Yo! Bad Republican Optics, Sen. Tim Scott & Michael the Black Man

African-American reach-out, Republican style?
Sen. Tim Scott tries to bamboozle black folks

The word of the day for me is optics.

Not the kind of optics associated with a complex scientific instrument like NASA's Hubble Telescope, which has been orbiting above our beloved planet since 1990 and to date has sent back hundreds of thousands of images and resulted in the publication of over 10,000 scientific research articles and papers.

No, I'm talking about the kinds of optics associated with political perception.

It defies belief that out of all the hyper-wealthy conservative members of the U.S. Senate, the braintrust of the Republican Party would trot out South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (the only African-American Republican in the Senate) to appear on-camera deceptively touting the GOP's "tax reform" plan as benefitting working and middle class Americans - then have him end it with the cringe-worthy catchphrase "#KeepYoMoney".

Not your, yo.

By the way my mom grew up in West Philly when African-Americans, Italian-Americans and Jews still lived in the same neighborhoods, Italian guys from Philly have been calling out Yo! to each other for decades.

Want to get hammered?

Watch the 1976 film Rocky and take a drink every time the title character, South Philly boxer Rocky Balboa, played by Sylvester Stallone, says "Yo!"

Now it's bad enough that the Republican-majority House and Senate have yet to pass a single piece of substantive legislation despite having the political "trifecta" benefit of having a Republican president in office - but they offer up their only black Senator to deliver an insulting catchphrase to bolster the illusion that their "tax reform" is not just a big tax cut for the rich?

As Gail Collins noted in her New York Times column yesterday, when White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former Goldman-Sachs executive who is one of the architects of the Republican "tax reform" effort, was asked if he could assure members of the working and middle class that their taxes wouldn't increase under the Republican plan he said he couldn't "guarantee that." 

So says the guy who received a whopping $285 million severance package when he exited Goldman-Sachs to join the Trump White House - no need to speculate on how much Gary's personal tax bill will shrink under the plan he's helping to craft. Cha-Ching!

Sen. Tim Scott delivering the "Keep yo money"
punchline on Wednesday in D.C.

What's really pathetic about all this Senator Scott tomfoolery is that I'm honestly not sure if the Republicans who thought up this latest PR disaster realize that it only reinforces their image as a bunch of culturally-oblivious stiffs who are perpetually and painfully out of touch with mainstream Americans.

As if having the black guy throw out a casual colloquialism commonly associated with African-American slang would suddenly convince people of color that Republicans have the interests of average Americans in their cold, compassionless hearts. 

Especially given that that the current tax overhaul being touted by Republican politicians in Washington, which seeks to radically lower the corporate tax rate, eliminate the estate tax and do away with the alternative minimum tax, is basically a mechanism for redistributing over $1.2 trillion in wealth to corporations and America's top earners.

Putting Tim Scott out there to promote the lie that Republican "tax reform" will benefit working and middle class Americans strikes me as culturally klutzy - it's not like he's a "man of the people".

As Jamelle Bouie observed in an article about Scott for Slate back in 2014, Scott's brand of "colorblind conservatism" is far more suited to the conservative white South Carolina constituents who elected him to office than it is to the mostly black South Carolina Democrats who overwhelmingly voted against him and his Tea Party policy positions. 

After all, Scott is the guy who introduced legislation that would cut off food stamps to any American worker whose wages were affected because of participation in a strike, as a then-member of the House, he voted against the 2011 deal to raise the debt ceiling to keep the government functioning.

He's basically a Tea Party guy who avoids speaking out on divisive racial issues like the controversial police killings of unarmed African-Americans like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown - so it's disingenuous for the Republicans to trot him out as the public mouthpiece of a hokey phrase like "Keep yo money" when black voters in his own state don't even vote for him.

One doesn't have to point out the racist, misogynist xenophobe the Republican Party nominated as it's 2016 presidential candidate to recognize that the GOP has long since abandoned any pretense of concerning itself with the major policy issues concerns impacting people of color. 

Maurice Symonette (AKA "Michael the Black Man") 
at Trump's rally in Phoenix back in August  

Amongst the unsavory leftovers still remaining from Trump's toxic 2016 presidential campaign, few are more disingenuous or laughable than his pathetic attempts to reach out to the African-American community.

This was true long before Trump stood at a podium at a campaign appearance in the mostly white Lansing, Michigan suburb of Dimondale, shrugged his shoulders with that smirk and pitched black American voters with the question: "What have you got to lose?"

Not surprisingly a mere 8% of African-Americans voted for Trump - I've yet to meet one of them.

His actions and statements since his inauguration have demonstrated that not only does he not give a rat's ass about people of color, Hispanics and Muslims, he's openly played footsie with fringe white supremacists by, among other things, hiring at least four as top White House advisers and describing the alt-right "Tiki Torch Nazis" parading around Charlottesville with swastika imagery chanting "Jews will not replace us" as "decent people."

So I found it really odd that out of the approximately 4,100 people at that bizarre Trump rally in Phoenix back in August, a strange black guy named Maurice Symonette (who also posts online videos as Michael the Black Man) wearing a "Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist" t-shirt holding a "Blacks For Trump" sign just happened to be standing just behind the Rambler-in-Chief - where the cameras caught him fawning, oohing and cheering at virtually everything that was said.

As Nina Golgowski reported for the Huffington Post back in August, Symonette used to go by the name Maurice Woodside when he was a member of a cult called the Temple of Love led by a man named Yahweh ben Yahweh who enticed Symonette into joining the cult by walking up to him and saying "All white people are the Devil." - ben Yahweh was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder.

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke

Symonette, who promotes a range of loony right-wing conspiracy theories, has frequently been seen photographed with his "Blacks For Trump" sign positioned in sight of the camera in ways that strongly suggest he's intentionally placed there by campaign staff and is quite likely paid to do so.

The only other black people I can think of that offer such enthusiastic support of Trump is the Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke who vilifies Black Lives Matter as a terrorist group.

You may recall his unhinged speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and recently his department came under fire after inmate Terill Thomas died in his cell after intentionally being denied water for 7 days.

The cowboy hat-wearing conservative firebrand has also drawn criticism from military veterans for festooning his police uniform with an assortment of pins and badges that have nothing to do with his actual service; including a Harley Davidson pin on his lapel according to a detailed analysis of his uniform decorations by the Washington Post.

