JANUARY 1ST

It was 16 degrees when I walked this morning at 6 am, but there was a clear sky and a spectacular full moon, the best I have ever seen.  I have great hopes for the George Papadopoulos revelations.  Everyone is asking whether he talked to members of the campaign about the info he blurted out to the Australian diplomat, but he has pleaded guilty and is a cooperating witness so Mueller knows, and the answer is, Of course he did.  This is getting good.

WEED WARNING

My son, Tobias [who does not smoke weed or anything else], posted this warning on his FaceBook page.  Weed lovers, take note:

To all my friends in California who are looking forward to buying marijuana after the new law takes effect on January 2, and to all my friends in Colorado and elsewhere who have been doing the same: You need to understand that buying marijuana is still a crime under federal law. Nothing that California, Colorado, or any other state does can change that fact. The media has been catastrophically inept in its reporting on this subject. If you are buying or using "legal" recreational weed in Colorado, you are committing a federal crime. If you buy or use "legal" recreational weed in California next week, you are committing a federal crime.

Even your ability to buy medical marijuana in the dozens of states that have "legalized" that practice is precarious. Medical marijuana is still a crime under federal law. Since December 2014, there has been a federal statute that prohibits the Department of Justice from spending funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws. That law was set to expire a few months ago, got a pair of short-term extensions, and will now expire on January 19 unless it is made a part of the spending bill (if we get a spending bill). And even under this legislation, the purchase of medical marijuana is still a federal crime, there is just a de facto prohibition on prosecution. The statute of limitations on the federal offense is five years.

Until and unless Congress changes the classification of marijuana as a Schedule One controlled substance under federal law, buying recreational marijuana means that you are putting yourself at the mercy of federal enforcement authorities. At the present moment, that means Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III -- who has made demonizing marijuana a career-long commitment -- and the unstable madman in the Oval Office who just proclaimed that he can unilaterally order the Department of Justice to do whatever he wants.

Perhaps it is unlikely that the federal government would shut down the cannabis industry altogether -- it is worth billions of dollars. But that is not the point. Authoritarian regimes wield criminal law to control political dissent, using charges (real or spurious) to imprison their opponents and extort compliance. We have not gotten to that point yet, but it is not difficult to imagine.

If your immigration status depends on not committing crimes, then for Heaven's sake stay away from "legal" marijuana, because it is not legal under federal law. If you are engaged in political protest or other forms of opposition to the current administration, then be aware that buying or possessing "legal" marijuana puts a tool in the hands of federal authorities to go after you. Simple possession of recreational marijuana carries a penalty of up to one year in jail under federal law and could mobilize federal forfeiture penalties that could take your car or even your home.

Sorry to be a buzz kill. But you need to understand, if you buy or possess "legal" marijuana in California, Colorado, or anywhere else, you are putting your safety and possibly the future course of your life in the hands of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the unstable madman in the Oval Office. That is a decision that requires very careful thought.

HAPPY NEW YEAR [IT HAS GOT TO BE BETTER THAN THE OLD ONE]

It is now almost ten years since a young, spry philosopher launched The Philosopher's Stone.  Two million, nine hundred eleven thousand, three hundred ninety six views later, a slightly plumper, noticably older philosopher confronts the new year with the desperate hope that it will be better than the old one.  If Trump can be restrained from launching a nuclear war, I believe the prospects for the new year are good.  Mueller will indict some more members of the transition and administration, the Democrats will win the House and even, God willing, the Senate, Trump wll be impeached and put on trial by the Senate, another dozen or more politicians will be outed as sexual predators, and The Philosopher's Stone, along about April  Fool's Day, will pass the three million mark in total views.

Happy New Year to all.

