Sunday Readings: November 27, 2016

It’s Sunday.

I interviewed Jill Stein for Paste about her push to get recounts in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Stein swears she isn’t doing the recount to push back on Trump’s victory, but as many people have pointed out, the states she’s asking to recount would flip the election to Clinton if all results were overturned.

I also refused, throughout the campaign, to say that I thought one candidate was preferable to the other. In my mind, both candidates are an expression of an election system that has been hijacked by the political and economic elite. Both candidates were not my candidate. So I would be doing this no matter who won.

One smear (of many) Stein endured throughout the campaign was being an agent of Vladimir Putin. In the wake of the election, an organization calling itself propornot has released a list of publications it accuses of being propagandists for Russia. Among those publications is Counterpunch, an online magazine I’ve written for. Chris Floyd writes about the accusations for Counterpunch and makes clear what he thinks of the mudslinging.

The story is a smear piece just like Tailgunner Joe and Roy Cohn used to make. It makes a direct equation between dissent and treason, using the crudest, stupidest kind of cod-reasoning: if you have criticized a policy or action that Vladimir Putin has also criticized at some point (even if the reasons for your critique might differ wildly from his), then you are automatically a Russian agent or a “useful idiot.” That’s it. That’s the sole binary in our political world, according to new McCarthyism: either you must accept everything the US government says and does at face value, believe it implicitly and support it whole-heartedly, or else you’re a traitor acting on behalf of the Russkies — or you might as well be.

The great 1990s group Rage Against the Machine were 24 years too early, says Frank Guan in Vulture.

Yet one of the most pressing themes in Rage’s lyrics is the notion of the inevitable return. Revolution, in Rage, is phrased in both senses of the word, as uprising and as a coming full circle: “How long? Not long. ’Cause what you reap is what you sow”; “It’s coming back around again”; “Like the sun that disappears, only to reappear.” If new music from Rage was nowhere to be found, Rage’s message continued to resonate, and often in the most unlikely eardrums.

The twitter personality @RickyRawls was interviewed in Thought Catalog on his trolling of whtie supremacists online. Rawls takes an independent view of American politics, he says.

Democrat or Republican, those to me are basically white organizations at the end of the day. I don’t agree with black people overly identifying and aligning themselves with any of those labels anymore. It’s cool to negotiate and work with them to whatever degree they are willing to help fulfill your needs for your family and your people, but to really believe they are there to represent you as a black person is delusional.

I’m basically anti-white supremacy, pro-black empowerment. If you’re a white politician with serious proposals to help accomplish either of those goals, I’ll entertain you, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, Whig, Marxist, Capitalist, whatever. If you’re just peddling an ideology centered on white people’s needs and telling me to just get overly invested in it just for a seat at your table and some lip service, I’m good.

For more Rawls, check out his appearance on Chapo from Thanksgiving.

Finally, The Nation has a measured, considered obituary of Fidel Castro by Greg Grandin that explains the complicated legacy of one of the world’s greatest revolutionaries.

In all his goodness and badness, Castro was a full man of the Enlightenment. It’s fitting, though depressing, that’s he’s left us on the cusp of a new darkness. But as he once said, the ideals of “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,” though routinely trampled, “will always sprout anew, everywhere.”

See you Monday.