Trump's African-American supporters also include former candidate on The Apprentice, Omarosa Manigault, who served as the Trump campaign's "director of African-American outreach" (when 88% of black Americans voted for Hillary...) and now serves in the White House in a position that really isn't all that clear - she's the one who proudly boasted that Trump has a list of "enemies."

It's weird enough that Trump is holding political rallies for the 2020 presidential race eight months into one of the most disastrous, unproductive and unpopular presidencies in U.S. history, but the fact that his most prominent black supporters are basically fringe right-wingers with views considered far outside the mainstream is a pretty sad indication of how widely despised he is by people of color in America - and how divisive he is as a president.

When you couple that with the Republican Party trotting out their only black Senator to try and bamboozle working and middle class Americans into believing that the GOP's tax cuts are going to put more money into their pockets, it's clear the Republicans have a huge optics problem.

What's not so clear is whether they're aware of it.

Nobody Is Forgotten and Nothing Is Forgotten

Russian poet Olga Berggolts

Last week millions of American citizens on the storm-ravaged island of Puerto Rico were still without power, medicine, food, water and fuel, while the man who calls himself president occupied his days publicly criticizing members of the National Football League for peacefully expressing their 1st Amendment right to free speech.

After the Republican-controlled Senate failed once again to pass an ungainly healthcare bill that would have stripped access to affordable healthcare for millions of Americans and allowed insurance companies to charge exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions, they set their sights on slashing taxes for corporations and the tiny fraction of the U.S. populace that makes up the 1%.

Depending upon one's perspective, the chaotic, directionless meandering and trite, paternalistic moralizing that defines today's Republican Party can be as exhausting as it is exasperating.


Arguably, a number of Russian citizens in the port city of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) likely felt the same way about the Communist Party - particularly on June 22, 1941 as news spread of Hitler's massive German invasion (codenamed Operation Barbarossa) along the western borders of the Soviet Union.

Russian poet Olga Berggolts was not among those who (albeit quietly) expressed criticism of the Party for its slow response to the many indications that an army of 3.8 million German soldiers was moving east into the Soviet Union across an enormous 1,800-mile front - though she had every reason to do so.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1910, she was just seven-years-old during the October Revolution of 1917 - when the Bolsheviks (led by Vladimir Lenin) toppled the short-lived provisional Russian government that took power after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on March 5, 1917 in the wake of widespread criticism of his leadership during the First World War as revolution and widespread hunger swept across Russia.

The end of the 304-years of the Romanov monarchy in Russia heralded years of internal political conflict, socio-economic upheaval and violent civil war that eventually led to the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922.

Olga Berggolts (sometimes spelled Bergholz) grew up amidst all that upheaval and chaos, becoming a devoted but idealistic Communist, poet, editor of a local factory paper and a writer of children's stories by the 1930's.

Olga Berggolts' arrest photo

But Joseph Stalin's consolidation of his control of the Communist Party and the country would usher in one of the darkest periods of her life.

Starting in 1936, Stalin and other officials began a two-year campaign to oust members of the Communist Party suspected of being "counter-revolutionaries" or "saboteurs".

A period of political repression which would come to be known as the "Great Purge" or the "Great Terror."

An estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens (the actual number will never be known) were executed at the hands of the Soviet government between 1936 - 1938.

Thousands more were sentenced to labor camps or prisons on intentionally-vague charges that allowed the Party leadership to imprison, torture, or kill virtually anyone.

For reasons that are unclear, but likely related to the content of her writing, her work as a newspaper editor, or her relationships with other intellectuals, Olga Beggolts was ousted by the Party, arrested by the NKVD (precursor to the KGB) and jailed for 12 months for "Unreliability to the Party".

While I can only surmise that she sought happiness, stability and intellectual companionship in marriage, the 1930's were far from kind to her.

Or those she loved.

Boris Kornilov & Olga Berggolts

Sometime in 1925 or 1926, she met the highly-regarded and handsome young poet Boris Kornilov while both were members of "The Shift", a group of poets in Leningrad led by the writer and poet V. M. Sayanov.

Berggolts and Kornilov were briefly married for about two years and they had a daughter named Irina.

But after his first collection of poems was published in 1928, his writing began to spark criticism by the Communist Party establishment.

Without the benefit of having extensive historical knowledge of the period, from what I've read, Kornilov began drinking heavily - understandable given the times.

It's quite possible that because of that, Berggolts was motivated to accept a job as a journalist in Kazakhstan in 1930, where she eventually divorced Kornilov and married Mikhail Molchanov - a literary critic with whom she had a second daughter, Maya, who (sadly) eventually died at 11 months old.

Back in Russia, Kornilov was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1936 - the same year that he and Berggolts' first daughter Irina died of heat disease when she was just 8-years-old.

On March 19, 1937, Kornilov was arrested in Leningrad after being accused of being involved in an anti-Soviet plot - he was sent to Siberia and eventually executed on February 28, 1938.

Perhaps because of her relationship with Kornilov, Berggolts was arrested by the NKVD a second time in 1937 while she was pregnant with her third child (presumably by Molchanov) and sentenced to prison for two years, during which she was interrogated and tortured - sadly, resulting in the child being born stillborn.

Now what fascinates me, is that despite all that personal tragedy, and her brutal treatment at the hands of the Soviet state, Berggolts remained a devout Communist - she remained true to the cause.

According to an article about her on Russiapedia.com, Berggolts is quoted as saying of the Communist-ruled Soviet establishment that imprisoned and tortured her, "there was something wrong with the people, not with the idea of Communism." 

You have to respect her for being a true believer.

Berggolts at work at her desk

After being released from prison in 1939 (the same year the movie Gone With the Wind was released), she returned to Leningrad and re-joined the Communist Party and continued to write poetry.

As a character Berggolts figures prominently in the author Harrison Salisbury's "The 900 Days", his definitive (and comprehensive) 1969 non-fiction account of the three-year German siege of the city of Leningrad during World War II - that's where I first learned about her life and contributions to the Russian war effort.

Not only did she record her written personal observations of life in Leningrad during the siege, she grew famous for reading her poetry on the radio on the only functioning radio station that still broadcast during the long and devastating German siege when the city was being starved, frozen, attacked and bombed from the skies and shelled by artillery.

Her uplifting poetry readings and messages of hope read over the radio are widely credited with helping to boost morale amongst the people of Leningrad during the horror of the three-year German siege.

