- This is what it’s like to be black in America, isn’t it? What it has always been like, at least since it stopped being worse. What it was like after Charleston, or after the church bombings during the civil rights movement. Or after the murders in Jeffersontown, which we mustn’t overlook. Except African-Americans live in the country that perpetrated their Holocaust, a country where denial of that Holocaust is still mainstream.
- Trump’s response that it would have been better had there been an armed guard is, yes, absurd in the light of the four police officers who were wounded. But the madness of this idea goes so much deeper. Should any group that gathers to pray also arm itself? Who will pay for the armed guards, and what should happen to religious gatherings too poor to afford armed guards? Are minorities to blame if they don’t arm themselves against racist violence? Is the government so weak and inept that minorities must arm themselves for a race war? Would Trump and his supporters really feel better if mosques started stockpiling weapons?
- Once again, an AR-15 is the tool of a terrorist massacre in America. Colt makes them. No one is talking about Colt. Colt is not a dirty word, but it should be. Colt should be held accountable. Its leaders and employees should be made uncomfortable all the time everywhere. It should be untenable for them to continue to do what they do.
- The reason we can do nothing about Saudi Arabia’s murder and dismemberment (hopefully in that order) of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is the reason we can do nothing about mass murders committed with American guns. Weapons sales always come first.
Responding to Hate with Charity
I woke up this morning, far away in Korea, to horrifying news of anti-Semitic terrorism back home.
I haven’t yet got much to say about what happened, but I felt the need to respond to hate with tzedakah (charity). There’s little else I can do right now. In multiples of chai, I donated to these organizations:
Tree of Life * Or L’Simcha
This is the synagogue whose congregants were murdered.
HIAS
“Welcome the stranger. Protect the refugee.” This is the organization whose mission of kindness drove the murderer to his vicious act. Anyone who knows our history as a people understands that we have been refugees, time and again. As the Torah says:
And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.
ADL
The Anti-Defamation League continues to fight anti-Semitism in America and around the world.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
Murder requires tools. CSGV is working to end the cycle of gun violence that grips America.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
The president has openly encouraged political violence, and his party has done nothing to stop him. The murders in Pittsburgh and the mailing of bombs to prominent democrats, including one to George Soros, a favorite target of anti-Semitic conspiracists, are of a piece. America’s anti-racist majority needs the political power the vulnerable instead of inciting violence against them.
Edit (October 29, 2018)
As we learn more, I found out there were two other congregations praying at the synagogue at the time of the attack. I’ve donated to both.
Strategic Angles
Screens in the Samsung cafeteria are showing the Trump and Kim Show and Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner. I’m not sure which dystopian vision of Pacific Rim globalization is weirder. Maybe it’s best to focus on the pocketless billiards on the screen in between? Oh, wait, a person in a giant cat head is cleaning the billiards table now. Never mind.
It’s an odd day, lacking the solemnity and gravitas of Kim’s first meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in because nothing Trump does has solemnity or gravitas. The results, after all the pageantry and tears, were more or less what I expected: a vaguely worded agreement reaffirming commitment to peace and denuclearization, with plans for more negotiation down the line.
Peace games
Trump followed up the summit by declaring that the US would stop its war games on the Korean Peninsula, which has led some commentators to claim that the US gave up something while getting nothing. In the most literal terms, that’s true, if you focus only on the summit and not on what led to it or how it was reported in North Korea.
Taking a slightly wider view, North Korea prepared for the summit by dismantling some nuclear facilities to demonstrate its readiness for real denuclearization. How valuable the facilities really were is debatable, but these are at least irreversible steps, unlike Trump’s decision to suspend the war games. And ending the expensive, provocative war games is probably something the US should have done long ago, but the US felt constrained because it felt like a gift to North Korea, and there was never an occasion for giving them a gift until now. I’m not concerned that the joint US-ROK military command will forget how to invade North Korea for lack of practice. Meanwhile, the economic sanctions are still in place, and so are America’s troops in South Korea.
The view from the north
North Korean reporting on the summit also matters.
