Butterflies for the Children of Aleppo

December 1, 2016December 16, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

December 1, 2016

What can we do? Can we dance while the children of Aleppo are being slaughtered? Can we smile while the last doctors pull the ball bearings from Russian-backed Syrian regime cluster bombs out of the spines of toddlers? The monarch butterfly only lives for six months. Do we have a right to enjoy its beauty knowing that its wings will soon be broken against the wheel? What can we do? What did you when you saw little Omran in the ambulance? What will we do now that we have seen him?

The siege of Aleppo continues unabated. The once bustling city has been hollowed out by Syrian and Russian jets dropping barrel bombs that spread explosions of shrapnel which decapitate children every single day. The innocent civilians cry to the sky. “Where are you, world? How are you letting this happen to our loved ones?” And the world Tweets something clever, indifferent. #WeirdBathroomConvos

History will ask where we were in 2016 while this horror happened. Just like it asked where where were in 1994 during the Rawandan genocide and where we were in 1975 during the mass killings in Cambodia. We are always in the same place; dancing with our eyes closed.

In 1993, I was in eastern Europe, doing my dissertation work on new fascist youth movements. The civil war in Yugoslavia was in full swing and Bosnian refugees were streaming out of the country with horror stories beyond belief. I tried to make it to Sarajevo, but the city was under a murderous siege and all travel in was closed.

It was a sunny day in Prague so I went to Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, to soak up the sun and some relevant history. There was an exhibit about the internment of Jews in the German concentration camp in nearby Terezin. Toward the end of the war, Hitler didn’t want the world to think his camps were so bad, so he invited the Red Cross to tour the camp in Terezin. The barracks were cleaned, prisoners that were sickly were quickly shipped off to Auschwitz, and the children were given art supplies to show the kindness of the Nazis.

What kind of art would children in a Nazi death camp create?

The exhibit had some of their art preserved over the decades. The art was their escape. Amid certain death they drew pictures of red birds and green butterflies flying though perfectly blue skies.

Later that day I was in the Old Town Square in the Staré Mesto part of Prague. In an abandoned storefront people had created an exhibit about the war in Yugoslavia to raise awareness about the violence nearby in the Balkans. The exhibit included art by Bosnian Muslim refugee children whose parents had been killed by Serbian soldiers.

When kind of art would the children of ethnic cleansing create?

Crayola crayon drawings of red birds and green butterflies flying through perfectly blue skies.

I walked outside and wept that this was happening again. And this time it was happening on my watch. I sat down in the Charles Bridge over the Vlatava River and wrote this.

Terezin Revisited

Kids in cages, kids in camps

Kids on TV, kids on maps

Crayon dreams of simple pleasures

A blue bird and a yellow sun

cross with grey sketches

of a brother being hung

Playground mortar shell

interrupts an afternoon soccer match

Late night round up

Out of bed shouting family snatch

The innocent monsters of childhood

are traded for the nightmare monsters of mankind

Kids in cages, kids in camps

Kids on TV, kids on maps

Twinkle, twinkle, night lights off so far

Doomed by the brands of moons and stars

Red rockets fly from mountain tops

Yellow bayonets from ghetto cop cars

When I grow up I want to be alive

I want to be married to a brave prince

with Mommy and Daddy smiling

But instead I go to Srebrenica or Auschwitz

“Never again” is an empty cry as Sarajevo’s children

relive the genocide plans of the ruling mind.

I wonder what type of art the children of Aleppo are creating now, in those precious moments between bombings and siblings dying. I imagine drawings of red birds and green butterflies flying through perfectly blue skies.

Andrea and I have been crippled by the images of Syrian children creeping into our mundane lives as parents in America. How can we look away? We are somehow complicit as “strong leader” Putin continues to bomb civilians. What can we do? Could butterflies help?

Andrea made the decision to use her artistic shoulder to slow the wheel. She is doing a series of paintings of Monarch butterflies, the symbol of her home in Michoacan, Mexico and symbolic of the great migrations we make to live and reproduce. She will be debuting them at my reading at Music Millennium on Saturday. All proceeds go to UNICEF Aleppo Relief. They will also be available on her website (andreabarriosart.com) for only $40 (they come with a little easel). It’s one way relieve an ounce of the suffering of children who do not deserve the hell of adult politics.

In addition, 10% of the sales for my new novel, The Dream Police, are going to UNICEF Aleppo Relief. It’s not much but if the book does well, it might be.

I think of all the places that children suffer from the actions of adults; Syria, South Sudan, Chicago. I think about food contaminated with plastics and guns in schools and lead in water. I think about how much we don’t think about our children and I want to turn into a butterfly and fly away.

Please help UNICEF help Syrian children by donating here: UNICEF

11/8 > 9/11: Trump’s body count starts now

November 10, 2016November 14, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 17 Comments

11/10/2016

I woke up on the morning of 11/9/2016 in a fetal position hoping I had just had a long lucid dream in which Donald “Pussy Grabber” Trump had just been elected president. Of the United States. Of America. My two-year-old daughter had her hand on my cheek and her face inches from mine. “I’m sorry,” she said with her little lisp and eyes cast down.

“Why are you sorry, Bug?” I asked, knowing the weight of America’s election day drunk dialing was falling right on her tiny little shoulders.

“I farted,” she said. And with that I was awake in a new paradigm, where hillbillies had thrown the entire country into the potty.

I flashed to the terrorist attacks on the morning of 9/11/2001 that slaughtered almost 3000 people. Then I feared the election of Donald J. Trump is going to make that day look like a mild SARS outbreak.

Wednesday morning, I unplugged my social media for a bit. I grew up in Klan town in Georgia so my Facebook friend circle is filled with those “non-college-educated white males” that were crucial to Trump’s path to victory. I didn’t want to hear them braying, thinking Trump’s vacant policies would help them in any way. There were enough white males cheering on neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites. Former Klan Grand Dragon David Duke all but took credit for Trump’s win and delivering the South for the alleged billionaire.

The last post I saw was by a white guy of my peer group who wrote, “Relax. We lived through Reagan.” I thought of all the people who did not live through Reagan, including the thousands of Americans who died of AIDS because the president ignored the epidemic as just a “gay plague.” He could have done something but he turned his back on his fellow countrymen as they suffered some of the most excruciating deaths imaginable.

Elections have consequences and those consequences are never paid for by the people at the top. Hillary Clinton will be fine. Even the white guys in red hats yelling at Trump victory parties like they were at a frat house gang rape will be okay for the most part. (Although they might think about cashing out their 401Ks toot suite.) I began to think about all the likely casualties of a Trump administration and it quickly surpassed the 9/11 body count.

A brief sketch of coming casualties

I thought of the Americans who will die when they are thrown off of their health insurance. Trump has vowed to cancel the Affordable Health Care Act as soon as he takes office in January with a promise to replace it with some vague “open market” alternative. Millions of men, women, and children (including my family) will lose their health safety net and will, again, have to chose to go forgo treatment and preventative care. This will cost lives.

I thought of the women who will, again, die from back alley abortions. Trump has made it clear that he will end a woman’s reproductive rights by stacking the Supreme Court with “pro-life” judges. Justice Ginsberg can’t live forever so this return to those desperate days may come quite soon. Add to that the women who will die of various cancers because they couldn’t get screenings at Planned Parenthood, another target of Trump’s pandering to the religious right.

