My Life with the Cops

                     Run chillun run, the pattyroller git you --                                                                                  Run chillun run, it's almost day. 

                                                       -- Slave song 

One evening in the 1940's, a young James Baldwin took the subway downtown to 42nd Street, just to see what was going on in midtown Manhattan. A policeman asked him what he was doing there, then told him to go back to Harlem where he belonged.  

One evening in the 1950's, a young Tom Phillips walked out of a bar in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, in the poorer section of town around the railroad station.  Emerging from a parked patrol car, a policeman asked me what I was doing "in there."  I said I was having a beer.  He informed me that everyone else in the bar was black.  "So what?" I said.  At this he grew defensive.  He had nothing against black people, he said, he'd "worked with them for many years."  It was just that I didn't belong there.   

Neither of these events would be likely today.  Black people are common on 42nd Street, which has become an urban extension of Disney World.  And the poorer parts of Roslyn have been torn down to make way for parking lots and condominiums.  My classmate and teammate Sam Brown, whom I saw in that bar that night, now lives in Roosevelt, farther out in a suburbia that has become more segregated as it has grown more affluent.  Such are the changes over time, but the basic principle remains: each race has its place.  And the cops will let you know it.  

4th of July Special: What America Means to Me

--   By Tom Phillips 

"Flag"  Jasper Johns, 1954

Huddled at home, trying to focus on something other than the din of illicit fireworks, I meditate on my high-school essay question:  What does America mean to me?  

I used to think it stood for Freedom.  Americans do enjoy an individual freedom of speech, thought, and worship that is nearly absolute. This is what keeps me here in my native land.  But Freedom is a tricky term, understood in many ways.  

For white supremacists, it has meant freedom to practice slavery, then segregation and discrimination, unequal justice enforced by racial terror.  For African-Americans it means the hope of freedom from white supremacy: Freedom to vote, to walk or drive through any neighborhood, to run for exercise rather than for your life. 

For Franklin D. Roosevelt, it meant freedom from want, freedom from fear.  For conservatives in the 21st Century, it means freedom from taxes, from caring for the poor, even freedom to endanger others' lives by not covering your face. 

So Freedom's just another word to fight about.   

Think of US as an acronym for Ultimate Struggle.  Ever since the English set foot in Virginia and Massachusetts, the country has been torn between two irreconcilable world-views.  Let's call them the System and the Movement.  S & M. 

Viral Spring #20: Bound for Glory

Woody Guthrie 

                           your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

In this apocalyptic time, as America is revealed in all her shame and beauty, an old man dreamed a dream: 

I was walking the wrong way on Grand Central Parkway --- a road without a sidewalk -- making my way against a tide of traffic speeding into New York.  My clothes were filthy, my shoes battered.  

A voice said stop, wake up, before you get hit by a car and killed.  But another voice No, keep going, walk the walk.  I kept going.   

The first voice said watch out, here comes a truck.  I walked through the truck and it vanished. Then I knew the dreamer was not a bum going the wrong way, but a spirit bound for glory.   

Viral Spring #19: Dreams and Visions

                           And afterward. 

                       I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
               your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
                       your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

I dreamed that I was fighting for a new America, a better America, in a rebellion that had just been named the "Green Patriotic Uprising" or something like that.  I was in a school gymnasium, waking up at dawn next to a young woman who was my wife or girlfriend.  She told me the name of the uprising; and I said -- OK that's what they call it, now let's go fight it!  I was gung-ho, as they say.   
 

We were to move out at dawn.  My assignment was to run to the front lines pushing my upstairs neighbor, a fellow septuagenarian and a long-time activist, in a wheelbarrow.  She wanted to fight, but had a bad leg and couldn't run.  I grabbed the wheelbarrow with Myra lying down in it and began to run, full tilt along a narrow wooden track, with the rest of the force close behind.  But the wheel got caught in a crack and stuck.  I was holding up the charge, so I worked frantically to free the wheel.  Then  it occurred to me that neither Myra nor I had any kind of weapon.  How did we expect to fight?  