During which an estimated 1.5 million Russian civilians and soldiers died as a result of combat, starvation, disease or freezing cold - numbers that are almost incomprehensible considering how much the Siege of Leningrad takes up in the historical textbooks of American students. 

Berggolts gave hope to the thousands of Russian civilians who helped defend their beloved city by building fortifications, anti-tank defenses, moving supplies and fighting alongside the Red Army to repel the German attackers.

Russian civilians walk past a frozen corpse on
the streets of Leningrad during WWII  

As Harrison Salisbury observed in chapter 33 of "The 900 Days" , Olga Berggolts once described the city's populace as moving through the streets of Leningrad to the front lines of the battle by: 

"familiar streets that each remembered like a dream - here was the fence around our childhood home, here stood the great rustling maple...I went to the front through the days of my childhood, along the streets where I ran to school."  

Lately I've found myself reflecting on Berggolts' words.

Especially as I try to make sense of what's happening with the regression of the U.S. government under Republican control, and the attempts to turn the GOP's obsession with widespread voter suppression of their perceived "political enemies" into government policy.

Think of Trump and his fabricated claims of voter fraud in the 2016 presidential elections (which he won...).

Or his controversial and widely-reviled White House "commission on voter integrity" led by the notorious Republican voter-suppression specialist Kris Kobach - whose crusade to "purge" voter rolls of thousands of citizens he deems ineligible to vote based on bogus, inaccurate data reeks of the same kinds of tactics that enabled the Communist Party under Joseph Stalin to charge, arrest and even kill people without due process or fair trial.

I've watched in horror as Donald Trump recklessly tramples over the hallowed institutions of our government as he attempts to mold them into a mechanism that exclusively trumpets the rigid ideology of the right-wing faction of hyper-conservative politicians and billionaire political backers that has coopted the Republican Party.

Like those citizens of Leningrad making their way past a cityscape altered by the German invasion that Olga Berggolts described, sometimes it feels as if I'm moving along a conveyor belt of change with other Americans.

Piskariovskoye Cemetery in St. Petersburg

Moving past institutions like the presidency, the Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education - and seeing them altered into nearly-unrecognizable reflections of what Congress and the American people intended them to be.

When I visited the then-Soviet Union in the summer of 1987 with a group of classmates and our teacher, my visit to the city of St. Petersburg opened my eyes to one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

A city with a fascinating history stretching back to 1703 when it was founded by Peter the Great.

To stroll through the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, or the Winter Palace once occupied by the Romanov family opened my eyes to a rich culture with a deep literary tradition - it stood in stark contrast to Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire."

Unquestionably, one of the most moving experiences of my life was during a visit to the enormous  Piskariovskoye Cemetery in the heart of the city - before then I had no concept of the extent of destruction of the Siege of Leningrad.

But when we stepped out of our tour bus and walked to a stone terrace that overlooks the cemetery, which is more like a vast open park, my eyes were immediately drawn to rows and rows of raised elongated symmetrical mounds (pictured above).

When I asked our tour guide what they were, I was stunned when she told me they were mass graves - each one containing thousands of bodies. Because of the cold, the bombing, the starvation and lack of fuel during the siege, it was almost impossible for many civilians to effectively bury their dead.

Piskariovskoye Cemetery, which opened in 1960, was built as a solemn place of remembrance, mourning and reflection - and a final place of resting for the remains of approximately 420,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers who died during the siege.

Etched on the Memorial Wall of the cemetery are the words of Olga Bereggolts:

"Here lie Leningraders. Here are city dwellers - men, women, and children. And next to them, Red Army soldiers. They defended you, Leningrad, the cradle of the Revolution, with all their lives.

We cannot list their noble names here, there are so many of them under the eternal protection of granite. But know this, those who regard these stones: No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten." 

Regardless of the current political tensions between America and Russia, I've never forgotten the kindness and generosity of the everyday average people I met during my visit to St. Petersburg, or the suffering and tragedy of the Siege of Leningrad during WWII - and I never will.

One Knee Equals the 1st Amendment

Coach Orlando Gooden kneeling during the playing
of the national anthem with his 8-year-old players

The image (pictured left), somewhat blurry and taken from a distance with a cell phone camera, seemed innocent enough.

A football coach kneeling on a field with a group of young players - a slice of Americana that is the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings.

But in a reflection of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, these third graders were kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before their game last Sunday.

Under normal circumstances such a thing might have escaped the notice of the media spotlight.

But last week when the story broke, Donald Trump was enmeshed in yet another disastrous week defined by the chaos sewn by his own fragile ego, narcissism, ignorance of world affairs, lack of political experience and unprincipled reactionary bluster.

His belligerent and often incoherent 42-minute speech in front world leaders gathered at the United Nations last Tuesday marked a new low-point for American diplomacy and global leadership.

He drew audible gasps from gathered attendees when he threatened to "totally destroy North Korea", and in defiance of the advice of his own senior advisers, derisively referred to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as "rocket man" before awkwardly trying to define his isolationist "America First" foreign policy by rambling on about individual nation's right to "sovereignty"  - even as he belittled other nations for their choice to pursue nuclear weapons programs or a socialist form of government.

In the aftermath, various outraged diplomats from other nations dismissed Trump as "unhinged", a "dotard" (senile person) and a "Goliath" among other choice names - so clearly the criticism was making The Donald feel defensive.

Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner

A defensiveness compounded by news reports last week that special counsel Bob Mueller is not only investigating Trump wanna-be consigliere Jared Kushner's financial dealings with Russia, the controversial son-in-law's role in putting together the murky campaign internet operation that targeted Trump supporters (and may have provided data to Russian agencies) is also a target of the probe.


Instead of trying to clarify, moderate or walk back his comments at the UN, Trump, evidently electrified by the media attention, decided to dial it up even further by doing what he always seems to do - he tried to change the media narrative.

When things aren't quite going Trump's way (as they usually aren't), his default MO is to launch a Twitter attack on something, or someone that his shrinking base of conservative supporters can obsess over and rally around.

Like the way he keeps ranting about Hillary's emails ten months after the election despite newly released documents provided to Newsweek via a Freedom of Information Act request showing that at least six top current and former Trump advisers (including Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner) all used personal email accounts to conduct official White House business.

