What I’m reading:
Religion Dispatches digs into Sen. Rick Scott’s plan to “rescue America” and finds what you might expect: a thinly veiled proclamation of White Christian dominance that should not be taken lightly.
In the plan, writes Annika Brockschmidt, the Florida Republican “paints a dire picture of the state of the country, echoing Trump’s claims of ‘American carnage.’” He blames what he calls the “far left,” and offers a remedy that “reads like a check-list of white Christian nationalist buzzwords” that “promotes classic GOP talking points of cutting back Social Security, fighting crime and strengthening border security” and “adds the unhinged culture war agenda of the far Right to the mix.”
The targets of Scott’s plan are the usual suspects: Leftists, diversity and any effort to promote it, immigration, the LGBTQ+ community, socialism, “woke-ism,” and anything else that might interfere with maintaining what Brockschmidt describes as “the Christian Right’s decades-long disdain for a pluralist, multi-ethnic democracy.” A key feature, of course, is an attack on voting rights, which has to be seen as something more than just an effort by a political party to rig future elections. It is part of the larger program in which the right seeks to define “American” — and to determine who gets to enjoy its freedoms and protections — is proscribed by race and religion.
Scott’s program, Brockschmidt writes, is a “paranoid crusade against everything and anyone that could threaten white, patriarchal, conservative Christian hegemony — be it cultural or political.”
Scott’s plan presents a terrifying version of America: an authoritarian, fascist fever-dream that becomes a real possibility should Republicans win the House and Senate back. Pay attention now—Scott and the GOP mean what they say. It should be clear by now that “they won’t go that far,” is an empty hope that should be abandoned. They will—and then some—unless they’re stopped.
*
Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, tells the story of Seneca Village, a long-razed enclave of Blacks in New York City. The neighborhood was home to numerous Black land owners during the 1850s — which also allowed them to vote — but was razed to make way for Central Park. The reason, Mystal says, is the abuse of eminent domain, a legitimate tool of government that has too often been used to take land from Black and poor people and hand it to wealthy Whites.
I wrote about eminent domain last week.
*
An interesting thread on Twitter from Jeremy Scahill:
that attempts to put the Russian invasion of Ukraine into a larger perspective that also implicates Western governments that have historically been all too willing to use military might when it suits them. I am not in complete agreement with everything he says here, but I think what he says had to be said so that we can discuss the damage a heavily militarized world inflicts. Remember, you can support Ukraine, denounce Russian aggression, and be critical of Western interventionism all at the same time.
*
I’m also rereading Tim Z. Hernandez’s Manana Means Heaven, which novelizes the three-week love affair between Jack Kerouac and Bea Franco — Terry in On The Road — from Bea’s perspective. Hernandez spent a lot of time with Franco and mined her memories to produce a remarkable work that adds perspective to one of Kerouac’s most touching bits of writing.
Also working through Kerouac’s experimental (and difficult) Visions of Cody, which I read years ago without fully comprehending. It is seen by some as a masterpiece, though I disagree. It is, however, an important window into his process and thinking.
I am reading both to help with a book I’m writing in which I am reconsidering Kerouac and On The Road’s place in my own life and asking how we might see him if the novel were published today.