Of course there were always individuals who refused to abide by the fair-share ethos. But those who became too arrogant or greedy ran the risk of being exiled. And if that didn’t work, there was one final remedy.
Take the following incident which occurred among the !Kung. The main figure here is /Twi, a tribe member who was growing increasingly unmanageable and had already killed two people. The group was fed up: ‘They all fired on him with poison arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached the body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death.’
Anthropologists think interventions like this must have taken place occasionally in prehistory, when tribes made short work of members who developed a superiority complex. This was one of the ways we humans domesticated ourselves: aggressive personalities had fewer opportunities to reproduce, while more amiable types had more offspring.
—“Humankind: A Hopeful History” Rutger Bergman
1.
We like us some Judge Tanya Chutkin. She was one of the first U.S. judges to reject Florida Man’s executive privilege claims to withhold January 6 White House records. And now Chutkin was randomly assigned on Tuesday to sit in the Big Chair overseeing the orangeman’s case in Washington. She checks all the boxes that MAGAs hate: immigrant, woman, Black, Asian. Heh. She has said, “It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort, is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment.”
2.
Ah, to be in Europe again where public transportation isn’t seen as an insult to your FREEDOM. This week Republican lawmakers are offended at the notion of a proposed light rail running past their offices in the Capital.
The Arizona legislature passed Proposition 400 this week, which calls for billions of dollars (over 25 years) of investments in key highway and transit projects, which are vital to the region's mobility, development and to its competitiveness. If the half-cent sales tax is extended, the spending plan would generate nearly $113 billion in economic benefits for Maricopa County, according to an analysis by the regional government agency, Maricopa Association of Governments, and the pro-business Greater Phoenix Economic Council. Once Gov. Katie Hobbs signs the bill (https://www.azmirror.com/2023/07/31/legislature-passes-prop-400-bill-ends-lengthy-session/), which she is expected to do, it will direct Maricopa County to hold a countywide election to ask the voters to extend the transportation tax for two decades.
Extreme far-right MAGA Republican member of the Arizona House of Representatives, Joseph Chaplik, tweeted Calling this “Transportation Funding” is just an attempt by a far left and feckless Hobbs to push a Trojan horse into our cities unleashing anti-motorists policies and stripping away at our freedom of movement. Hobbs wants us to bend the knee to the climate alarmist cult and I will stand and fight this. I’m a strong No vote. Far-right extremist Republican member Austin Smith chimed in with This is irresponsible policy. I’ll be a no vote on the floor.
There’ll be no 15-minute city for these saucy fellers!
As Hank Stephenson reports in the Arizona Agenda, For good or ill, the Valley survives on growth. Killing Prop 400 wouldn’t have stopped that growth — it just would have meant we stopped managing it. The Valley narrowly averted that disaster scenario thanks to compromise from our political leaders at the Capitol. But this political football should have never been handed off to lawmakers in the first place.
And just to hark back on the national scale for a minute, an average train ride from Tucson to Albuquerque costs $150 and takes one day, fourteen hours. London to Paris costs about $60 and takes two hours and twenty-eight minutes. We so advanced!
3.
While Florida Man sucks up all the headlines, books are still being banned across the country by state legislatures and local school boards. Here is the list of banned books in Arizona alone. These books are BANNED. Let that sink in. Prominent authors such as Luis Alberto Urrea, James Baldwin, Sherman Alexie, and Howard Zinn are on the list…as well as ol’ Billy Shakespeare. Did I mention these books are BANNED? Did I mention to let that sink in?
The disciples of Phyllis Schlafly are in full swing these days, which makes them equally as dangerous and demented as Florida Man. In the September-October 2023 issue of Mother Jones, author Dashka Slater tells of her Stonewall Award–winning New York Times bestseller, The 57 Bus, being the 10th most frequently challenged book in Texas and the 35th in the United States last year.
The article goes on to say The American Library Association reports that more than 2,500 books were challenged in 2022, a big uptick from the already astonishing 1,858 challenged in 2021, which was already five times the number challenged in 2019. Last year, some 41 percent of challenged books were by or about LGBTQ people, and 40 percent were by or about people of color. The 57 Bus, a nonfiction narrative about two teenagers on either side of a high-profile crime, is a twofer: One main character is Black, the other nonbinary. The Tennessean reported just last month that The 57 Bus is now one of that state’s top five most challenged books.