CHATTELS MOVABLE AND IMMOVABLE

I wrote too quickly, and mesnenor offered a more accurate account of “chattel slavery,” but the situation was actually more complicated even than he or she indicates.  In the English Common Law [and elsewhere] a distinction was drawn between chattels movable and chattels immovable or real.  Furniture, clothing, jewelry, cattle, etc. were chattels movable; land was chattels immovable.  [Hence in French, meuble is furniture and immeuble is real estate.]  When a man of property died, his chattels movable were the first parts of his estate to be sold off to pay his debts, thus protecting the land.  You would think that slaves would be chattels movable, but if they were sold off first with the furniture, the widow would be left with land and no one to work it, so in a series of court cases in the American colonies that defied logic, slaves were declared chattels real or immovable, thus safeguarding the heirs.  The best detailed account of this can be found in a fascinating book called Southern Slavery and the Law, by Thomas Morris.  [At least, I found it fascinating.  I got it put on the list of Fifty Major Works of Afro-American Studies that we required all doctoral students to read and write papers on in the first year Major Works seminar, but the students hated it and it was dropped from the list.]

HOT OFF THE PRESSES

My Black Studies book is now converted from WordPerfect to WORD and has been uploaded to box.net, available via the link on this page.  Who knows?  Maybe someone will read it.

A REPLY TO PROFESSOR PIGDEN AND OTHERS

Professor Pigden has written a long and eloquent response to my cri de Coeur of six days ago [“A Question for Christmas Eve.”]  I agree with virtually everything he says, and yet I am not content to adopt the voice he articulates for us.  In explaining why, I encounter a problem that, I suspect, afflicts many writers who have grown long in the tooth:  I went into all of this in a book I published a dozen years ago, and so feel that there is no need to go into it again, and yet that book sold almost no copies and therefore, so far as the reading public is concerned, does not exist.  The book, which dealt with my experiences in the University of Massachusetts Department of Afro-American Studies, is called Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, an homage to a novel by James Weldon Johnson well-known in Black American circles.

Rather than rewrite here the two chapters in which I dealt with this question, I am going simply to reproduce the joke with which I begin the first of those chapters.  Then I will be able in a few words to complete my response to Professor Pigden.  Here is the joke:

“Sam Shapiro’s daughter comes home from college at the end of her Junior year and announces at the dinner table that she is to be married in two weeks time.  Mrs. Shapiro goes into panic overdrive and starts to plan a modest wedding for three hundred.  Her last words to Mr. Shapiro, before taking over the den as headquarters for the planning operation, are “You are going to need a new suit.”

Mr. Shapiro sighs, and goes to see Schneider the Tailor.

  

“Schneider, I need a new suit, and there’s no time for fittings.  My daughter, Tiffany, is getting married in two weeks time.  It’s got to be a real fancy suit.”

“Mazel tov!   Not to worry.  I will make you such a suit, your own relatives won’t know you.”

Schneider measures Mr. Shapiro up one side and down the other, all the while assuring him that there is nothing to worry about.  “Just come back the morning of the wedding,” he tells Mr. Shapiro, “wearing your good shirt, your good underwear, and your good shoes.  The suit will look like it was born on you.”

Two weeks later, not having spoken more than ten words to Mrs. Shapiro or Tiffany in the interim, Mr. Shapiro goes back to Schneider the Tailor, with his shirt, his shoes, and underwear all just waiting to be graced by the perfect suit.  Schneider whisks out the suit with an air of triumph, and tells Mr. Shapiro to try it on.

Mr. Shapiro slips on the trousers, and his face falls.  The pants are a disaster.  The right leg is three inches too long, and slops over his shoe.  The left leg is four inches too short, revealing a quite unappealing ankle.  And the waist is too big, so that the pants sag dangerously low on the Shapiro midsection.  Mr. Shapiro lets out a cry of anguish, and turns on Schneider.  “Schneider, you idiot!” he yells.  “What have you done?”

“Now, now” Schneider croons, “don’t worry.  Just extend your right leg to make it a bit longer.  Now hike up your left hip, so that the leg pulls up.  And if you will remember to keep your stomach pushed out, the pants fit perfectly.”