Last week Trump's juvenile pissing contest with Kim Jong-un only seemed to earn him more criticism from mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike and increase the risk of a military confrontation - so he turned his focus to the NFL.

Now it's common knowledge that Trump watches a lot of TV, and despite his office granting him access to classified information from the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Pentagon and other government sources, remarkably he still relies on the conservative bias filtered through Fox News as his primary source of information on the world.

So there's little question that he was watching Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning the day after his unhinged UN speech last week when the target of their Fox-ian outrage was a group of African-American 3rd graders and their football coach.

Members of the Cahokia Quarterback Club in 2016

Many Americans were absorbing the news that after eight months, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had finally released detailed information on 3,000 online ads paid for by a Russian agency that skewered Hillary Clinton, promoted bogus fake news stories about her and were decidedly pro-Trump.

But where were the chirpy hosts of Fox & Friends directing their focus?


On a group of young American kids expressing their 1st Amendment rights on one of the most important human rights and justice issues in modern American history.

Now if you take a few minutes to listen to the tone of the indignant moral outrage of Fox News "contributor" Rachel Campos-Duffy, one might think that the small group of 3rd graders had burned an American flag and then pissed on it.

But the members of Cahokia Quarterback Club (8-years old and younger) from Cahokia, Illinois began their own little protest after asking their head coach Orlando Gooden, a former college football player at the University of Missouri who graduated from Cahokia High School, questions about the widespread protests in St. Louis after Circuit Court Judge Timothy Wilson found former St. Louis PD officer Jason Stockley not guilty for the 2011 shooting death of 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith.

The kids were aware of who Stockley was, which in itself is a sad statement of America in the 21st century.

As Gooden told St. Louis Fox affiliate KTVI, (watch the automatic video volume if you click that link, it's loud) he asked the kids if they understood what the protests were about and one of them answered, "Because black people are being killed and nobody's going to jail."

Coach Orlando Gooden and Latia Cole-Gooden 

The coach decided to speak with them about other high profile killings of African-Americans at the hands of police that have taken place across the country, and why former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games last year as a form of silent, non-violent protest.

The kids asked if they could do it as well, and with the unanimous support of the kid's parents, Gooden told them could kneel during the national anthem at Little Devil's Field in Belleville.

When news of their actions went viral, that's when Fox & Friends seized on it as an example of the pending collapse of society - and brought Rachel Campos-Duffy on to vent her outrage.

I found it interesting how quick Fox News was to sort of hold her up as the "outraged conservative mother", defending American values and her children by vilifying a group of 8-year-old kids trying to understand why members of law enforcement are never held legally responsible for shooting and killing African-American boys and men.

As if she was somehow victimized by a group of 8-year-old boys kneeling on a grass football field while the national anthem played.

During her appearance on Fox & Friends she called their peaceful non-violent protest "shameless."

The Arizona-born Campos-Duffy first gained notoriety as a member of MTV's The Real World, where her outspoken conservative views and advocacy of the Republican Party at times caused friction with other housemates on the show.

These days she's a busy WASPish Latina mother who works as the national spokesperson for the Koch brothers-funded LIBRE Initiative, an organization which seeks to promote "free market policies within the Latino community" (whatever THAT means).

And she's married to her former Real World cast-mate Sean Duffy.

Rachel Campos-Duffy and her loopy Republican
Congressman husband Sean Duffy 

A budding right-wing nut-job Republican Congressman who represents Wisconsin's 7th District and by all accounts his doing his fellow Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan proud.

As Jonathan Allen reported in Roll Call back in February, Duffy drew criticism after a CNN interview in which he "applauded 'the good things that came from' a white supremacist murdering nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, SC in 2015." 


He also voted for a bill that would allow college ROTC programs to fly the Confederate flag and tried to blame liberals for the fact that Jared Loughner, a right-wing wack job prone to conservative anti-government hysteria and kooky right-wing conspiracy theories, shot Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in the head.

During a town hall meeting in 2011 after Republican Tea Party poster boy Scott Walker was swept into office on a wave of anti-Obama hatred and proceeded to propose draconian cuts to the Wisconsin state budget, when a construction worker complained that his wife's salary would be slashed, Duffy complained about he and his wife and six kids having to survive on his Congressional salary of $174,000 a year.

So it's no accident that Rachel Campos-Duffy would be called on to offer social commentary on the 8-year-old members of the Cahokia Quarterback Club deciding to kneel during the national anthem.

Fox-Ready: Links to the Koch brothers? Check!

It's ironic that she gained her fame on a TV reality show called "The Real World", like her husband she's totally detached from the harsh realities faced by average Americans, and thrives off the energy of viewing everything through a distorted lens of "conservative values".

Campos-Duffy is tailor made for Fox because she's used to living in a distorted bubble - the same kind of parallel reality that Fox News pumps into Donald Trump's head every day.

In a recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, writer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar offered an interesting take on the distorted reality that Fox News propagates by immersing himself in watching it for three days straight as an experiment - he wrote:

"Fox gives Trump misinformation that makes him think his world is real: that he won the popular vote, that people don't think he's a racist, misogynist xenophobe. It's been reported that twice a day Trump is given a folder of only good news about himself, which some in the White House refer to as 'the propaganda document'. When those folders aren't enough, he can tune in to Fox."

As the unified rejection of Trump's recent criticism of the NFL and its players showed over the weekend, he's as out of touch as Fox News on the issue of men and boys making the decision to kneel as a form of silent, peaceful protest against injustice in America.

Leave it to Fox to call 8-year-olds "shameless" for exercising their 1st Amendment rights and Trump calling hundreds of NFL players "sons of bitches" for doing the same thing.

As many observers have noted, the simply doesn't grasp the basic fundamentals of the democracy he lives in - unfortunately that's not covered in his daily 'propaganda document'.

Corporate Citizenship: Equifax's Three Amigos

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

It's been a real drag learning that I was one of the estimated 140 million Americans whose personal information was "compromised" in the Equifax data hack that was revealed two weeks ago.

To be honest I still don't exactly know what "compromised" even means in terms of who actually stole my data, where it's being stored and what, if anything, the hackers who stole it intend to do with it.

After reading about what is now considered one of the largest data breaches in history, I went to the Equifax Website to enter my name and six digits of my Social Security number and quickly learned my information was part of that gargantuan cybertheft.

Like I didn't have enough on my plate to begin with - the Equifax Website said they would mail me details about my compromised data but I still haven't gotten it.