I thought of the people who will die because of the loosening, non-enforcement, and/or canceling of safety, health, and environmental regulations. Trump has said most of these regulations are unnecessary and get in the way of “job creation.” We now have a president who believes global climate change is a “Chinese hoax,” so I have to count the related environmentally-sourced deaths as he ramps up carbon-based fuel industries. Anybody remember Black Lung?

I thought of the women who will be raped and sexually assaulted as his “Move on it” misogyny has been given the seal of approval from the American voter. The president of rape culture is moving into the White House. Likewise, the casualties from hate crimes inspired by his “America first” rhetoric will only increase. Americans and residents who are Muslim, black, or brown (like my wife) are not as sure they will “live through Trump” as my white friend of Facebook. There are already reports of Trump supporters in liberal Portland, Oregon screaming the “N word” at black residents on the street. After one day of “President Elect Trump,” there are reports of hate incidents all over the country. It could get very ugly.

I thought of the people who will die in the justice system, in jails and prisons and on the street, just as Obama’s reforms are starting to get underway. Their lives matter. But stock in private prisons is surging as America anticipates a new war on minorities (sorry, “War on Crime”).

I thought of the refugees escaping the hell of wars we helped start who will die because they can’t find refuge for themselves or their children as Trump has sworn to shut down the border on “Day 1” of his administration. I thought of the Central Americans who escaped violence to find safety and security as (undocumented) immigrants who will die when Trump’s deportation force sends them back to the hell they escaped from.

I thought of all the American troops who will die as Trump’s “bomb the hell out of them” diplomacy goes into effect with war after war. Just like the over 4000 Americans in uniform who didn’t survive the Bush Administration because they were killed in Iraq, the Trump body count will mount, as this zero-experience commander-in-chief who dodged Vietnam plays with his flesh and blood toy soldiers.

I thought of the global body count as he alienates our allies from our overseas struggles. Body counts from withdrawing humanitarian aid around the world. Genocidal body counts as he promotes the sale of nuclear weapons to South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

I thought of the deaths of young Americans from suicide, bullied for being gay, or Mexican, or Muslim. The Trump Effect in schools has already been well documented. And then there’s deaths of girls from eating disorders as they starve themselves to be a Trump 10 and not a “fat pig.” I thought of the Americans who will suffer as he translates disrespect and cruelty into “so much winning.”

3000 deaths in Trump America? That might be a good day. And where 9/11 brought us together as a nation, 11/8 has ripped us apart.

Who are these red state people?

I know the people who voted for Trump. I’ve been studying this demographic for 30 years. It’s the “White-lash” (as Van Jones called). There’s a segment of White America that couldn’t handle a successful black president, devoid of scandals, while they faced their own hardships. They became obsessed with him just like the racist skinheads I studied in 1989 were obsessed with the Huxtables on The Cosby Show. Rural America blamed Cliff Huxtable/Barrack Obama for the changing complexion of small town life and Rust Belt America blamed him for the globalization (that took off under Reagan) that was stealing their solid wage unionized jobs. Those folks are in for a shock if they think anti-union Trump is going to bring back their line position at General Motors.

Sure, Trump managed to find a few women and people of color to climb on to his fact-free train, but let’s face it – This election was all about the push-back. It’s the same push-back that the Klan rode to mainstream appeal in the 1920s. Then it was the pushback against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (aka, Catholics and Jews) under the banner, “100% Americanism.” Now it’s the pushback against immigrants from south of the border and the Middle East under the banner, “Make America Great Again.”

Donald Trump is the greatest recipient of white male privilege in modern history. If any other person had stumbled though just one of his foibles, it would have been over. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had children with three different husbands and bragged about her sex life on Howard Stern. Imagine if President Obama said his opponent was holding secret meetings with “international bankers” and that he could do anything to any woman he wanted, because he was a “star.” Do you think Fox News would let that slide? Donald Trump lied to his followers on a daily basis they ate it up like coprophiliacs eating shit with a spoon. I wonder if that teflon will keep working for four years. But he was the white man, so he got the job over the actually qualified female. Happens every day in America.

So what’s next?

First I would like to tell the world that most Americans did not vote for Donald Trump. In fact, most of Americans who voted didn’t vote for Donald Trump. Clinton won the popular vote. But America has as an arcane electoral system that gives the few hundred people who live in a hamlet in North Carolina essentially the same say in the contest as the few million that live in Oakland, California. So know we’re not all crazy.

Secondly, as we enter a period of one party rule headed by a potentially sociopathic charismatic authority who wants to build a Supreme Court in his image, know that the founding fathers gave the power hungry a ticking clock. The 2018 mid-term elections are just around the corner, so if we can flip Congress before Trump burns the Reichstag, we might be safe from a fascism. Might. And then it’s Elizabeth Warren for president in 2020!

The big lesson is in how we talk to those “non-college-educated white males.” I’m certainly guilty of over using the word “moron” and perhaps, “mouth breathers” on my Facebook page. We were characterized as judgmental elitists and it was probably accurate. That position only served to push them away from anything approaching an intellectual discussion and into Trump’s cult of personality where simple slogan’s ruled the day. “Crooked Hillary!” “Build a wall!” “Trump the bitch!”

Trump is not going to build a wall, or ban Muslims, or lock Hillary up. The Constitution should prevent such folly. But he could amass a pretty massive death count before he realizes he probably should have stayed in his golden tower instead of moving into the People’s House on Pennsylvania Avenue. If we want to limit the damage, we gotta figure out how to talk to these knuckle draggers. Sorry, I mean economically fragile Caucasian-Americans.

Take some time, hug your children, go for ice cream, and then get back into the fight, but this time, try some dialogue. There should be some down-time while these boys in red hats wait for their wall to appear. The whole world is watching us.

Donald Trump for President of Rape Culture

October 10, 2016October 10, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 11 Comments

October 10, 2016

Let’s hope this is my last blog post dedicated to Candidate Trump as his schadenfreude campaign circles the toilet. One more “teachable moment” for the country that the Trump train wreck has gifted us.

I was going to call this piece, “Will Donald Trump Grab My Daughter’s Pussy?” now that that word is more relevant to the 2016 election than “down-ballot.” I have to think Trump’s marriage gets turned over to the lawyers after election day and he will start “moving on” other women “like a bitch.” I’m going to hope his targets are over the age of 13, but with Trump, we don’t know.

Federal Judge Orders Hearing in Donald Trump Rape Lawsuit

Feminists and academics (and feminist academics like me) have been writing about rape culture for a while now. We’ve been writing about it existing in frat houses and rap songs and every other episode of Game of Thrones. It’s the normality of sexual violence against women. The numbers vary depending on the study and methodology, but roughly one in four women are willing to report being victims of sexual assault. Anybody willing to listen would guess the percentage is a hell of a lot higher, especially when you include sexual assaults of young girls. (Plenty of research backs this up.)

If you are a female, you know this is true. If you haven’t yet been victimized you know it is always a looming possibility. If you are a man, you either plug into the concern about the women in your life and work to make them safe (including standing up to “locker room talk”), or you are part of the problem.

Rape culture is rooted, first, in patriarchy. The most popular God in our culture is a male and He lets his men know that women are objects to be conquered. There’s plenty of sanctioned rape in The Bible, so it’s not a new idea. The belief is that women’s (and girls) bodies exist for male pleasure; to look at, to have sex with, and to kiss and grab whenever the spirit moves them. Females are certainly not autonomous humans with the right to control their own bodies. That’s a male privilege.