When I first lived in South Korea, in the era of the Sunshine Policy, the english-language Arirang network had a show called Peninsulascope that did soft news about North Korea, looking for areas of commonality and progress. They would end each episode with a North Korean cartoon. I remember there was one about a family of squirrels who live near a fox. When a flood comes, the fox offers to save them; the squirrels hesitate, afraid of the fox, but at last they accept the offer, and the fox does indeed rescue them — only to eat them later. The moral of the story is that you can never trust your enemies because they will never, ever change.
The fox is America. This is how North Koreans are taught to see us: as devious and bestial in our very natures. And now Kim Jong-un has sat down with the king of the foxes and cut some kind of a deal.
I think of that cartoon whenever I hear someone saying this summit is boosting Kim’s legitimacy. In some hypothetical, domino theoryish way, the summit’s acknowledgement that Kim is the leader of a nuclear North Korea — which is true, by the way — may be giving some other dictator ideas. Domestically, though, it’s not that simple.
Kim has been preparing his people for a shift. Showing Kim talking to the enemy, and showing Kim admiring Singapore’s shiny prosperity, is something new. It’s something of a gamble, even if Kim’s position is for now secure. What might have been seen as capitulation or even treason — seen that way not just by the people, who don’t matter, but by the generals and politburo members, who do — has to be seen instead as a bold path forward. Kim needs to make it clear to his domestic audience that he’s not surrendering. I’m not sure how easy that is.
In taking these risks, Kim seems to be demonstrating his desire for something genuinely new. And really, for all that Trump and Moon can set timetables and fiddle with the requirements, it’s up to Kim whether he wants to denuclearize and cut a new path.
We shall see.
Opening Closed Doors
f(x)’s androgynous rapper/singer Amber Liu has a new mixtape, and it’s a doozy.
The mixtape starts with Get Over It, a jab at the music industry that’s also a plea for freedom of expression, to the point that Amber whips a paper bag off her head. Closed Doors is the first of four love songs, all ungendered (pronouns are “you,” “me,” “we”), and the refrain is “Nobody has to know what’s behind these closed doors.” On Right Now, Amber duets with a male singer (her vocal coach), and an actress plays his love interest, rather than Amber herself. Lifeline features a moving pas de deux featuring two men. For the Three Million Years video, Amber wears a rainbow peace sign pin in the video.
In a Billboard interview about the mixtape, Jeff Benjamin does all he can to get Amber to bite on the obvious question. He asks what “Closed Doors” is about, and Amber says it’s about respecting her privacy. He asks if there were any rumors that got to her, and she deflects it by saying she didn’t like it when the press reported her family was rich. He asks a couple of questions about her love life, and she gives meticulously ungendered answers. He even implies that one lovesong might be about her and a bandmate. She talks a lot about LGBTQ representation and is very supportive throughout the interview. Some of her best friends are gay.
Now, Amber Liu’s orientation, and her public discussion of it, are her business. I have no idea whether she’s actually queer or not. Maybe she’s straight but feels that’s not anyone’s business either. Who knows? But it sure feels like Amber is pounding on the closet doors from the inside.
It would be a huge deal to have a kpop star as big as Amber come out as gay or bi. For now, though, enjoy the music, the ambiguity, and Amber’s strong statements in support of the LGBTQ community.
Everybody Plays Games
“Everybody plays games.” That’s what Trump had to say after his sudden cancelation of his summit with Kim Jong-un, and then his intimations a day later that maybe the summit will go ahead after all.
This is not how diplomacy is usually done. Diplomacy is statecraft and it’s stately, building from the ground up, with lots of lower-level officials hammering out agreements over time. That kind of diplomacy can be effective, and it has the advantage of bringing thought and expertise to complex processes. But it hasn’t ever really worked with North Korea.
Instead, Trump is playing games. As a mode of running a presidency, it’s terrible. Playing games with immigration has been a disaster on too many levels to mention. Playing games with Iran — a country capable of the usual sort of patient, step-by-step diplomacy — also seems pretty dumb. Playing games with China on trade is like trying to play badminton with a grizzly bear. Playing games with Amazon and the Post Office is just batshit.
But with North Korea? Maybe games are where it’s at.
