I’ve been AWOL from this blog for months now. My dad moved into an assisted living facility in Millbrae and it’s been very time-consuming, to say the least. I had all sorts of problems with his health, the institution and its billing practices, and all the planning associated with leaving his home, watching my sister and brother-in-law get ready to relocate to the midwest, and organizing the imminent sale of his house. I think it’s starting to settle down now, and I’m hoping for a regular rhythm that will leave me some time to process my thoughts and perhaps occasionally share them here as I am wont to do…
Here’s the first of the placards I made for yesterday’s nationwide protests. It was good to be out in the sun with friends. It was a funny milling-about kind of demonstration, which was fine with me. I was far from the stage and the official speechifying, something I never care for anyway. I also attended briefly the “Tesla Takedown” rally in front of the dealership on Van Ness a week earlier, so I’ll pepper this with images from that too.
My first sign for the April 5 protest.
Rather than “hands off” all sorts of dumb things like NATO, I say “hands on” because we have some obvious changes to make…
But I thought I’d use this moment to post a short screed I wrote to accompany a link to the public statement by the OAH and AHA, the two main history organizations in the country.
In brazenly trying to put the (critical historical scholarship) toothpaste back into the tube (of social amnesia and self-congratulatory denial), the neo-fascists running the organized demolition of the administrative state attempt the impossible. Far too many deeply researched and brilliantly written works have appeared in the last half century, all contributing to a far more nuanced and critical understanding of the settler colonial society that is the United States of America, founded on slavery and genocide, and designed to reinforce white supremacy at every opportunity. As the two main historical organizations representing working historians argue, “Classifying collective historical scholarship as ‘toxic indoctrination’ or ‘discriminatory equity ideology’ dismisses the knowledge generated by the deep research of generations of historians.”
The book burning bonfires may not be far off, since the free circulation of books remains one of the most effective means of subverting the blathering, blatantly false propaganda being imposed by executive fiat. Let’s conserve and share our libraries, let’s do what we can to keep a bright flame of critical historical thinking burning. Perhaps one day the fires we kindle will overwhelm the puny minds trying so desperately to silence the winds of change that have already scoured the land and buried forever the old cliches of American history.
The view from the International Space Station!
Even further out there…
And from the Tesla Takedown protest on March 29…
Not always the most radical or politically interesting themes, but anything we do to puncture the myth of the grifter class of kleptocrats seems like worth doing…
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