So rape culture isn’t just the epidemic amount of rape that happens every day against our daughters, sisters, mothers and soap opera actresses. It’s more than a Robin Thicke song, as well. It’s the normalization that women exist FOR men’s enjoyment. One example would be beauty pageants. Imagine a beauty pageant owner who would brag about going backstage to see the contestants naked and making the bathing suits smaller to see more of their bodies. What would we think of that man? Would he make a good leader of the nation or a good leader of a rape culture? If you want them to be the same thing, you are a defender of patriarchy.

This brings us to Trump 2005 and his little bus ride with douchey Billy Bush, the poster boy for white male privilege. We’ve all heard the tape by now, as well as Trump’s half-assed “Clinton is worse!” apology. (Getting caught sucks.) There are two important discussions here for the nation at this important crossroads.

The first is one is obvious. Is this over-ripe frat boy who brags about sexually assaulting women and, while his third wife was pregnant, boasts about trying to bed a married women, qualified to be elevated to our highest office? Does this misogynist have the right to represent our great nation that is 50.8% female? What message will that send to our daughters as well as the rest of the world?

For me, the larger question is, what will be the impact of Donald “Grab their pussies” Trump have on this insidious rape culture? Many of his cult already view him as a “god” and we’ve seen Trump’s aggressive rhetoric translating into hate crimes and a spike in schoolyard bullying. How many boys and young males are now going to reject “sexual violence education” as “political correctness” in favor of just grabbing women and girls like Trump does? Will my daughter have to add the fear of Trump-inspired gropers to her anxiety about who claims a right to her body? This man being awarded the Oval Office would give budding douchebags license to follow their sexual drives unchecked. Be like Trump! WWDD? Move on her like a bitch!

We’ve been trying to figure out when the “again” was in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Clearly, it’s at least before the existence of laws against sexual harassment.

And this is the part where I feel compelled to explain to the “But Bill Clinton…” Trumpists that Bill Clinton is not running for president. Feminists had a hard time with Bill in the 1990s, believe me. It might be news to conservatives, but wives are not their husbands. Hillary Clinton is a separate person. (I know that might be hard for these people to process.) She has her own thing goin’ on.

Look, I’m glad Trump has apologized and has said he wants to be a better man. That’s awesome. I’m on my own journey and am a better man than I was in 2005. But I’m not not running for president and I’m not sure we would have Trump’s mea culpa if that live mike hadn’t captured him off camera. The difference is two-fold. Unlike Trump, I’m willing to admit I’ve made a ton of mistakes and am using each one to be a better man (not waiting until everyone else finds out about it). Secondly, I acknowledge that this issue is deeply systemic. It affects everyone I care about, including my wife and my daughter. Out of my love for them and the mighty women and girls in the world, I am busting my ass trying to undo rape culture. This includes my role in propping it up. Trump and his droogs deny the existence of rape culture (and white privilege, and climate change, and…)

Also, I’m guessing I’ll be a better 59-year-old man in 2023 than he was in 2005. Just a hunch. But let’s imagine that he spent 69-years as a committed misogynist and dramatically changed his assessment of patriarchal privilege in year 70. Yeah, right. He’s a very old dog. We might as well just imagine the fallout if there was a 2005 tape of Hillary Clinton bragging about grabbing men’s dicks. Lord.

It’s funny trying to see the Trump camp try to rationalize this pig of a man. “Well, Trump said Bill Clinton said worse things!” Again, Bill is not running for president and, at this point, you’re really gonna believe anything that Donald Trump says? “Well, women loved 50 Shades of Grey!” As I wrote in this blog, feminists took great issue with that crappy book. Besides Christian Grey is a fictional character who, like Bill Clinton, is not running for president. Those Harry Potter books are pretty popular but I don’t think America wants a president who claims to cast magic spells either. (Okay, that might be more fun than this.)

Trump’s lurking behind Secretary Clinton in the second debate like a creepy clown or stalker only seemed to be in line with his predatory manner. He again sloughed off his praise of sexual assault as “locker room talk” (3 times) and then quickly shifted to his go-to mantra about ISIS “chopping off heads” and people “pouring into our country.” He might be bad but at least he’s not ISIS, y’all! You had to think that Melania Trump, painfully smiling in her appropriately named Pussy-Bow blouse, was just waiting for all this to be over.

Singer Billy Bragg used to say that when Americans elect a president they elect a president for the whole world. In 2016, let us elect a president for all the women in the world and strike a very loud blow against rape culture.

How Donald Trump makes me a better feminist

September 28, 2016October 1, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

September 28, 2016

I had a really great “a-ha” moment in my intro sociology class my freshman year at Oxford College. Professor McQuaide was discussing a classroom study that found that young male students will raise their hands to answer questions they have no idea the answer to while young female students, who know the answer, will remain quiet. Girls are supposed to be seen and not heard, pretty, not smart. I remember relating to it because in school I was a junior Arnold Horshack (Google him, kids) leaping out of my chair just to control the room with whatever sound would come out of my mouth. “Oh! Oh! Oh! I know!” Even if I didn’t.

That’s how I felt about the first Clinton-Trump debate.

There are plenty of things to pick apart about Trump’s bizarre showing. I worked in the music business long enough to recognize a coked-up money guy. They blamed things on “bad microphones” as well. But the thing that struck me was his constant interruptions of his debate opponent – 51 times by one count. Trump was like a jacked-up Kanye West who thought the stage belonged to him alone. You can think what you want about Hillary Clinton, but I’m guessing a whole hell of a lot of women identified with her for those 90 minutes. A clueless guy rambling nonsense, in love with the sound of his own voice, over an experienced knowledgeable woman who as learned to defer to the man. It happens in classrooms, bedrooms and boardrooms every day.

I’ll leave it to the pundits and addiction specialists to translate Trump’s incoherent word salad. He’s convinced he won the debate and I’m sure he thinks he did. (Cocaine is a powerful drug.) I just want to reflect on how we men talk to and about women.

The first is the dismissive way we “let” “girls” into “our” conversations. We set the rules of the game and if they don’t follow them they are “incapable” on one hand or “ball-busting bitches” on the other. Or, in the case of Trump’s treatment of Alicia Machado, “Miss Piggies.” Women have a narrow margin of acceptance in a man’s world. Hillary Clinton had to smile but not too much. Be prepared but not overly scripted. Research shows that we are more likely to refer to women by their first names (or “Honey” or “Sweet Cheeks”) and give them less time to express themselves because their opinions are valued less. This has certainly been the case when discussing “male” issues like national defense and the economy. “Math is tough,” as Talking Barbie once said. Trump is an overweight 70-year-old man but Clinton was described by watchers as a “grandma.” The double standard lives!

The second is the way we erase females from the conversation. I’ve written about normative maleness in this blog. Like white is the default position, male is the “norm.” You have cabdrivers and lady cabdrivers. (Cue Prince song.) I’m still explaining to people that Cozy is a girl. (Although I secretly enjoy when old codgers call her “Young man.”) Unless it’s a cheerleading squad or one of Trump’s creepy pool parties, the female is an anomaly, like an alien, and must be treated with suspicion. Right, fellas?

The big thing is how we don’t actually listen to women. (“Did you say something, honey?”) Our body language and lack of eye-contact reflect this and every single woman knows what I’m talking about. But men like to pretend that women are from Venus and unless they have some magic Manslater to translate what the bitch means it’s just not worth the effort. Right, fellas?