Then I woke up.                    

Viral Spring #18: If I Had a Hammer

-- By Tom Phillips
                            
Thirty-one years ago this spring, I was in Tiananmen Square amid a huge peaceful protest -- the largest the world has ever seen, the center of a nationwide movement for democracy in China.  As the protests built across every major city in China, the mood was euphoric; it seemed impossible for the ruling communist party to ignore the pent-up demands for personal and political freedom.

Americans are feeling the same euphoria today, as young people -- black, brown and white together -- turn out en masse in peaceful protests against racism and police brutality, and a president who embodies these abuses by denying them. With his poll numbers falling and ex-aides blasting him in public, it looks like a rout to some. "The Trump Regime is Beginning to Topple," headlined the Atlantic a few days ago.  

                                            

                               If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning

                               I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land..  

Viral Spring #17: White Bodies Up Front!

Brooklyn,  6/4/2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Something turned in me over the span of a day last week, maybe because something is turning for America.  

On Thursday morning I opened the New York Times to the most gut-wrenching piece of arts criticism I've ever read. Wesley Morris, a young black man who is the paper's critic-at-large, wrote of  a song that came up on the radio and left him weeping at his kitchen sink. The 1985 song by Patti Labelle is about the end of a long, bad relationship.  If you don't know me by now, she wails, you'll never know me.

Morris's composure broke not over a failed romance but the police murder of George Floyd, and Morris's own feeling that another relationship is ending -- that if we whites still don't get it, after all these years, we never will.  

Here's what he heard in Patti Labelle's lament:    

I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never …

I finished the article shaken.  If black people give up on us -- who were raised to think of them in just these ways, who struggle daily to beat back our pre-conscious ideas, whose very perceptions are still twisted by a racist culture -- what is next?  Is there any hope?

Viral Spring #16: Masters of Deceit

-- By Tom Phillips

President Trump is kneeling on the neck of American democracy, and we are gasping for air.  The only thing in his way is the US Constitution, and that will be his next target.  

A classic coup d'etat is in progress, with all the earmarks of tactics school children learned to watch out for in the 1950s.  FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover wrote a book on the truth-defying tricks of the Soviet communist party -- the "Masters of Deceit."  

The KGB's playbook -- adapted from the Bolshevik revolution -- was designed so that a small, determined group could seize power over a large nation, and make it look like the people's choice.  The key was co-opting legitimate protests, turning them violent, creating chaos and confusion, and then presenting the party as the only force that could restore order.  And both the KGB and CIA used this tactic during the Cold War, fomenting unrest as a pretext for seizing power in countries as big as Indonesia, Iran and Afghanistan. 

George Floyd

Now it's come home to America.  Following the police killing of George Floyd, multiple sources reported violence instigated by  young white men, heavily masked, smashing windows and setting fires.  Local people then took the opportunity to pillage, helping themselves to a sliver of America's luxury consumer wealth.  And TV News did its part, constructing a lurid loop of riot footage to accompany the news night and day  -- a misleading mashup that makes it appear the entire country is in flames.     

Just before he called governors to demand a military crackdown, our president talked by phone with Vladimir Putin.  The White House says they had an airy discussion of G7 invitations, the successful US space shot, and steps they're taking to fight the pandemic. Pardon my skepticism but I think there was another item on the agenda.  

Putin, the former KGB whiz kid, is today's Master of Deceit.  The President of the United States is his Apprentice.  Their playbook comes courtesy of the KGB and CIA, which manipulated the world for decades, fooling journalists like me into reporting phony crises that resulted in the rise of client regimes. Now they'd like you to believe those black-clad masked invaders are just irate citizens; that what you see on TV is what's happening in America. 

Do yourself a favor, America.  Walk out into the real world today and see how it compares with the president's fever-dream.  

Then try to breathe. The worst is yet to come. 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips