Author: hankkalet

My Progressive Populist column:

The Big Con

We have done great violence to ourselves.

I can’t think of a better way to describe the new American era. We have done violence to ourselves, shot ourselves in our collective foot, cut ourselves, inflicted unnecessary but potentially clarifying pain upon ourselves.

Perhaps I’m just a pessimist — or is it optimism, this sense that our retreat from reality may provide us with the first real clarity we as a nation have had in decades.

I write this just days before Donald Trump is to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. I write this as the Republicans begin an aggressive dismantling of the safety net, as nearly 20 million are to be stripped of their health insurance, as undocumented immigrants are about to face a purge, as efforts to ratchet up police power are being promised.

The press is under siege. Conflicts of interest are ignored. The truth — well, the truth has no bearing.

Read more here.

Here is a comment I just made on Facebook, which offers a bit of a preview of an upcoming column:

These are not normal times and this is not a normal presidency. We can’t fall into old habits, which is what helped drive the bus off the cliff in the first place. The simple dichotomy of R and D has blinded us to a pernicious authoritarian creep that has culminated with the current menace in the White House, but has its roots in the expanding powers granted to presidents over the last several decades. At the same time, the media has ceased to focus on things that matter, preferring to focus on the political back and forth, the insider-baseball stuff. the distractions, rather than the real questions of who wins and loses among American citizens when corporate power grows, when we allow a permanent war party to take hold of Washington and when the safety net is shredded. Our debates have been between centrists and the right, shifting the center ever rightward. Obama, after all, had considered a grand bargain to dismantle or severely gut Social Security, and the health care plan he created left the insurance industry essentially in charge. Glenn Greenwald‘s point the other day, which I used as a jumping off point for a column that will run in The Progressive Populist next month, that Trump did not arise out of nowhere is important. Trump is both culmination and aberration, and we have to attack the dangers he poses on both fronts. We have to cut off his political oxygen. He is outside of the mainstream, but also a product of its dysfunction.

Send me an e-mail.

I wrote this piece for PopMatters when Johnny Cash died in September 2003 — so long ago. I thought i’d reshare — not for any other reason than I like the piece and I’m in an essay-writing mode.

The Man in Black

It would be too easy to call him an everyman, too cliché, too trite.

And yet, that is what he was, an everyman, a singer and songwriter who plumbed our souls and made each of us real and alive in his music.

Johnny Cash, country icon and rock and roll founder, died Friday of complications from diabetes, leaving behind nearly 50 years of remarkable music and a legacy of innovation.

Read more here.

Send me an e-mail.

I just posted an experimental essay on homelessness at The Atavist

This essay is an experiment in form, and is based on interviews done in various places over the last five years. All of material — the writing, photos and sketches — is my own, though some may have appeared in other essays or articles published in the past.

 Read more here.

Send me an e-mail.

The short essay that follows was inspired by the announcement that the indispensable podcast “Our National Conversation About Conversations About Race” was ending its two-year run. If you haven’t listened, go to its archives and dive in.

Americans have a problem when it comes to race. This is not news. It’s baked into our history. It undergirds our attitudes, our language, our voting patterns. It structures our economy, delineates our neighborhoods, our views of crime and punishment.

It’s there, both front and center and in the background, and until we admit this nothing is going to change.

I know what some of you — meaning my readers, friends from my younger days, my critics — will say: “I am colorblind,” you’ll tell yourself. “It’s about character, experience, knowledge.” “I don’t see race,” you’ll say as you cross to the other side of the street, as you become watchful of the black kids in the mall, as you nod at the race joke and laugh.

I’m not calling anyone a racist. I can’t be in the head or heart of anyone but myself. And I’m not saying my hands are clean — I admit I need to check the impact of this history on my own subconscious actions and prejudices.

Under the Christian doctrine of original sin, at least as I understand it (being an agnostic Jewish existentialist and not a Christian), we cannot escape this taint. All we can do is repent and ask forgiveness. Slavery is America’s original sin, and I — all of us, really — can’t help but be tainted by it.