How many heterosexual relationships have gone down in flames because the female partner felt like she was not heard? Studies show that the most successful marriages are the ones where couples act like they are teammates on the same side, facing issues together. Lots of guys like to claim they married their “best friend” but then tune her out when it’s convenient. That’s not how it works. I’d love to be Melania Trump’s therapist when Donald has moved on to model-wife #4. “He only talked at me, never with me. And he was always sniffing.”

And it’s not about listening to gossip or how the CenturyLink remote won’t work. It’s about listening to women’s journey through a still very sexist world and trying to be the best ally possible.

I write this because, like Donald Trump, I have a lot of work to do on this issue. I’ve come a long way since my first marriage, which ended with my wife saying, “You listen to your friends better than you listen to me.” I still struggle with the eye contact issue but it’s important to my partner so it’s important to me. I’m a feminist but I was socialized as a male and that means I have a lot of extra baggage to get rid off. Thank you, Donald Trump, for reminding me. You make me what to be a better man. My daughter and wife will appreciate it.

It might not be fair to characterize Trump as a coked-up bully who disregards the opinions of women and is not even interested in women who are not “10’s.” Maybe it’s not the coke. He has said he’s never done drugs and we all know Donald Trump never lies. Maybe that’s just him.

So I Married an Alien

September 8, 2016September 9, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

Sept. 8, 2016

I thought I should post this little confession. I married an alien. She invaded America in 1998, coming from a strange land called Mexico. Now if she was a white person we would just call her an “ex-pat,” but Americans prefer to refer to non-white visitors who weren’t born here as “immigrants.” If they came here to escape war or violence or just the American dream of economic mobility but they didn’t come through the very tiny door controlled by the federal bureaucracy we all love so much, they are called “undocumented immigrants,” or what the Trump crowd prefers, “illegal aliens.” I’m going to compromise and refer to my wife as an undocumented alien. It sounds more X-Files. And sexy. Hey, I saw a cute alien finger and I put a ring on it! (Or rather, she graciously allowed me the great honor.)

Now before Donald sounds the butt bugle for his quasi-fascist “deportation force,” let me say she now has papers. Thanks to immigration reforms under the first Clinton administration (See what I did there?), a loophole opened and she earned a green card that establishes a right to permeant residence in the USA. I just hope we can find it if Donald’s thugs kick down our door in the middle of the night as they round up the “very bad people” the Mexican government is “sending here” to “kill us.”

I mention this because, like most intelligent Americans, I have whiplash from trying to figure out what the fuck Trump’s ever-changing immigration policy is. Is he planning on asking “his generals” to come up with the answer to that one as well? It seems his policy is based on who his audience is and if his teleprompter is working or not. It certainly was a lot of xenophobic screaming after he returned from his brief trip to Mexico.

There are a couple of reasons this matters. First, as I’ve written about many times in this blog, he is using scare tactics to whip white voters into a frenzy. His recent cavalcade of “angel moms” whose kids were allegedly killed by undocumented immigrants is a classic example. Of course it’s heartbreaking to have a family member murdered, but most people are murdered by people they are closely connected to, not the neighbor’s gardner. According to FBI crime statistics, only 12.3% of homicides are committed by strangers. Donald Trump is more likely to be murdered by Donald Trump, Jr. than an documented immigrant. But he’s successfully made brown immigrants into this season’s Willie Horton bogey man.

Despite his claim that America is a “complete disaster. Believe me.” – the crime rate has steadily been dropping in this country since 1993 at a rate of about 5% a year. And not only do immigrants have lower rates of crime offending than non-immigrants, studies show that cities with higher undocumented populations have lower crime rates. Think about it – If I’m here without papers, I’m not even going to jaywalk for fear of being discovered by police who might deport me and send me far from my family and my job. (And by the way, as Mexican President Peña Nieto pointed out to Trump’s confused face, illegal immigration to the U.S. has also been steadily declining, but, you know, THE SKY IS FALLING.)

The second reason this is important is that all those “illegal aliens” that the Trump mob loves to hate and are convinced are stealing “their” jobs (picking strawberries) have stories. Some are escaping the insane violence of El Salvador and sending them back would be a death sentence. Some just want a better life for their children. Andrea wrote about her crossing so beautifully in the new collection, A Journey of Words. She didn’t come here to steal anybody’s job or rip anybody off. She came to live and to make America greater, as generations of immigrants, both legal and illegal (whatever that really means), have before and after her.

I feel like we’re at a turning point. So much of the political rhetoric from the Trump mob sounds like Germany in 1933 or even the United States in 1942, when 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and Japanese immigrants were ripped from their homes and thrown in desolate concentration camps until the end of the war. I wonder if my daughter, who Trump has hinted is not guaranteed citizenship just because she was born here, will be safe even if America’s favorite con artist loses in November.

It’s clear that many of Trump’s thugs could care less about the facts, whether it’s Trump lying on TV about his past statements (that happen to be on video) or just repeating the “Crooked Hillary” mantra in hopes that truthiness beats out the truth. I’ve given up trying to convince these people. But I think if they just knew somebody like Andrea or any of the twelve million people who are here without papers, Trump’s fear mongering would fall on deaf ears.

Remember when pretty much every gay person outside of San Francisco was in the closet? (Maybe you’re not old enough.) As those people found the courage to come out, attitudes changed. A guy in Omaha had a harder time going off about “them queers” because he probably knew (and liked) some people who were gay. Just think of all the people in the Bible Belt who watch Ellen Degeneres five days a week. They must be pretty conflicted about the “hate the sin, love the sinner” crap they are supposed to believe.

It’s time for these same people to get to know their neighborhood undocumented immigrant. Who knows – they might also find love.

Feministing in Havana

August 14, 2016August 28, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

14 August 2016

Going to Cuba was a lot easier than I thought it would be. My second major at Emory in the Reagan ‘80s was “International Studies” with a focus on Soviet and Latin American politics, Cuba being the connection. My mother was there as a bobby-soxed teenager in 1959 and flew out Havana the day Castro took the city. The one paper my she saved from her college days was about Kruschev and the Cuban Missile Crisis. So Cuba has always seemed completely off-limits to me. But if Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, I can see Cuba from my balcony here on Isla Mujeres. Actually, it’s just over the horizon. If I had a frisbee and a good south-eastern trade wind, I could probably land it inside a cell in Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. government is still actively creating terrorists. So why not just go?

That’s what Andrea and I did. On a mad impulse we bought tickets to go. On Tuesday I went scuba-diving and on Wednesday I was on a Cubana Airlines flight over the water from Cancun to Havana. Barely an hour in the air and we were there with our hastily prepared visas and access to the world’s last “socialist paradise.” (Your Nikes are made in Vietnam and your iPhone is made in China, so they are disqualified and nobody is claiming North Korea as anything but an Orwellian nightmare.) Off to the land with no internet, leaving our wi’s and fi’s behind.

There’s so much to write about the experience. We were there as the country was getting ready for Fidel Castro’s 90th birthday. I can’t believe the guy has been there my entire life. His brother, Raul Castro, has somewhat normalized relations with the U.S. and since Obama eased the embargo, you can feel the Starbucks shops just lining up to come in and change the nation overnight. Ask anyone from a small-town what Wal-Mart has done to America. Havana had plenty of construction cranes and the new hotels were coming. I’m sure the names “Hilton” and “Trump” will become part of the new oceanfront skyline. (Although nobody seemed to know who Donald Trump was. God bless them.)