Mr. Shapiro is beside himself, but the wedding is in one hour, and there is nothing for it but to make the best of a bad situation.  He extends and hikes and pushes, and the pants more or less cover his lower half without falling down.

Now Mr. Shapiro slips on the jacket, and this is an even worse disaster, if that can be imagined. One sleeve is too long, the other is too short, and there is a bunch of cloth over his right shoulder blade that has no discoverable function at all.  Schneider the Tailor guides him through another series of contortions - one arm down, the other arm up, the shoulder hiked to fill the extra cloth, and finally, clammy with anxiety, Mr. Shapiro steps into the sunlight and makes his way carefully down the street toward Temple Beth Israel.

As he walks, concentrating fiercely on his left leg, his right leg, his left arm, his right arm, his stomach, and his shoulder, a nicely dressed stranger approaches him on the street and says, “Excuse me, but could you tell me the name of your tailor?”

“My tailor!  My tailor!” shouts Mr. Shapiro.  “Why do you want to know the name of that scoundrel?”

“Well,” says the stranger, “I figure any tailor who can cut a suit to fit a man shaped like you must be a genius with the needle!”

**********

Mr. Shapiro is America.  His new suit – Schneider’s folly – is the story White people have been telling about this country for the past four centuries.  In recent times, textbooks have tinkered with the story, pushing a leg out here, hunching up a shoulder there, trying to make the story fit the facts of the American experience, but the suit never really fits.  The only thing to do, at long last, is to give the story to Good Will and write a new one that really fits the facts.”

In the rest of the chapter, I examine in detail the successive editions of the three most successful and widely respected college American History texts of the 20^th century, showing how they adjust to the times by tinkering with their account of the American experience.  But it is Schneider’s Wedding Suit all over again.  In the next chapter, I tell the real story of America, as I learned it from my colleagues in the Afro-American Studies Department and from the countless books I read about Black history.

America is not, was not, and never has been a country founded on the Idea of Freedom, imperfectly realized at first and then, through struggle, little by little brought into greater conformity with its founding ideal.  America was, from Colonial days, a Settler State built from the 17^th century onward on unfree labor.  By a complex process taking more than a century, that unfreedom was codified as racially defined chattel slavery.  As the saying has it in this digital age, slavery was a feature of America, not a bug, and today, a century and a half after the official end of slavery, racial inequality remains a feature of American society, not a bug.  It is, like the inequality of women, a foundational structural arrangement for creating and perpetuating inequality.

The problem I tried, however ineptly, to articulate in that Christmas Eve post, is that with the exception of most Black and some few female intellectuals, no one who speaks in the public sphere shares this view, and would find it alien and even incomprehensible if confronted with it.  How then can I speak so as to be true to my understanding of the facts and also relevant to the conversation?

ANOTHER STRAW IN THE WIND

For me, the last eight days of the year are a special circle of Dante's Inferno.  Not only are they an endless three-day weekend, when nothing is open and even the mail is disrupted, it is also a time when one's favorite TV hosts are on vacation and the scrubs are suited up.  In addition, there is nothing to watch but wall-to-wall retrospectives of the year's news, which I have already absorbed, digested, excreted, and tried to forget.  The days are short, the nights are long, the sun is low in the sky even when it is up, and worst of all, you are supposed to be chuckling and cheerful and happy.  SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, does not begin to capture it.

In the midst of all this gloom, an obscure Republican operative, recruited to flesh out an MSNBC panel, made an observation that brought a warm glow to my heart and momentarily lifted me out of the Slough of Despond.  Talking about the probability that 2018 would see a Democratic electoral wave, he said, "the Democrats cannot wait to vote."

"My God," I thought, "that is exactly right.!  We are not just prepared to voted, or likely to vote, we cannot wait to vote."  All across America there are millions of people who are eager to cast a ballot against Trump and the Republicans.  I have never seen this kind of energy on the left..

This is going to be a good year.  Now, can we just dispense with New Year's Eve and get back to regular order?