The Cult of Trump

Notes on a Dangerous Imaginary

Hank Kalet Apr 25 ∙ Preview

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Above left is an email I received today from  something called Proud Patriots, a company that describes itself as ” a place where the love for America burns brighter than a sky full of Fourth of July fireworks.” It is an independent online retailer unaffiliated with the Trump campaign — according to its website — but its definition of patriotism is certainly wrapped up with the fetishization of Trump as  savior.

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Take the product being hawked here — a bobble head doll that merges Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character, in militaristic leathers and dark sun glasses. It’s meant as a play on two Schwarzenegger catch phrases: “I’ll be back,” i.e., as in I’ll be back in the White House, and “haste la vista, baby,” which is recast as “haste la vista, Biden.”

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Capitalism’ Homelessness Trap

The Court Will Rule on the Legality of Tent Bans, but Homelessness Will Remain an Issue

Hank Kalet Apr 22 ∙ Preview

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My book As An Alien in a Land of Promise is a hybrid work that looks at the problem of homelessness through the literal camera lens of Sherry Rubel and our reporting work in Lakewood, NJ.
The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case today that, in the words of The Guardian newspaper, “could significantly change how US cities respond to the growing homelessness crisis.”

The case involves a local ban in Grants Pass, Oregon, on sleeping outdoors, a law that criminalizes homelessness without doing anything to address its root causes or effects on those forced to find shelter in the now-banned tent encampments. A lower court already has ruled in favor of the homeless in this case, building on a 2018 decision barring the enactment of such bans.

But Grants Pass is now taking this to the Supreme Court, and it is unclear how a bench ruled by six conservative justices might respond.

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This all seems too familiar. Men and women with nowhere else to go, cobble themselves together into a ragtag community. They pitch tents. Find ways to provide food and other forms of aid. Knowing they will face reaction from the powers in city hall. They do this because they have no choice, because the alternative may just be worse, even as the city turns to its police forced to roust the men and women from their tents and chases them into the darkness.

This is familiar because it happens repeatedly. I remember, back in 2012 and 2013, watching several police SUVs rumble down the central dirt road of a tent encampment in Lakewood, N.J. The encampment, run by the Rev. Steve Brigham, was home to about 75 to 100 displaced men and women. A houseless population, but not necessarily homeless, because the encampment was offering a rough version of what most of us think of as home.

The use of law enforcement is a failure of both policy and imagination. Criminalizing the homeless (as I write here) only exacerbates the homelessness problem.

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The Great Rollback

Our Rights of Conscience Are Under Attack

Hank Kalet Apr 18 ∙ Preview

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Photo from Freedom Forum.
The First Amendment is under threat.

From assaults on campus speech by conservative forces to efforts to rein in the rights to protest, we are witnessing a dangerous moment of rollback when it comes to our basic rights.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution essentially protects our right to follow our conscience. In its five freedoms — to speak, believe, publish, assemble, and criticize the government — we have the broad promise of what America is supposed to be and the tools needed to ensure that these promises are met.

American history offers proof of the value of these tools — in the labor movement and the various rights movements that forced the United States to expand its vision of itself beyond its early white, male, Christian identity to include multitudes, as Whitman wrote.

This expansion did not occur by accident, nor did it happen because good always wins out. It does not. The expansion of who can claim citizenship (both legally and metaphorically) didn’t just happen; it was forced upon the ownership classes by workers and farmers and all of the dispossessed through organizing and protest and speech.

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These successes, of course, were met with pushback and often with state violence. The early history of the labor movement is one of violent struggle, in which workers were forced to take up arms against the well-funded and violent armies of capital. Black liberation in America also was met with violence — everything from billy clubs and fire hoses to genocidal riots and assassinations.

Each advance made by a dispossessed group was met with backlash. Today, we are witnessing another retrenchment, a multifaceted attack fueled by capital that seeks to divide and that wishes to take us back to a concocted before-time.

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