It reminded me of my first trip to Czechoslovakia in 1991, right when the country opened its doors to the west. The people and infrastructure in Prague had no idea how to handle the rush of tourists who wanted to come and look around. There were no hotels or restaurants and capitalist entrepreneurialism was a foreign language. We stayed in people’s homes and ate whatever we could find in beer halls. When I returned in 1992, all that had changed. Western money flooded the “Paris of the East,” and there were billboards proclaiming (in English), “There are now four McDonalds in Praha!”

So we’ll see if Brother Raul lets that happen to his island. I have feeling it’ll look a lot different next time we go back. We stayed in a wonderful casa in the center of the city that might be a Quality Inn this time next year.

But I thought I’d write a little but about gender on the streets of Havana. Cuba has been known for being on the vanguard of gender equality issues for a long time. Women, like Celia Sånchez, were at the forefront of the revolution in 1959, fighting alongside Fidel and Che. The Federation of Cuban Women was formed shortly after that. Half of the judges and justices in Cuba are female, over a third of the parliament is female and 62% of university students are female. There are great feminist Cuban rappers, like Krudas Cubensi and Obsession and 31 Cuban women are competing in the Rio Olympics. (Watch for Yorgelis Rodríguez in the heptathlon finals.) Unlike in the United States, gender equality is a part of the Cuban constitution. “The state guarantees women the same opportunities and possibilities as men in order to achieve woman’s full participation in the development of the country.”

So it must be a great place to be a woman, right?

Andrea and I were walking around our little neighborhood on Friday morning, just behind the Cuban capital building and some guy, seeing her, angrily shouted out to his friend, “She got fucked by the French!” He probably thought I was French and what was this brown girl doing with a white guy. It was in Spanish so I totally missed it but Andrea was visibly upset. After a similar comment she felt abused enough to return to our room and just hang out, away from the catcalls. She was shaken as the daily war on women followed her all the way to a communist outpost that supposedly outlawed sexism before I was even born.

Cuba is an incredibly diverse place, from dark Afro-Caribbean to Europeans (and probably some Hemingway descendants). Andrea, who would be punishingly sexy in a medieval suit of armor, noticed the comments were coming from men of color and asked me why that was. I assured her that white men were not free from the same behavior but there might be some good feminist explanations of the race-gender interaction.

I took a moment to play professor and tackle it from three of the many feminist perspectives. Liberal feminists would argue that black Cuban men have be raised with a different relationship to women than white Cuban men which may be more vocally aggressive and seeing a Latin woman with a white man viewed as a betrayal of an ethnic subcultural value. Marxist feminists would say that even in allegedly communist society, poor people still exist and are alienated and poor black Cubans are alienated the most. (Stats back up that black Cubans have the lowest paid jobs.) So Marxist Feminists would argue the one place those men have power in a patriarchal world is over women. (Stats also show black women in Cuba experience more domestic violence.) Finally, radical feminists argue that patriarchy will rear its ugly head in spite of popular values of gender equality, finding any way possible to subordinate females, either through institutional means (less pay) or old-fashioned scare tactics. So on our little block, mostly populated by men who were poor and dark-skinned, it was the catcall.

I don’t know if this discussion was of any value to my wife. The conversation became one of how do we get men to raise their sons right so our daughter won’t routinely experience the same harassment. We both absolutely loved our brief time in Cuba and want to return as soon as possible, before Starbucks and Wal-Mart (and future bankrupt Trump casinos) erase a nation frozen in revolutionary amber.

There’s a great line about Cuba – “Cuba got three things right: education, health care, and baseball. And it got three things wrong: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” The food can be pretty bland. I would say it’s been wrong on lots of human rights issues as well (although the last ten yeas have seen massive improvements for the lesbian, gay, and transgender populations). But all the socialist good will hasn’t stopped men from being dicks. I have to side with the radical feminists on this one. You can get rid of capitalism, but until you get rid of patriarchy it’s the same old shit. Cuba libre.

The Casual Sociologist: Causally watching race and races from Mexico

July 26, 2016July 26, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

July 26, 2016

Watching the American political conventions from another country is a strange experience. The summer of 1984, I was living in Dublin, Ireland and only heared second hand reports about the amazing speech Jessie Jackson gave at the Democratic Convention. Now, thanks to the global wi-fi (and CBSN), I can stream it live and watch from my bed here in Morelia, Mexico.

One of the funny items that has been circulating (besides Melania Trump’s beautiful tribute to Michelle Obama) has been the image of very Caucasoid-looking people holding “Latinos para Trump” (not “Latinos por Trump”) signs at the RNC last week in Cleveland. The implication is that there are no actual Latinos for Trump, so the RNC made the signs up and handed them out to the whitest crowd assembled since Kenny G’s last concert, hoping that the internet wouldn’t notice. “Look, Latinos do support Trump! Everybody was wrong!”

First of all, there are Latinos that vote Republican. They’re called Cubans. Secondly, Latinos come in all shapes and colors. From dark indigenous people to European Spaniards and old fashioned whites. Not all Latinos look like George Lopez. Having said that, and being married to a full-blooded citizen of Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (That’s “Mexico” to you gringos), I feel pretty confident in saying those folks holding the “Latinos for Trump” were about as Latino as a crunchy chalupa at Taco Bell.

I was thinking about the issue the other day as Andrea and I were sitting at a sidewalk cafe on Plaza de Armas in the center of Morelia. We were enjoying our very European cappuccinos while dark skinned indigenous people (the “O.G.s of Mexico”) tried to sell us trinkets, clothing and candies. Andrea was quick to point out how Mexico has adopted it’s own version of racism that grants privilege to the lighter-skinned citizens. The darker the Mexican berry the harder the struggle.

The United States exports a lot of wonderful stuff. I saw a kid in Mexico City last week playing Pokemon Go! USA! USA! Some might argue that rampant consumerism is not our best export. Now that nearly everyone in Mexico has a credit card, the latest clothes and gadgets are accessible (along with a lifetime of debt to the happily profiting banks). But before the exported version of the variable interest rates came our views on race and the basic idea that the whiter you are the better you are.

If you don’t believe me, look at the origin of the term “redneck.” Poor whites had to work the fields and their tanned skin reflected that. Eighteenth century aristocrats hid from the sun and prided themselves on their porcelain skin. And if that wasn’t enough, they would cake on the white face powder and powdered wigs. (The great irony was a lot of that white powder contained lead and poisoned the wealthy.) But anything was better than looking like the darker common folks.

Add “negroes and mulattos” to the mix and you have the completion of the “white is right” hierarchy. And it’s not like this idea died in 1865. All over the globe there are Asian-originated people getting plastic surgery on their eye-lids in a sad attempt to “look white.” And all over the globe there are African-originated people who are bleaching their skin in a sad attempt to “look white.” And if you’re a Latina, there’s blonde hair dye on sale! There is a multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry that regularly tells women around the globe that being beautiful means being “white.”

10 Ways the Beauty Industry Tells You Being Beautiful Means Being White

I had a Latino student in one of my Hate Crimes classes at Portland State who did a fascinating research project. He did a content analysis of images of women in fashion magazines that targeted the Latina audience, like Vanidades and Latina. The images of ads and articles were either of Caucasian women or very light-skinned Latinas. There were no images of indigenous women or even mestizo (mixed) women. The message was clear – white is beautiful and, therefore, non-white is ugly.

It’s no secret that Mexico has it’s own version of American racism. Just watch any half hour of Univision or UPN and try to find dark brown faces. When they do pop up on telenovelas they are maids, peasants, villains and even witches. The news presenters all look like Access Hollywood hosts. Off the screen it is just as clear. The lighter skinned people work in banks and the darker skinned work construction and peddle. White is money.