I wonder if any of the three senior Equifax executives (including the chief financial officer John Gamble) who collectively sold off about $2 million of their company stock just before announcing the data breach, had their personal data stolen?

Somehow I doubt it, but you never know, there may be justice in the world.

As Vox reported on Monday investigations into the remarkably-timed stock sale and data breach have been announced by the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and various Congressional committees.

Now I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting for the conservatively-tilted federal government to use it's power to slap down any corporation, let alone Equifax, an Atlanta-based company with 9,500 employees that "collects and aggregates information on over 800 million individual consumers and more than 88 million companies worldwide" according to their Website.

Got Equifax stock? Joe Loughran, Rodolfo Ploder
and John Gamble certainly don't

Want a good chuckle? Check out the Equifax page on Corporate Citizenship.

Instead of a photo of CEO Rick Smith, they ought to have a photo of those three shysters who dumped their stock before revealing that the personal data of almost half of the U.S. population was swiped; CFO John Gamble, president of U.S. information Joseph M. Loughran III and president of workforce solutions Rodolfo O. Ploder.

Oh and the stock price has tanked by about 35% since the announcement on September 8th of a massive data breach they all knew about back in July - so the three amigos collectively saved themselves about $700,000.

Would you believe that Equifax has five different presidents in their corporate leadership?

That's a lot of presidents for such an appalling lack of oversight, ethics and accountability.

Lest we forget, remember when Senator Ted Cruz and Representative John Ratcliffe (both Texas Republicans) introduced legislation that would eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau back in February?

With over $3 billion in revenue in 2016 and their brand and reputation rapidly sinking into the shitter, my guess is that Equifax has already dispatched lobbyists up to Capitol Hill to get their meathooks into members of Congress before the villagers begin storming the castle with torches and pitchforks.

Anyway, let's hope the wheels of justice turn more positively for the 140 millions Americans who've been affected by the Equifax data breach than they did for Anthony Lamar Smith in St. Louis.

Well that's all I have time for tonight, I have to get back to trying to initiate a credit freeze on the Equifax Website.

Wish that was as easy as dumping Equifax stock.

The Wheels of Acquittal Turn Again

Cops & protestors in St. Louis on Friday after former
SLPD officer Jason Stockley's acquittal [Photo - Theo Welling]

Given the protests and civil unrest that have rocked the city of St. Louis in recent days, former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley is arguably one of the most despised individuals in the state right now.

The crowds of people who took to the streets in protest after St. Louis Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson found Stockley not guilty of murder for the 2011 shooting death of 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith represented a wide cross-section of the local community.

Young and old. Black, white, Hispanic and Asian, people of different faiths.

All understandably confused and outraged over what is widely viewed as a gross miscarriage of justice in a state still recovering from the aftermath of the protests over the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by 28-year-old former Ferguson PD officer Darren Wilson in the nearby northeastern suburb of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

The similarities are startling.

In both cases, young white male police officers used deadly force in broad daylight after pursuing young male African-American suspects fleeing police after allegedly being involved in relatively low level felonies - Brown had reportedly robbed a local convenience store and Smith was allegedly selling heroin in a parking lot behind a fast-food chicken spot.

Both former officers used handguns against unarmed suspects based on what they both claimed was self defense, Brown and Wilson were engaged in some kind of physical struggle through the window of Wilson's police car before he fired twelve shots at Brown.

Smith sped off in his Buick in an attempt to flee, about 45 seconds before the high-speed, one-mile chase ended, then-officer Stockley was heard on the police SUV's internal video camera saying "going to kill this motherfucker, don't you know it."

Former St. Louis PD officer Jason Stockley

As the Huffington Post reported, Stockley ordered his partner Brian Bianchi to use their police SUV to ram Smith's vehicle to stop it.

Stockley got out holding his personal AK-47 assault rifle (which is not permitted by department regulations) with his department-issued pistol in his holster.

About 15 seconds after reaching the driver's side of Smith's Buick, Stockley ordered Smith to put his hands up - the driver's side air bag in Smith's car had deployed when the police SUV rammed it.

Stockley then removes his police pistol from his holster and fires five shots into the car, killing Smith - he claimed Smith was reaching for a gun.

But what's strange is that Stockley then walks back to the police SUV - remember he just shot a man.

Both a bystander's cell phone video and internal video cameras in the police SUV show Stockley open the back door and put his personal AK-47 rifle on the back seat, then he returns to Smith's car.

Then, the same cameras show Stockley walk back to the SUV a second time, and this time he's clearly seen rifling around in his personal backpack before emerging, going back to Smith's car and getting into the driver's seat after other officers remove Smith's body from the car.

It's there that prosecutors claim he planted the .38 revolver found in Smith's car - if Smith had tried to use that gun, why was Stockley's the only DNA found on it?

Take a couple minutes to look at the video of Stockley - watch it for yourself, both the bystander's cellphone video and the internal police SUV video are synchronized next to each other.

I estimate he's rifling around in his backpack for about 17 seconds, notice how he positions and hunches his body so that the internal police SUV camera can't show what he's doing.

But again, as in the case of Darren Wilson shooting Michael Brown in 2014, Stockley claimed he had no choice but to use deadly force against Anthony Lamar Smith because he was in fear for his life - but like Wilson, the only real evidence that he was in fear for his life is his own testimony.

No charges were ever filed against Darren Wilson in Ferguson, and it took five years before Jason Stockley was charged with murder - ending in an acquittal last week.

St. Louis PD officers knock an old woman who was
protesting to the ground before stepping on her

The police reaction to the subsequent protests by members of the local community and activists was similar too.

The heavily-militarized police response in Ferguson, including armored vehicles, was widely condemned around the world.

In St. Louis as people began engaging in peaceful protests on Friday, police responded by showing up in riot gear including helmets, shields and batons.

An older female protester was knocked to the ground and stepped on by cops.

It's pretty troubling given that she was exercising her 1st Amendment rights to protest against what many see as a flagrant miscarriage of justice.

That kind of authoritarian response certainly stands in contrast to the police response in Charlottesville, Virginia a few weeks ago when local and state police basically stood there and watched as Neo-Nazi, KKK members and alt-right nitwits, many of whom were openly carrying assault rifles and handguns, marched past - white supremacist protester 52 year-old Richard Wilson Preston shot a handgun directly into the crowd and nearby police did nothing.

