Dear friends,
Regular readers know that Tuesdays are reserved for good news. Well, some weeks, good news is a bit scarce, so we have to be creative.
Japan managed an impressive turn-around in the last three months, with its Covid case numbers plummeting and its immunization rate (both shots!) approaching 75 percent of its population. Japan reported just 202 new cases on Saturday. Weirdly, it seems to have been the government’s somewhat reckless decision to hold the Olympics — and the attendant spike in cases — that brought about the shift in public attitudes toward vaccination. (Yay for recklessness?!)
I’ve been worrying about the state of American democracy. So, here are some pieces of somewhat encouraging news:
Jacob Chansley, the ‘QAnon Shaman’ who paraded around the Senate floor wearing a headdress of horns and fur, face-paint, and no shirt, will face sentencing this week. Prosecutors are calling for a sentence of 51 months, ten months longer than Fairlamb’s sentence.
And, of course, Steve Bannon appeared in federal court yesterday on charges of contempt of Congress for failing to appear or turn over evidence to the House committee investigating January 6. Unfortunately, he cannot be tried for plain old contempt; he is full of it and he likes to lather it up and spread it around. The man is the definition of bad news.
Jamelle Bouie wrote an excellent piece earlier this month to remind us of the importance of the story of January 6. It crosses over into history-nerd territory, however, and you may have skipped it.
The Republican Party, in the wake of the Civil War, was not as politically secure as one might think. It won, in 1860, with a minority of the popular vote and needed a unity ticket — with the Tennessee Democratic Unionist and slaveholder Andrew Johnson as vice president — to win in 1864. Republicans did win a majority in Congress that year, but only because the South did not take part in the elections.
Anxious to retain power in Washington, Republicans took every opportunity to pin the late rebellion on their Democratic opponents, north and south. None of it was subtle.
Bouie explains that during Ulysses S. Grant’s 1868 campaign, Republicans were relentless about reminding the voting public of their opponents’ responsibility for starting the war. This strategy became known as ‘waving the bloody shirt’.
“The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era,” writes Stephen Budiansky in “The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox”: “It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had.”
This passage struck me because we are constantly bombarded with the grievances of those on the right, who claim to have had an election stolen from them, who mourn their oppression at the hands of elected officials who mandate life-saving vaccines.
Bouie’s point is clear, though I have added bold type anyway:
What is important is that the Republican Party never took for granted that voters would blame the Democratic Party for its role in the rebellion and vote accordingly. Republican politicians had to make salient the public’s memory of, and anger over, the war. And, I should say, they were right to do so. It was right to wave the bloody shirt in the wake of a brutal, catastrophic war that according to recent estimates claimed close to a million lives. That we, as modern Americans, learn the phrase as a negative is an astounding coup of postwar Southern propaganda.
Bouie’s history lesson serves as an important reminder to keep the January 6 narrative fresh in the public’s mind and be sure to cast blame where it squarely belongs. Some of us are still acutely aware that the American experiment may fail, as we enter the second year of the Big Lie.
It was fine for Lincoln to talk of “bind[ing] up the nation's wounds,” but politicians will have to continue to show the human cost by reminding the public of the five officers who died as a result of the January 6 attack, four of whom were suicides.
January 6, of course, is not primarily about the deaths of individual people, although if we’re counting, we should include the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives to COVID while the former administration squashed public health policy in order to fit the political agenda.
We have to stop the dangerously effective efforts to drain the blood from American democracy. This means protecting voting rights and pursuing electoral reform.
It’s time to hit the streets. There’s a voting rights rally at City Hall on Thursday and we should all be there.
RSVP for Thursday’s Before It's Too Late Rally to pass the Freedom to Vote Act.
Whenever I feel down, I look up… and ahead. A team of designers and consultants tried to imagine what a comprehensive transformation of the streetscape in NYC could look like.
Check out what they came up with.
It’s Tuesday. You came for good news and you didn’t get much. Here is the genuine article: the Nature Conservancy’s tree census has found that
All the boroughs of New York saw an increase in the net tree canopy during the time studied, which relied on open data of Lidar imaging — a method of scanning the Earth’s surface with laser technology — undertaken by the city in 2010 and again in 2017 using federal funding allocated after Sandy for disaster recovery and resiliency efforts.
The report found that communities with more household crowding, more vulnerability to heat and higher poverty rates have less canopy overall. But between 2010 and 2017, tree canopy growth was strongest in those very areas with higher poverty and heat vulnerability.
That was not an accident; the Trees for Public Health initiative made it happen. It’s always good to see movement in the direction of environmental justice. And trees are beautiful, and such good company.
with love,
L