But this racial class divide is not always so divided. The teacher’s union in Oaxaca is waging a bitter strike against the reforms of President Peña Nieto. Last month six demonstrators were killed and more than 100 were injured by federal police in the conflict. The teachers are often lighter-skinned and more educated than the demonstrators but they are all in the struggle together. Last week we were in Pátzcuaro and traffic stopped for what I thought was a festival of locals. That was until I saw the anarchist flag and the barricade on the railroad tracks to stop trains from getting through. These young dark brown people were shutting the system down to support teachers in another Mexican state.

I know to a lot of Trump folks (and maybe Americans in general), “Mexicans” are anyone whose family comes from south of El Paso. That includes El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and even Brazilians. They are all the same skin tone and education level. Malcolm X once said, “What does a white man call an educated negro with a PhD? He calls him a nigger.” That attitude is often extended to the “beaner” in America. (But if you can get a few of the light-skinned, dyed-blonde GOP Hispanics in front of the camera at the RNC, no problema.)

So it should not be a great surprise that the attitude that white is better permeates south of the border and across the globe. Racism is a planetary sickness that devalues indigenous people pretty much everywhere (outside of Northern Europe). But maybe, if Trump wins, white will be out and the world will become a nauseating shade of orange.

Douchebags, Thugs, Bullies, and Donald J. Trump: The perils of wounded masculinity

May 25, 2016May 26, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 16 Comments

May 25, 2016

Last summer when I began pointing out the parallels between white supremacist tactics, fascist movements and the rhetoric of Donald Trump I felt like a lone voice in the wind. Now the concern that Trump is bringing a populist form of fascism to America is bouncing around the mainstream, from the Village Voice to the Brookings Institute. Of course, last summer I thought the Trump crazy-train would derail by Thanksgiving as Bush or Rubio became the rational choice of the Republican Party. I have never been so wrong in my life. I completely underestimated the number of deluded people willing to dive into a cult of personality. They aren’t a silent majority, they are a very noisy minority. A very noisy white minority.

Much has been made of the fact that the core of Trump’s base is “undereducated” (Trump’s word) white males. Yeah, many of those are whites who think Latino youth in the streets of Albuquerque protesting Trump are the shape of things to come. But as important is the “male” part of the phenomenon. According to a recent Gallup poll, 7 in 10 women have a negative view of Trump. Another poll found that almost half of Republican women can’t see themselves voting for Trump. Trump doesn’t really want the minority or female vote and heaven help us all if he wins the White House without it.

I’ve been writing about how Trump reminds me of the white supremacists I’ve studied for thirty years. He also reminds me of another idiot I’ve studied; myself. He reminds me of myself before I became a feminist. Before I grew up. You have to ask yourself one question, why do women hate Donald Trump so much? Are they just “dumb bitches” who don’t understand politics? Should they just be seen and not heard and vote the way their men tell them? I think I get Trump and the thugs who love him. I used to walk in their shoes.

Much has been written about Trump’s horrible treatment of women, especially since the recent New York Times article, “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private.” As soon as he declared his candidacy, his voluminous amount of sexist comments were trotted back out. The guy who said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass” might become president. Women are just eye candy for his beauty pageants and women who oppose him are “ugly.” His first wife implied that he raped her before he dumped her for one of his lovers. His groping of women is Cosby-level. And it goes on and on and he, oh, he just won another state. What the hell is going on? (And don’t dare suggest that he has small hands!)

The larger answer relates to the concept of backlash. There’s a white backlash similar to the one that Ronald Reagan, with his mythical tales of black welfare queens, rode to the presidency in 1980. They see Black Lives Matters protestors and Latino protestors threatening their special rights as whites (aka, white privilege). But there’s also gender backlash, the same one that Susan Faludi wrote about in her bestselling 1991 book. The advancement of women threatens male power and so the war on women begins again. Trump doesn’t want to have to be “politically correct” and neither do his followers. And nothing is more threatening than the prospect of a female president. After eight years of a black president, then a lady president? What’s next, a gay president? It’s hard out here for a straight white man. Save us Donald! Our essential masculinity is under attack!

I used to buy into that kind of thinking, the zero-sum game between men and women. We were opposite sexes. I performed the role of masculinity I was taught, defending any attack by “manning up.” Then I took out a loan on a clue and went to college. Women are not the opposition, they are the salvation. Instead of dismissing them (and raping them), we should be listening to them. I tell young men the most revolutionary thing they can do is ask the women in their lives what they think and then actually listen to their answers. Donald Trump has never done that (or at least the Trump caricature he performs for his flock). And his beauty queen wife stands behind him. “He’s not Hitler!” she promises.

Here’s what makes Trump the king of the douchebags. It’s not his endless lies that his followers ignore, dismiss and excuse like battered wives who will put up with the abuse as long as the husband promises to take care of them. (“Believe me.”) It’s the simple fact that Trump cannot admit that he’s ever made a mistake. Even the bashing of Heidi Cruz was not really a mistake to him, he just wishes he’d done it differently. He routinely says he has no regrets. He as no ability to share his internal monologue because his internal monologue probably just sounds like, “Tits, ass, tits, ass, tits…” What does Donald J. Trump have to regret anyway? He’s the perfect American, he says.

Meet the regret king, me. As you evolve, you probably look back at the last version of yourself and shudder. I was using the word “feminist” before I knew how to act like one. I was callous with the women I dated, used sexist language, and, worst of all, failed to really hear those I was in serious relationships with. I’d like to apologize to all those females, including a Facebook friend who’s bra I snapped in eighth grade. And I’m sure 2026 Randy will think 2016 Randy still had a lot of work to do. To be a decent person you need humility and to know that you’ve probably been wrong more than you’ve been right. You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

Instead we get Bully Trump who “hits back” twice as hard when he thinks he’s been hit. Maybe somebody should tell him about the guy to asked us to turn the other cheek. He wants to build a wall around America like the wall he’s built around himself. It’s the wimps that wanna listen and share their feelings. He just wants to knock the hell out of his enemies. He’s a sad man who reminds me of so many sad men I know and the one I once was.

The media has tried to create a similar narrative on the left, the “Bernie Bro.” Supposedly there are an army of Sanders supporters rioting in the streets who will use sexism to defeat Clinton. It’s a myth easily dispelled by the wide support Sanders has from women and minorities, but it’s still something to guard against. Clinton and Sanders and their supporters don’t benefit from the same lack of introspection that Trump celebrates. None of us do. And throwing rocks at cops just drives the sheep into Trump’s tent.

Look, there are plenty of white people who don’t understand the Black Lives Matter movement or Latino protestors taking to the streets. Are they racist? Well, some believe America is being handed to “underserving savages,” so those people are. Even more Trump men see their old-fashioned John Wayne masculinity threatened by empowered women, gay, lesbian and transgender people. They can’t even protect their females from the mythical transsexual predator in the Ladies Room. They’ve already surrendered the toilets at Target. What’s next? America? Where is the white man’s man who can make America great again?

This election is going to be decided by women. Will they follow their men into Trump’s douchbag circus of doom or stand on their own, vote their interests and save the rest of us dumb-asses from ourselves?