My sense is that the acquittal of Jason Stockley and the subsequent response by police is what largely fueled a small fraction of the hundreds of peaceful protestors to throw rocks and paint at the home of Mayor Lyda Krewson's home late Friday night - which prompted police to use tear gas to disperse crowds.

The frustration of protesters, activists and human rights advocates is also compounded by the fact that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has already made clear that under his oversight, the Department of Justice will not use its authority to investigate local police departments for racially-biased policing, violations of citizen's Constitutional rights or excessive use of deadly force.

It all seems to point to a White House and Justice Department that tacitly reinforces a two-tier system of justice and a polarizing view of race in this country.

Ms. Texas Margana Wood: not a Trumper

A nation in which we now have a president who vents outrage and fury depending upon the race and ethnicity of the person involved.

For example, both Trump and his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders spent much of last week directing anger at black ESPN anchor Jemele Hill and the sports network after she called Trump a white supremacist on her personal Twitter account.

Frankly their self-righteous indignation was laughable considering Trump's habitual crude insults and serial misogyny.

In contrast, after Ms. Texas (who is white) Margana Wood publicly called Trump out at the Ms. America pageant last Sunday night - when asked about his response to the Charlottesville protests, she rebuked him for not making a more definitive statement deploring white supremacy.

Trump said nothing about her comments.

Much like his radio silence when white Americans commit acts of terrorism on people of color or Muslims, but when a terrorist linked with ISIS commits an act of violence, his Twitter feed blows up.

But to get back to my original point, it's pretty clear that the protests in St. Louis are about much more than another white police officer once again facing no legal repercussions for shooting an unarmed African-American motorist.

The protests are also a reaction to complacency and lack of leadership on issues of racial injustice by the federal government and people's impatience and frustration that the same racial bias still permeates the judicial system in St. Louis three years after the events in Ferguson.

Judge Timothy Wilson

As Jeremy Stahl reported for Slate on Friday, Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson's justifications for acquitting Jason Stockley outlined in his 30-page opinion are pretty shaky, he almost seems to be reaching for a reason to acquit the former St. Louis PD officer - despite a planted gun that doesn't have the victim's DNA on it and video that shows clear premeditation to kill.

Over the past few days I've spent some time reading people's reactions to the case on social media, and it's interesting to see how individual perspectives seem to break down along the same political and ideological divisions that are parroted in progressive and conservative media.

Some people's resentment is directed at the protesters, expressing the opinion that Jason Stockley's fatal shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith was justified simply because he fled the police.

In my view if the guy was selling heroin, fine, then arrest him, charge him and let a court find him guilty and sentence him accordingly.

But for Stockley to act as judge, jury and executioner for a low-level felony, then plant a gun to justify murder violates the principles of law enforcement and the Constitution.

There's no "many sides" on that issue, there is only right and wrong.

Columbus Revisited & The Real Uncivilized Tribe

Hands on the statue of Columbus painted red to
symbolize his violent treatment of indigenous peopls

It's not really clear why the as-yet unidentified vandal defaced a statue of explorer Christopher Columbus on the east side of Central Park near east 65th street on Tuesday morning.

But it doesn't come as a surprise in these divisive times.

Columbus' statuesque hands were painted red to highlight his brutal treatment of the indigenous peoples that he encountered after initially landing in the Bahamas in 1492 on the first of his four trans-Atlantic voyages on behalf of the Spanish crown.


When I was in elementary school, the textbooks we used generally touted Columbus as the man who "discovered America"; an assertion now known to be inaccurate.

Advances in modern archaeology techniques, new technology (like the wide availability of detailed topographical satellite imagery to uncover previously hidden ruins) and extensive research have revealed that in America at least, Columbus has gotten credit for something he didn't actually do.

The discovery of ancient Norse settlements near the Canadian coast in Newfoundland confirms that the explorer Lief Erikson and his fellow Vikings reached North America in 1000 A.D. (and stayed there for at least a year) almost 500 years before Columbus reached the Caribbean.

Some researchers have even suggested the Muslim Chinese explorer Zheng He, born in 1371, may have reached the west coast of America sometime in the early 15th century.

Portrait of Leif Erikson by Arturas Slapsys

With the discovery of scientific evidence showing that humans migrated across the Bering Strait to parts of the northwestern coast of America as far back as 14,000 years ago (far earlier than scientific evidence previously indicated), it's possible ancient explorers reached North America long before Leif Erikson arrived in Newfoundland by navigating boats along the coastline from Siberia to America.

But don't get me wrong, as a navigator and explorer, Columbus and his men certainly had chutzpah sailing west into uncharted seas.

Their having survived the voyage at all is a reflection of their seamanship and courage.

There's no question that they deserve credit for helping to change the course of human history by opening the gates of the Caribbean and Central and South America up to European exploration and colonization.

But one of the byproducts of Columbus sailing west to find a viable route to Asia and inadvertently stumbling upon the Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic and, eventually, an existing continent, is that it would lead to the systematic genocide of millions of indigenous peoples and lead to the kidnapping and enforced labor of millions of Africans via the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade over the course of hundreds of years.

So while I can understand why many Italian-Americans (including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo) are miffed over the defacing of the statue of Columbus in Central Park, frankly I'm one of those people who remain puzzled about why there are statues of this man in the first place.

After being appointed Viceroy and Governor of what was inaccurately then called the "Indies", historical records show that Columbus' period of leadership on behalf of the Spanish crown was marked by tyranny, savage torture, slavery, murder and nepotism until he was replaced as Governor by Francisco de Bobadilla in 1500.

Portrait of Christopher Columbus 

According to a 2013 article in The Guardian about a 48-page report compiled by Bobadilla at the behest of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who ordered investigations into allegations of Columbus' tyranny, the explorer once congratulated his brother Bartolome´ for having had a woman paraded naked through the streets on the back of a mule and having her tongue cut out for suggesting that Columbus was "of lowly birth."

In all fairness to the popular culture that ascribed a kind of mythical status to Columbus, that  48-page report (supposedly...) wasn't uncovered until recently.

So the folks who wrote songs about him, built statues of him, or dedicated a national holiday in his name may not have lent a whole lot of consideration to how he conducted himself and treated indigenous peoples once he arrived in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Was Columbus "evil" as some suggest? Not in my view.