Now that many books about race, gender, and sexuality have been cleared from the shelves, the censors are casting an even wider net. According to the latest report from PEN America, an increasing number of challenges target books about violence and abuse, health and wellbeing, and death and grief.
Book bans have been an American pastime since at least the antebellum era, when Southern states forbade the sale of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In modern times, bans have usually involved lone crusaders targeting a particular title. But this new wave is fundamentally different, driven by groups with strong ties to the Republican Party, such as Independent Women’s Voice, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn. Often, a single person affiliated with one group or another presents local authorities with a long list of books they want removed from the shelves—sometimes books they haven’t read and whose names they can’t even bother to get right. One member of Moms for Liberty had 20 Jodi Picoult titles removed from school libraries in Martin County, Florida. Citizen censors even targeted a book by bestselling young adult author John Green for being “depressing.”
There are actually many conservatives that also oppose these bans but the people who show up and make noise are the ones wanting to ban books. As Slater writes, fans of the right to read freely tend not to show up at school board meetings and statehouses the way the book banners do, either because they take their constitutional freedoms for granted or because they’re cowed by the vitriol the censors might throw their way. Without an engaged local press, too, many people are unaware of books being challenged in their backyard. But when readers do show up in force and resist, they can make a big difference.
I’m tired too. When I get together with other children’s and YA authors, our shoptalk is often about how the bans have affected our careers: the outrageous accusations; the cries for help from embattled parents, teachers, and librarians; the mysteriously canceled speaking engagements; the surreal question of whether it’s even safe for us to do public appearances. “Sometimes, in especially bad situations, I get so upset that I can’t focus on writing, which means that they’re taking away books that haven’t even been written yet,” says Kyle Lukoff, a National Book Award finalist and Newbery honoree whose books featuring trans characters have become frequent censorship targets.
One ray of hope; Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a law in June that will prohibit book bans in its public schools and libraries. Mr. Pritzker, a Democrat, said “While certain hypocritical governors are banning books written by L.G.B.T.Q. authors, but then claiming censorship when the media fact-checks them, we are showing the nation what it really looks like to stand up for liberty.”
Think about showing up when you can, spread the word, and fgawdsake, JUST VOTE BLUE.
4.
Just a couple moments of GODDAMN today: Rudy Giuliani is truly a piece of work. Noelle Dunphy, a former employee of Giuliani, has filed a harassment lawsuit not only for sexual misconduct but his recorded disparaging remarks concerning gays and Jews. “Jews,” he says. “They want to go through that freaking Passover all the time. Man, oh, man. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. OK, the Red Sea parted. Big deal. Not the first time that happened.” And in the category for the biggest hypocrite may we present Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) who recently tweeted “Everything is bigger in the Lone Star State including @Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas — the 2nd largest manufacturing facility in the U.S.! Tesla’s impressive facility employs 10k Texans & is one of the many reasons why TX is leading in job creation.” This despite the fact that Cornyn fought bitterly against the clean-energy tax credits that directly prompted Tesla to boost its U.S. manufacturing. Tesla’s current expansion in U.S. output includes a massive new investment at the very plant Cornyn toured and touted. In the runners-up category, here are GOP Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith (Miss.), Tommy Tuberville (Ala.), John Boozman (Ark.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.) who also boasted about money coming to their states from the infrastructure law to fund transportation and broadband projects. GODDAMN.
5.
Concert-goers are feeling more free to be tossing all kinds of shit at performers these days. As written by Jon Caramanica for the New York Times Performers might appear superhuman, but they are vulnerable, exposed. It’s one of them vs. hundreds or thousands in the crowd. The barrier between stage and audience is philosophical, a shared understanding of social practice but not anything more than that. It is not impregnable. Not a lot new here…just ask these guys.
6.
Speaking of barricading a band behind chicken wire, the Morpholinos will be at the Tap & Bottle for our debut (the Carnivaleros played there a few times) on Thursday, August 24. Slap it on your calendar…no cover! Check here for more dates coming up.
And now…
Chaplik is a nitwit who works for the rich and represents a safe, wealthy, white district. They don't want light rail near the Capitol because it would make it easier for people to visit the Capitol. They prefer to do their dirty work without voters watching from the gallery.
Wow they banned like water for chocolate and the tempest? What? I didn’t dare read the list further for fear of blowing a cork! Like Water is one of my all time favorite books and cannot even imagine what someone, anyone, would find offensive. Republicans aren’t nuts, they are just fucking ignorant. As the orange one would say...”sad”