Douchebag note: I have to be honest, I’ve never really known what an actual “douchebag” is. About a year ago a female friend suggested it might be more sexist language I should abandon. I listened but the sound of the word fits so well with who it describes, I held on to it. My friend Jen just sent me a note on the word and I defer to her feminist wisdom. She said, “This issue I have is that you are comparing a man to a dirty vagina that needs to be cleaned and in this scenario the vagina is a) dirty and needs to be douched to get cleaned which is obnixous and false b) he is lower than a dirty vagina and c) because he’s so sexist equating him to a vagina cleansing product implies that the worst thing he could be is a woman’s vagina which is in fact one of the most amazing things on the planet.” Agreed, vaginas rule! She also offered the other argument with this piece: Could “douchebag” be a feminist insult? Thanks, Jen!

Earlier Trump blogposts

Who the Hell is supporting Donald Trump?

I told you Donald Trump was a fascist!

Mr. Trump, kiss my anchor baby

Trump Part 2 – This is what fascism looks like

Donald Trump is the new face of white supremacy

The Millennial Effect: Here comes Generation Z

May 18, 2016May 20, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 10 Comments

May 18, 2016

As a sociologist of youth culture, I spend a lot of time trying to explain what makes generations unique. The easy answer is – nothing. Broad generalizations are meaningless and teens in 2016 probably face many of the same issues that teens did in 2016 BC. Some things are eternal, like when do you get the keys to the hybrid or chariot?

But there is a social science of generations, looking at a cohorts born in a similar time and place. The parameters are usually based on changes in birthrates. The Baby Boom Generation begins about 9 months after the end of World War 2. In 1946, with the world safe for democracy, the birth rate in the US exploded and finally began to drop in the early 1960s. Nearly a third of the U.S. population are Baby Boomers and it’s pretty much explained nearly every cultural trend since. The sixties were the “Sixties” because you had so many college-age kids. (Bad time to throw a war.) And now all those boomers are retiring and there’s a Viagra commercial on TV every 60 seconds.

Then came Generation X, the relatively small generation that I’m part of the first wave. The birthrate bottomed out in 1974, so a lot of of the 1980s “kids in America” had to live in the shadow of the massive Boom. Next came Generation Y, or the “Millennials,” that ended the century. The birthrate jumped up in 1981 as boomers (finally) started settling down, AIDS killed “free love” and they invented the SUV (with a “Baby On Board” window sign).

This 1981-2001 “echo wave” ended up being even bigger than the baby boom generation. They were not only the brats of Boomers who had finally found their way out of the disco. The population of first generation immigrants also got considerably younger. The Millennials became the most diverse generation in American history. They represent the browning of America. Over 35% were born outside of the country, another 26% are first or second generation immigrants and 38% are bilingual. This is my wife’s, story. She is the new face of America.

These three generations, Baby Boom, Generation X, and Millennial, have some real markers. Baby Boomers watched Star Trek on Friday nights on NBC. Gen Xers watched the reruns after school as latchkey kids (and Star Trek: The Next Generation). And Millennials stream old episodes on Hulu between J.J. Abrams reboots. They are marked by different historical moments; the assassination of the Kennedys, the Challenger explosion, and 9/11. Boomers bought Beatles albums, Gen Xers bought U2 CDs, and Millennials may never have bought music on a physical format, preferring to download it instead. Baby Boomers got sent off to Vietnam, Gen Xers mostly avoided war and many Millennials volunteered for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In reality, there is an incredible variation within generations (including Millennials who buy Beatles albums – on vinyl). Usually when the term “generation” gets used it’s primarily referring to the experiences of middle class white males and what they do with their disposable income. The Great Recession of 2008 and the ethnic demographic shift makes the experience of the Millennials even less homogenous, but the one thing that makes them unique is their reliance on social media technology. Where Boomers hung out at the malt shop, the love-in, and the disco, and Gen Xers hung out at the all-ages punk club, the mall, and the rave, Millennials just hang out on line. The skate park gang is now a multiple-player online Tony Hawk game. The youth are no longer wild in the streets (unless there is a Bernie Sanders rally in town).

But these generations shape culture and not just hairstyles and popular dances. The Baby Boom gave us the second wave feminist movement. Gen X birthed Alex P. Keaton conservatism and Madonna sex-positivism and the Millennials gave us social networking. The great contribution of the Millennial generation is the recognition that you are not your job. They’ve seen their parents, painfully loyal to companies and careers, stabbed in the back, downsized and outsourced. Work is now something to provide you an income while you follow your bliss. Why commit to a profession that is just going to be replaced by a computer or Chinese child labor? As a Gen X’er who recently experienced this betrayal first-hand, this way of living sounds pretty good.

The oldest Millennials are 35 and the youngest are 15. The 9/11 attacks in 2001 also marked another shift in the birthrates. So here comes Generation Z, those born after 2001. This includes my daughter, born in 2014. The first Generation Zs turn 18 in 2019. What will their world be like?

It’s exciting to imagine what the 2020s will look like for them. We know there will be more non-white people in the U.S. and a declining pool of old white guys who want to make America “great” again. Z’ers will probably be even more immersed in technology (unless President Trump causes a global economic collapse and we have to revive the Pony Express). Between rising sea-levels and China repossessing the United States treasury, they will have plenty of issues to bring them together. We can hope that by then that whatever wave of feminism that’s happening is just tweaking the finer details of gender equality and expression. In 2026, Cozy will be 12 and I can imagine her doing a report for a 7th grade class about how her father used to have to explain what feminism was and why it was ever needed.

The Who played here in Portland last night and when they played their anthem, “My Generation,” I have to think 72-year-old Roger Daltrey grimaced a bit when he sang, “I hope I die before I get old.” But whatever your generation is, you’re going to have to stick around that long to figure what it all meant.

Who the hell is supporting Donald Trump?

March 10, 2016August 4, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 22 Comments

March 10, 2016

When I first started writing about the Trump candidacy last summer it was because his hateful rhetoric reminded of what I had heard in my many years of studying racist groups like the Nazi skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan. I feared for the brown members of my family but hoped that, like so many Trump products, the marketplace of ideas would send the Orange Aristocrat to the dustbin of history; that this “Ivy League” braggart with his horribly misspelled tweets and his potty mouth would be given a permanent time-out by sane political voices.

Well, we were all wrong. Somehow the Trump shell game has only gained followers. So the question is now, who the hell are these people voting for Trump? It’s easy enough to blanket characterize them of as idiotic racists flocking to the game show host’s cult of personality like good little Germans, but that angle is horribly problematic. It denies the fact that these are real people responding to problems that they believe to be real. Their numbers include some of my own friends and family members whom I’d never describe as knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers.

So pollsters and pundsters are wringing their hands trying to figure out who this mob is that might be driving the United States towards fascism while the rest of the world watches in horror and humor. “Donald Trump? Really? Sacré bleu!” YouTube is full of videos of Trumpists saying stupid, racist, and completely wrong things giving credence to the popular belief that they’re an army sub-moronic cretins who have fallen for Trump’s fact-free medicine show. But those folks giving the Donald their stiff-armed pledge don’t tell the whole story.

While ranking Republicans are freaking out, trying to unmask the Trump con (even Glenn Beck has compared him to Hitler) there’s something happening in the country. And that something is same phenomenon that is also driving people to support Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton.

It’s no longer a blue collar world

My master’s research was a thirteen-month study of a group of white supremacist skinheads in Orlando, Florida in 1989 and 1990. I was trying to figure where these little Nazis came from. Were they crazy? Did they have abusive parents? Did black guys steal their girlfriends? What I found was they were responding to the very real phenomenon of deindustrialization. The economic policies of Ronald Reagan opened the door for manufacturing industries to close up shop and head across the border and overseas in search of cheap labor.