American racism was both created by, and helped create the so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery. It helped justify the violence used to control slaves and created the racial hierarchy that distorted the allegiances of poor whites, made them complicit in an evil from which they derived little and that was used to erase racial and caste resentments.

This is where white privilege begins — with the notion that skin color is destiny. Privilege, in this context, does not imply special benefits in the way we normally view them. Poor whites are still poor, and middle class folks like myself still have to pay our taxes and shovel the walk ways when it snows. Rather, it implies a kind of immunity — getting pulled over by police does not lead to an existential crisis, for instance, and the kinds of slights (“micro-aggressions) that African Americans are expected to live with do not happen to us. (I should say “most of us” — as a Jew I live with a different set of “micro-aggressions,” but that is a different essay.)

Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen uses these slights (does this word minimize the impact?) in an effort to show how the seemingly small, inconsequential moments are part of the larger web of privilege and racism. As The New York Times wrote when the book came out:

“Citizen” begins quietly, with descriptions of how encounters between people of different races can turn hurtful or puzzling or disconcerting in the space of a few words. The stories come from her own life and from people in her personal and professional circles.

One cannot forget the times a friend called her by the name of a black housekeeper. Another suffers a lunch companion who complains that because of affirmative action, her son cannot attend the same school that she, her father, her grandfather “and you” all attended. Yet another shows up for her appointment at the house of a specialist in trauma therapy. The therapist opens the door and yells: “Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard?”

Ms. Rankine said that “part of documenting the micro-aggressions is to understand where the bigger, scandalous aggressions come from.” So much racism is unconscious and springs from imagined fears, she said. “It has to do with who gets pulled over, who gets locked up. You have to look not directly, but indirectly.”

There is a continuum connecting privilege and micro-aggressions to white supremacy and Dylan Roof-level violence. Roof, the white man who killed nine African American churchgoers in South Carolina two years ago, occupies a distinct position on this plane, along with Bull Connors and Jim Clark, but that does not absolve the rest of us of our guilt.

We are complicit, remain complicit, and cannot claim redemption until we first admit our sin and seek forgiveness by engaging in the debates and fighting to alter a system that was built on sin and maintains its power by playing on the worst instincts of the broader American public.

Send me an e-mail.

Reminder: As an Alien in a Land of Promise is available for purchase

Hank Kalet’s As an Alien in a Land of Promise is a book-length mediation on homelessness and American capitalism. Interspersed with Sherry Rubel’s black-and-white photos, the hybrid work of poetry and journalism tells the stories of those living in a now-defunct homeless camp in central New Jersey, asking why our economic system turns people into refuse.

Based on a year of interviews and research in the former Tent City in Lakewood, Kalet tells the stories of people like Angelo, who lost his job in the crash of 2008, and the musician Michael. Interspersed with their voices – and those of “the pastor,” are writers like Jonathan Kozol and Michael Harrington, whose earlier research informs Kalet’s work.

The poet Eliot Katz, a former advocate for the homeless in New Brunswick, calls the book an “inventive mix of objectivist-influenced, journalistic poems and moving photographs” that “brings real, often-ignored human stories, statistics, and local geographies to life.”

B.J. Ward, author of Jackleg Opera, says Kalet “works in the poetic traditions of the inspired and observant narrator in Whitman’s ‘The Sleepers’ and, with his sense of lineation, Williams’ image-emphasis.”

Kalet is a journalist, essayist and poet, whose work appears regularly in NJ Spotlight and has been published by The Progressive, In These Times, The Progressive Populist, Main Street Rag, Lips, The Journal of New Jersey Poets and elsewhere. He is the auther of Stealing Copper, Certainties and Uncertainties, and Suburban Pastoral.

The book is published by the independent Piscataway House Press.

For more, see asanalieninalandofpromise.wordpress.com/ The book can be ordered at channel-surfing.blogspot.com/p/buy-books-by-hank-kalet.html, from Piscataway House, or Amazon. For press information, contact Hank Kalet at hankkalet@gmail.com. Press kit available upon request.

Send me an e-mail.