures despite their better judgment – and at levels never before seen in a “free” country!

Treatment for COVID-19 FATIGUE may include counseling, medications such as antidepressants, and lobotomy. But now, for just two easy payments of $169.99, YOU can get your certified COVID-19 FATIGUE LICENSE right away!

SCIENTISTS CLAIM THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IS PROOF THAT HUMAN HABITATION HAS DESTABILIZED ECOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES, LOOSENING EARTH’S GRIP ON DISEASES WORLDWIDE. DON’T LET SOME GROCERY STORE CLERK BLAME THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF OUR TIME ON YOU!

If you are:
•   dismayed at closed sports-bars and movie theaters,
•   angry at having to teach your child math, or
•   sick of waiting in lines…

…this is the card to play!

Your anxiety over washing hands, wearing masks, and maintaining physical distance can now be recognized as the debilitating, psychosocial illness it is. Just present your COVID-19 FATIGUE LICENSE in casinos, airports, post offices, gas stations, and many more places of business!

Finally, you can carry identifying documentation that designates YOU as a sufferer of COVID-19 FATIGUE, the symptoms of which are recognized by medical professionals and government authorities around the world.

Your COVID-19 LICENSE will allow you the freedom to be recognized
– NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO.

STORMTRUMPERS

November 1, 2020 by J. Nelson

Truck Dicks are old news that’s been kicked upstairs.
As of this week, they’re no less than Shock Troops.

The armed Texas Trump Train that reportedly outnumbered police 50-1 while surrounding a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway has received their leader’s eager endorsement. Drivers of giant pick-ups, particularly those with confrontational or tantrum-like adornments, will now be lumped in with political vultures who have essentially become a Storm Division.

The galloping neuroses of men in monster trucks has never been more conspicuous or weaponized.

Already at ease with their cartoonish potency, Truck Dicks have achieved hero status of the “stand back and stand by” variety. Also, they’re probably relieved to have found purpose for their Ford Platinum Super Duty F-350 MSRP of $87,110. What third wife is gonna nag her celtic-tattooed mid-lifer about that monthly $967 insurance/car payment combo while they’re leading the most American parade since the Lafayette Welcoming of 1824?

Yup. Trump’s magic wand again, the meatball stick waved over empty heads. POOF! Knighthood!

Oh, I don’t mean every mega-truck owner is susceptible, but aren’t the cop groupies who yammer on about law enforcement (as though it were a life form) the easiest of Trump’s recruits? You know, the Dave & Buster’s dadbods whose rigs are too clean to be hauling America-building payloads like in the commercials?

I’m talking about the aging flat brimmers who mansplain about the bells ‘n whistles of doom survival. They swear that 700 pounds per foot of rear-wheel torque and a 40-gallon diesel gas tank are the only things standing between their families and any number of possible human extinction scenarios. Yeah, those 5’5″ fuckers whose flip flops dangle out the door when they fence-hop themselves into the cab.

Not so much guys with the shipyard cred: I mean the haters with the Heineken spread.

It’s almost as if Truck Dicks blossomed at the discovery that they’ve been driving Somali Technicals to Lowes and the bullet store. Their 18-guage steel tiger-cobra-rhino-dominators are now platforms for select historical celebrations, looter hunting, and ideological policing of all sorts. It doesn’t help with their child support payments, but hey, “blood purge.” USA! USA! USA!

If it weren’t for Donald Trump, some of these men might be relegated to the usual parking lot small-penis appraisals. But after ganging up on and endangering the passengers of an election campaign bus, who knows? There may be an Executive Order in their future, one mandating that “Intimidation Performance” be considered in the assessment of full-size pick-up resale value.

Here is our Where Excuses Go to Die screen-grab tribute to the men, trucks, and flags of MAGA enforcement.

Maps of Felony Disenfranchisement, 2020

October 17, 2020 by J. Nelson

“Disparities in the criminal justice system are linked to disparities in political representation.”

The cartograms and maps created by The Sentencing Project’s incredible researchers say a lot about who we are –and how far we have to go– as a country. Even a cursory glance at “Locked Out 2020” should have you questioning how so many Americans have come to think the way they do about fairness and opportunity.

Hopefully, it will also spur some thinking on what we can do about it.

Please vote accordingly.

For more, visit sentencingproject.org