Though he clearly did some pretty twisted things to other people in the name of profit, empire and the Catholic faith - and of course set the stage for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Personally I think he was a man of the times, an ambitious individual engaged in the enterprise of colonization to enhance the power, prestige and territory of (and channel financial profit to) the major European powers of the time - as well as the influence of the Catholic Church.

But just like the recent outcry against the Confederate flag and statues of Confederate generals and leaders, the defacing of the Columbus statue in Central Park is just the latest example of high profile non-violent protests challenging widely-held, and frequently incomplete, assumptions about history.

In some ways, the legacy of Columbus is still with us here in the 21st century.

Members of an uncontacted Amazon tribe fire arrows at
an aircraft flying over their settlement in 2008

On Sunday Shasta Darlington wrote an interesting article in the New York Times about a group of gold miners in a remote part of the Amazon who allegedly killed 10 members of a tribe of indigenous people never known to have made contact with the outside-modern world.

According to the article the killings took place when the miners encountered the members of the tribe gathering eggs along a river in the remote Javari Valley in western Brazil.

A federal prosecutor has begun an investigation into the killings.

The Amazon encompasses 2.6 million square miles and over 4,000 miles of rivers snake through what makes up an astounding 40% of the planet's remaining rain forest - within that territory there are still tribes that have never made contact with the outside world or modern society.

As Dan James Pantone reported in an article about the Brazilian government's decision to publish ariel photographs of a previously unknown tribe known only as the Cabellos Largos or "Long Haired People"; shown in the photo above trying to fire arrows at an aircraft that was flying over their settlement in 2008.

According to Pantone's article, another Amazon tribe known as the Matse´s had reported encountering members of the Cabellos Largos in seasonal camps located in the remote Javari River Valley near Brazil and Peru - but apparently the Brazilian government kept the photographs (and existence) of the tribe secret until 2008.

As the photograph above shows, the men dye their bodies red, and the women dye their bodies black - a tradition practiced in some ceremonial events by other Amazon tribes in Brazil and Peru.

To me it's an absolute travesty that a bunch of gold miners would kill members of an indigenous tribe (they reportedly bragged about doing it at a bar), just consider what they might know about native plants or species, or what we could learn about human evolution and behavior.

Charley Boorman & the late Powers Boothe in
John Boorman's 1985 film The Emerald Forest 

But whatever specifically happened to cause this slaughter, at the core, it was the intrusion of "modern society" into a pristine natural landscape inhabited by a people whose way of life may not have changed in thousands of years - it's just as tragic now as it was when Columbus arrived in 1492.

It's hard to put into words, but to me there is something powerful, mysterious, humbling and deeply spiritual about tribes that have never made contact with civilization existing in the modern world.

On a more positive note, there a couple of really good films that portray that conflict between modern man and "unknown" tribes that may have remain unchanged since the Stone Age.

Given that the excellent actor Powers Boothe recently passed away, it might be a good time re-watch (or see for the first time) director John Boorman's visually stunning 1985 film The Emerald Forest - check out Holcomb B. Noble's excellent review of the film in the New York Times which also offers some fascinating insight into the making of the movie as well.

I'm a huge fan of Boorman's Arthurian legend movie Excalibur (which I saw in the theater in Bethesda, Maryland with my younger brother when it came out) and I also saw The Emerald Forest when it came out as well; and went on to rent it on video many times.

It's based on a true story of a Venezuelan engineer whose 7-year old son was kidnapped by members of an indigenous tribe in 1972 - the man spent a decade searching the rain forest for his son.

Daryl Hannah and Tom Berenger in the 1991 film
At Play In the Fields Of the Lord

When he finally found him, the boy had totally integrated into the tribe and his father made the decision to let him live out his life in the jungle.

Boorman's version of the touching story is amazing, it's a really underrated film from the 1980's with a cool soundtrack that offers a glimpse of the way "civilized" man infringes on the life of indigenous tribes in the Brazilian and Peruvian rainforest.



Now if you want a somewhat darker take on that same conflict and you've never seen it, I highly recommend the exceptional 1991 film At Play In the Fields of the Lord, an adaptation of the novel by Peter Matthiessen directed by Hector Babenco.

At Play in The Fields of the Lord revolves around a group of well-meaning, but sadly somewhat delusional American Christian missionaries who come to the remote Amazon interior to spread the Gospel to an indigenous tribe called the Niaruna.

It's a brilliant cast that includes Aidan Quinn, John Lithgow, Daryl Hannah, Kathy Bates, Tom Waits and Tom Berenger.

In one of his best on-screen roles, Berenger plays a half-Cheyenne American bush pilot named Lewis Moon hired to help bomb indigenous people's remote village to drive them from their home so gold miners can move in.

Adian Quinn and Kathy Bates as missionaries
in At Play In the Fields of the Lord

But with his conscience troubling him, Moon gets drunk one night and takes a powerful indigenous hallucinogen and takes off in his plane, while circling the indigenous village as he's tripping, he parachutes out of the plane.

The story follows his introduction to the tribe and eventual transformation into a full-fledged member, and the deterioration of missionary couple Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah who come to recognize that life in the remote rainforest is not what they thought.

And dangerous to their young son.

Their struggle to hold on to their faith and mission as their relationship dissolves is pretty gripping.

At Play In the Fields of the Lord is not for the faint of heart, the violence against the indigenous peoples is pretty graphic, it raises challenging questions about Christian missionaries and self-doubt about faith - and the story takes its time developing - it runs a whopping three hours and nine minutes.

But as a meditation on the search for redemption and self-discovery, the meaning of organized religion and the themes of  Man Versus Nature and Man Versus Man - it's really worth it.

If you happen to be one of the those people fuming about the hands of Columbus' statue being painted red, I'd suggest you watch both these films and think about his legacy in the Americas.

Columbus does have blood on his hands, but he's not the only one - those of us who consume material goods without considering the consequences of climate change and burn fossil fuels without thinking about the impact on the natural environment and the indigenous peoples who live there, have a hand in that too.

As The Emerald Forest and At Play In the Fields of the Lord both demonstrate, the accoutrements that often define "civilized society" are merely masks that hide the truth of who the real uncivilized tribe really is.