Games countries play
North Korea has a style unlike any other country’s. Negotiations even with very difficult counterparts like Cuba or Iraq never veered quite so schizophrenically from protestations of eternal friendship to foaming rants full of schoolyard insults. North Korea’s version of good cop-bad cop is Andy Taylor and Stacey Koon. In this case, after some admittedly unhelpful and possibly stupid and threatening comments from Vice President Mike Pence, North Korea failed to show up for a planning meeting and called the vice president stupid, along with some other amped up rhetoric.
The usual response, when North Korea throws one of these tantrums, is to backpedal, play it down, and coax North Korea back to the negotiating table like parents trying to keep their two-year-old from embarrassing them at a fancy restaurant. Trump tried something different. Before the tantrum even reached full crazy, he threw his own little narcissistic tantrum, backing out of the summit with a weirdly personal letter full of regret and disappointment.
Not only that, but Trump backed out after North Korea blew up its own nuclear test facility. You can argue that the facility was in bad shape anyway, but still, the timing was striking and devious. If this is where the diplomatic train stops, then the US got the destruction of North Korea’s only nuclear test facility, and North Korea got nothing. No cash, no lifted sanctions, no security guarantees, no future cancelation of US-ROK joint military exercises. Nothing.
Crazytown diplomacy
The Trump cancelation sent everyone scrambling. Moon Jae-in and Shinzo Abe were embarrassed and confused. China was probably both confused and relieved, if concerned that we’re going back to nuclear brinksmanship on their border. North Korea probably looked around and remembered that China is their only reliable ally.
If this were normal diplomacy, all of that would be very, very bad. But this is not normal diplomacy. This is Trump crazytown diplomacy. With Trump, everything is always contingent and always personal. North Korea made a conciliatory statement — a sign that Trump’s tantrum-for-tantrum approach might actually be an effective way of talking to North Korea — and now Trump is talking about reinstating the summit. So who knows?
The thing is, crazytown diplomacy might be the right tool for North Korea. Trump isn’t good at being president, or even at running a real business, but he’s good at sucking people into his orbit and using his B-list charisma to create buddies and sycophants. One of the only things we actually know about Kim Jong-un personally is that he has a taste for B-list charisma. It’s bizarre to consider that Trump’s Rodmanesque qualities just might win the day here.
Of course, any actual agreement will require the more ordinary diplomatic processes of working out details, resolving ongoing dispute, managing inspection schedules, and all that messy stuff that bores Trump. And at any point, North Korea could go back to the tantrum tactics. But they may be learning that Trump will tantrum right back. Mafia-style emotional overreaction might actually be a useful way of disciplining North Korea.
Can Trump do anything good?
Before you dismiss all this as my naivete (or, worse, before you decide I think Trump is wonderful and have finally come around to understanding his genius), take a moment to remember that bad people do good things. Nixon expanded the Vietnam War and engaged in petty theft against his political enemies, but he also restored relations with China. Stalin was a horrific murderer who led the Soviet Union in destroying Hitler’s armies. Keanu Reeves was actually pretty convincing in River’s Edge.
It’s also worth remembering how bad the previous Republican presidency was. Trump’s style is horrifying, and he has done much harm by appointing incompetent, corrupt people at every level of the federal government, as well as by doing outright bad things. But by this far into the Bush administration, we’d suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, instituted torture and kidnapping as national policy, lost track of Osama Bin Laden, started a disastrous war in the wrong country (we’re still feeling the effects of that failure), and even took time to destroy the career or CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Trump needs to be understood in this context. His fuckups are real and serious, but don’t let the style make them seem worse than they are — or, rather, don’t let the style make you forget what we endured from our bobblehead president. The outrage of the moment — and Trump is good at producing outrage — can make the present seem worse, and the past seem better, than they actually are.
All of which is to say that before you denounce the pullout from the summit as yet another example of Trump’s dangerous fecklessness (which it also is), check to see whether you’re just denouncing it because it’s Trump and it’s crazy and he’s awful. Because in this one case, Trump’s crazy awfulness might work.
Or not. Who knows? Crazy is crazy. But on North Korea at least, a little crazy might be called for.