If I work in a factory, I probably belong to a union and that union has used collective bargaining to secure a decent wage, paths to promotion, health care benefits, and maybe even a pension. I can work in an auto plant or a textile mill and still buy a (small) house and send my kid to (state) college. That’s the American Dream right there and it evaporated under Reagan. Of the people to move out of the middle class in the 1980s, two-thirds moved downward, not up. And it got worse when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993, accelerating manufacturing job loss and replacing them with shitty, low-wage, no benefit service sector jobs. Fifty years ago the number one employer in America was General Motors. Now it’s Wal-Mart.

These skinheads knew lots of people who had been laid off or downsized (including their parents). What was happening to America? they’d ask. The answer came from neo-Nazis like John Metzger (son of White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger) who would tell them exactly why. It was immigration, Affirmative Action and a “Jew-controlled” economy conspiring to take away “their” country. A very real problem (deindustrialization) was given a bogus explanation (Jews) and followed up with a very old-fashioned solution (violence). A recipe that has driven the racist skinhead movement ever since.

In much of America, this problem persists. Wages are down and benefits are few and far between. The factory is gone and in its place is a Wal-Mart selling American flags made in Vietnam. There must be somebody to blame for this.

Donald Trump as a Strongman

Donald Trump is a hyper-masculine cartoon character. He wants to torture terrorists and kill their children. That is until one of his seemingly slow advisors hands a note saying that’s illegal. He wants to “bomb the crap” out of ISIS, unaware that Obama has been quietly doing just that. He wants to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S., “until we know what the hell is going on,” except for the fact that we do know what the hell is going on. And he goes on and on about how “they” are chopping off our heads (in New Jersey?). Most famously he wants to “build a wall” to magically keep illegal aliens out, seemingly oblivious to the fact that illegal immigration has decreased and deportations have increased under Obama. All that might not play well on college campuses where kids actually keep up on the news, but it’s a huge hit with the white boys in South Carolina and Mississippi.

My Orlando skinheads were little authoritarians who were frightened by the changes in the world and wanted someone to come along and give them a path out of the chaos to order. Unfortunately, it was older Neo-Nazis who gave them that very ordered worldview and action plan. There’s a real parallel with the Trumpists who are scared shitless of Muslims, Mexican immigrants and Black Lives Matters protesters who are upsetting their world. It’s hard enough to keep up with cell phone technology, let alone these non-WASPS who might push terrified whites off the privilege throne. So here comes Trump, railing against “political correctness,” and the “God-given-right” to push back against these darkies. “All lives matter,” he bleats. “I’ve got a big dick!” he promises us. “Believe me.”

Recent research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found support for this idea. A doctoral student named Matthew MacWilliams found that Trump supporters, unlike the general population, demonstrated authoritarian personalities (just like my skinheads). Trumpists felt threatened by outsiders and were more likely to flock to a strongman who, they believed, would stop the changes that they feared the most. So Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall on our southern border and suddenly he’s their savior. It might be too obvious to draw the parallels with Hitler here but the xenophobia of Trump and his core following is not exactly new. We can talk about how fear-mongering moves us toward another F word, fascism.

Fear is the Path to the Darkside

We’ve got plenty of evidence about the frightening views Trump supporters hold. A recent YouGov poll found that a third of Trumpists thought placing Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II was a good idea and one in five Trumpists thought freeing the slaves was a bad idea. No wonder Trump has been slow to disavow support from white supremacists. (He’ll disavow it with a hrumpf that says stop making me do this.) And disavowing someone like Klansman David Duke is much different than making a heartfelt statement about the evils of white supremacy. The bottom line is these are Trump’s people!

Trump’s support has been less in whiter states, like Oklahoma, where Ted Cruz has been winning. Researchers have shown that you find higher rates of racism among people who believe they are directly competing with minorities for the same jobs. Data has shows that Trump supporters overwhelming believe (wrongly) that Affirmative Action takes jobs away from whites and hands them to blacks. They also have the incorrect idea that their taxes go to welfare for lazy (minority) adults who refuse to work. This was a lie Ronald Reagan pioneered in 1980 to move working class whites away from the Democratic Party. Driving this trend are southern evangelicals who have little to do with Jesus and lot to do with racial resentment, according to recent research done at Vanderbilt University.

Trump protester sucker-punched at North Carolina rally, videos show

Trump has tempered is huge support from white supremacists by pushing a more politically correct version of racism that makes brown the new black. He’ll find a small number of African-Americans who are ginned up on the competition with Latinos for crappy jobs and place them in front of the camera at his rallies. They are victims of the same economic policies that he’s profited from but he tells us that he has a “great relationship with the blacks.” “No on has done more for equality than I have,” he recently proclaimed. So fuck you, MLK.

Earlier this week I was on The Gavin McInnes Show, the right-wing internet show that’s popular with anti-feminists and “angry white men,” having a surprisingly good discussion about racism and Trump with guest host Jim Goad, author of The Redneck Manifesto. I think we both clearly stated our points and I was glad to participate. Afterwards I got a tweet from a fan of the show that said, “ if u dont believe blacks have a problem with violence why do u live in a white city? Move to black Chicago and test your bullshit.” I’m trying not to engage these folks on Twitter but I wanted to explain to him all the years I joyfully lived in downtown Atlanta and that I purposely moved to historically black part of Portland. But he lives in fear and the fear drives his political choices.

The year of the “I’m not a racist, but…” voter

Of course Trump’s coded racism is clearly understood by his followers. The endless data is telling us who his supporters are. They are older, whiter and angrier. They’re angry at the how the country has changed in the last fifty years with all the feminists, homosexuals, non-English speakers, and most symbolically of all, Barack Hussein Obama, their black president. Like the white supremacists I studied, they want somebody to “make America great again,” when a white man could beat up a black protestor and not get labeled as a “hate criminal.”

The anger is also targeted at the “disastrous trade policies” of the “stupid leaders” in Washington (who are mostly Republican) who have been unable to stop the the “Obama agenda” from driving the country off a cliff (or to renewed prosperity, if you look at the actual economic measures). With merely the power of his awesome personality, they believe that Trump will transform the complex workings of all three branches of the federal government. (“Meat Loaf for the Supreme Court!”) Just like Mussolini, who Trump is fond of quoting.

The great irony is that the Trumpists are motivated by a very real problem, the erosion of the middle class rooted in the very policies that Trump has benefited from to make his money. Trump’s lovely ties are made in China where the cheap labor is. And it’s a problem that impacts EVERYBODY in the working class, not just whites. These policies, including the Clinton-signed NAFTA, are also motivating many Sanders supporters, but instead of blaming the people at the bottom (who are often not white), Sanders and his voters are more likely to understand the problem is systemic magnified by the influence of corporate lobbyists in politics. But that’s a more complex issue. Scapegoating Mexicans is easier for Trumpists.

Bernie Sanders might be able to reach out to these economically dislocated Trump supporters in a way that Hillary Clinton can’t. But they have to be willing to abandon their authoritarian need to bash outsiders and insiders who don’t look (or pray) like them. They will have to let go of their fear. That’s a big “If” and points to the sad reality that after Trump goes back to his golden palace, another strongman will likely arise with the promise of making America great (white) again.

Post-script (Aug. 3, 2016): Warning: This Trump rally video includes vulgarities and racial and ethnic slurs.

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