Strange Fruit In New Hampshire? Contrition In Iowa

Baseball dugout at Quackenbush recreational field
in Wellsville, NY a day after Trump's election 2016

Now if you recall it was just about this time last year as the 2016 presidential campaign was headed into the final weeks before the November elections that some pretty disturbing reports started emerging from elementary, middle, high schools and colleges across the nation.

Schools being defaced with Nazi imagery, like my old elementary school Burning Tree Elementary in Bethesda, MD.

A detestable moment for America.

Racist graffiti scrawled on the walls of school buildings, bathrooms and hallways.

In the ten days after Trump's election in 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded at least 867 different incidents of harassment or intimidation based on race or ethnicity around the U.S.

For the most part, conservative news outlets and commentators tended to dismiss and minimize the impact and seriousness of these ugly incidents of racial and ethnic hatred and violence (stirred up by the divisive campaign of the orange-haired guy who pledged to Make America Great Again) as isolated examples of reactionary fringe-dwellers seizing the moment to express their internalized bigotry.

But as an article by Ben Thompson in the Boston Globe earlier today about racist graffiti found in the bathroom of Needham Elementary School on Monday demonstrates, it's still happening.

Another insidious hallmark of the Trump election in 2016 was that nooses intentionally began appearing in some schools again.

Casandra Merlin's 8-year-old biracial son's neck
after a 14-YO hung him from a noose

These vestiges of racial and ethnic terrorism were left in classrooms, lockers, or outdoor recreational areas to taunt, insult or intimidate African-American students.

Truly disturbing attempts to resurrect a dark and deadly chapter of America's past.

Sadly, that's still happening too.

As many news outlets have reported, recently at least one 14-year-old teenager in Claremont, New Hampshire allegedly took that a step further.

After Casandra Merlin's 8-year-old biracial son was taunted with racial epithets before a group of kids started throwing rocks at his legs, the as-yet unnamed teenager put a rope from an old tire swing around his neck and pushed him off a picnic table.

According to his grandmother, the teenager and other as-yet unidentified teens simply watched him swing back and forth three times until the boy was able to somehow remove or untangle the noose from his neck and escape.

As Angela Helm observed in an article about the incident posted on TheRoot.com on Sunday, despite growing national interest in the case, the Claremont, NH police chief Mark Chase is thus far denying media requests for more information on the investigation into what happened.

Even though it was the as-yet unnamed 8-year-old boy who was hung from a tree by his neck, the police chief seemed unusually concerned about the impact the media attention would have on the reputations and futures of the teens who allegedly committed this act.

Chase told reporters: "Mistakes they make as a young child should not have to follow them for the rest of their life." 

Nor should their age excuse them from responsibility for participating in a hate crime.

Claremont, NH police chief Mark Chase

In her article Helm pointed out:

"Notice how he called these predators 'young children', infantilizing the white teens. Conversely, teens like Trayvon Martin are made out to be hulking, menacing adults."

According to an article on Boston.com, after coming under increased media scrutiny and public pressure, sometime Monday night the police chief committed to investigate the incident as a hate crime but refused to give any more details because the kids involved are in their teens.

Earlier this afternoon a local NBC affiliate reported that Governor Chris Sununu and Rep. Annie Kuster have both released statements condemning the incident.


If it was a "mistake" as Chase suggested it certainly was a whopper.

Speaking of youthful "mistakes", did you hear about those five teenagers from Creston High School in Iowa who were shown in a photo burning a cross while wearing what appear to be KKK hoods while one held what appeared to be a rifle with a scope and another held what looks like a Confederate flag?

According to a Des Moines Register article posted last Friday, school officials decided to take disciplinary action against the students after the photo reportedly appeared last Wednesday morning.

Given the reaction of Creston Community School District administrators and members of the community, I don't think it's fair to characterize what these five knuckleheads did as representative of the town of Creston, or Iowa for that matter.

Creston, Iowa teens burning a cross

But I am personally troubled by the deeper question of what prompted them to do such a thing in the first place.

Did they have a few beers and decide it would be a gag or some kind of joke?

Or are they among the disturbing numbers of young white boys and men who've become "self radicalized" by the plethora of right-wing extremism online propagated by the alt-right community?

Was this some kind of juvenile reaction to what happened in Charlottesville?

According to Census data, in 2010 the population of Iowa was about 88.7% white and about 2.9% black or African-American.

So I really cant' see five white teenagers from Creston, Iowa (population 7,289) feeling racially marginalized - but maybe they do.

If I was a betting man I'd wager they were buying into some kind of distorted reality being peddled online by the community of alt-right bigots who find solace and courage in anonymity - and a sense of legitimacy from Trump.

Whatever their reasons their actions have certainly brought them back into reality quickly, and I as think back on my time as a junior and senior in high school, it's sad to think that the actions of these five individuals have come to dominate the start of the school year - and brought negative global attention to Creston High School.

All five boys were on the football team and coach Brian Morrison announced he'd spoken with their parents and removed them from the team; the principal Bill Messerole wouldn't comment on what, if any other disciplinary actions would take place.

Creston HS quarterback Kylan Smallwood

Both the coach and the team's quarterback Kylan Smallwood (who is African-American) expressed shock about hearing about the photo even while their comments were thoughtful, eloquent and measured in a videotaped interview about their reactions to the incident.

If there's any positive, it's clearly brought the team and members of the community together in ways that they might not otherwise have been compelled to do.

Personally I think Jamie and Megan Travis, the parents of one of the players in the photo, deserve credit for having the courage to pen an open letter published in the local Creston News Advertiser, apologizing for the incident and asking the community for forgiveness.

As they said in their letter (in part), "The photo in no way reflects our family values. Our family strongly believes that all individuals are created equally in God's eyes...Our goal is a peaceful resolution. We want to move forward and embrace our community in eliminating racism in Creston." 

Those are sentiments that I think the vast majority of Americans would share in this era of Trump's vile, petty divisiveness, pandering to nationalism, stoking "otherism" and dreams of walls.

Obviously no one was injured in Creston, Iowa as a result of what those five teens were doing in that photo, so in some ways it's different than what happened in a backyard in Claremont, New Hampshire.

But the root cause is the same.

Clearly no Kum-ba-yah moment is going to magically make everything right in a day.

But let's hope the same sense of contrition and unity in the face of ugliness that flowered in Creston, can blossom in Claremont - and that a traumatized 8-year-old boy and his community can find a way to heal.

What would Billie Holiday think about the erie song "Strange Fruit" still being relevant in 2017?