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The Deafening Drumbeat of the Unfree

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Above the din of disturbing news – that discordant banging you’re hearing, steadily getting louder and louder, that you can no longer ignore – that’s the drumbeat of the unfree.

Dehumanized by the labels “prisoner,” “inmate,” and “convict,” even reduced to serial numbers like Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean in “Les Misérables,” these men and women are, just like you and me, or any mortal – irrespective of flaws, frailties, even felonious acts and misdemeanors – endowed with the right to be treated with dignity, decency, and respect.

Advancing 10 specific demands as a rallying cry in prisons nationwide, these brave incarcerated souls are striking by: not eating, refusing to do prison work, engaging in sit-ins, and taking part in myriad other acts of nonviolent resistance that could, nonetheless – given the carceral, contentious environment they’re taking place in – quickly trigger violence (even reprisals, including the nefarious, all-too-frequent imposition of solitary confinement).

So what can you do? At a minimum, read the list of demands; they’re not long and considerable thought and effort went into crafting them. Since the very act of striking places the safety of the strikers in greater jeopardy, it’s the least you, as a civic-minded, compassionate citizen, can do. The complete list is inside:   [Read more…]

Vengeful Alabama to Kill 83-Year-Old Man

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Barring intervention by courts or its governor, Alabama will kill an 83-year-old man on April 19; long-incarcerated for the 1989 mail-bomb killings of United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance and civil rights attorney Robert E. Robinson, Walter Moody, Jr.’s wizened, withered body, will, three decades after his crimes, be strapped to a gurney, pricked with a sharp needle (possibly many, many times), and pumped full of chemicals until he is dead.

Why? Other than the reactionary, regressive idea of “retribution” – whose flawed moral underpinning is interchangeable with bloodthirsty, wild, wild West revenge – how will justice be served? And, for whom?   [Read more…]

Battling the Death Penalty with James Baldwin

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If you’re thirsting to understand our increasingly cold, jaundiced, at times carcinogenic society, James Baldwin’s singular insight about America and his dizzying, divine command of the English language are as refreshing as an icy elixir on the hottest day in hell.

Moreover, for death penalty abolitionists, Baldwin’s writing is particularly poignant in the wake of:

  1. The Supreme Court’s recent refusal to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty, and, “wipe the stain of capital punishment clean” (In the aftermath, Reuter’s Andrew Chung soberly observed that “[t]he Supreme Court has not seriously debated the constitutionality of the death penalty since the 1970s”);
  2. The Trump administration’s doubling down on a harebrained, ass-backward plan to put drug dealers to death;

    3.   [Read more…]

Concerning Our Endless Quest for Self-Improvement

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To counterbalance the competitive pace of the digital age, and the cacophony of self-help gurus—always more voluble at the start of a new year—urging us to lead “better,” fuller, more productive lives, Alexandra Schwartz, a staff writer for the New Yorker, recently recommended Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann’s 2014 book, “Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze” (see “Improving Ourselves to Death,” January 15th).

But, while Brinkmann’s modern-day ruminations are undeniably in vogue, they are no more edifying than German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s from over a century earlier. Without even the maddening ubiquity of constantly updating, beeping, and otherwise chirping smartphones—that, unless muted, turned off, or, gleefully chucked into the sea—never seem to allow us adequate time for unadulterated reflection (both about ourselves and the world), Nietzsche remarked: “With the tremendous acceleration of life” we are all “like travelers who get to know a land and its people from the train.”

Equally more illuminating than Brinkmann’s minimalist musings is masterful American writer James Baldwin’s take on modern society’s lack of consciousness. In his essay “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist,” Baldwin piercingly observed: “What the mass culture really reflects . . . is the American bewilderment in the face of the world we live in. We do not seem to want to know that we are in the world, that we are subject to the same catastrophes, vices, joys and follies which have baffled and afflicted mankind for ages.”   [Read more…]

Call Lethal Injection the Vile Torture It Is

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In a New Year’s Eve display of liberal newspaper death penalty abolition harmony – buoyed by the release of the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) annual report evidencing another year in the long-observable trend of capital punishment’s disuse and disfavor in America – both the Washington Post and New York Times’s editorial boards published opinion pieces arguing for an end to what the Times called a “cruel and pointless” practice; one that is “savage, racially biased, arbitrary,” and which “the developed world agreed to reject…long ago.”

On her well-followed Twitter account, intrepid anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean opined that the Times “opened the New Year with a bang: a full-throated exhortation against the death penalty. The editorial hit all the right notes.” While I hardly disagree with Sister Helen on anything concerning death penalty abolition – and, despite all the truthful and pointed invectives the Times’s editorial board did skillfully use to highlight capital punishment’s moral depravity – I still preferred when newspaper editors used the word ‘torture’ to describe to the American people what lethal injection really is.   [Read more…]

A Modern Day ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’

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My country, ’tis of Thee,
Troubled land of shooting sprees,
Of Thee I sing;

Land where 20 Sandy Hook children died,
Land where they tried to kill gay pride,
From ev’ry mountain side, high caliber bullets fly,
When will it end?   [Read more…]

When Racism Lurks In the Heart Of a Death Penalty Juror

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“…absent an unlikely intervention, the state of Georgia will execute death row inmate Keith Tharpe by lethal injection on September 26, 2017.”

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” This single, sinister question, asked over a sepulchral-sounding musical score, was rhetorical; for after a dramatic pause and a malevolent cackle, the narrator smugly informed the audience: “The Shadow knows.”

And so it was with this somber admonition on September 26, 1937, that the gritty, crime-fighting character dubbed “The Shadow,” whose exploits had previously been limited to pulp fiction magazines, burst into American consciousness with his own radio program. The uber-successful first episode called “The Death House Rescue” would lead to a run of 664 more installments over 18 seasons.

Exactly 80 years later another story about a scheduled execution, this time one that is all too real, is playing out; but, unlike that first episode of The Shadow, there is little chance of a tidy and fair resolution (much less “a death house rescue”). Indeed, absent an unlikely intervention, the state of Georgia will execute death row inmate Keith Tharpe by lethal injection on September 26, 2017.

Also, unlike the condemned man in The Shadow’s fictional “Death House Rescue,” no one is arguing that Tharpe is innocent. Nevertheless, Tharpe’s attorneys argue he shouldn’t be put to death because, as has been widely reported, after Tharpe’s conviction and death sentence, Tharpe’s lawyers secured a prejudice-laden sworn affidavit from a now-deceased juror by the name of Barney Gattie.   [Read more…]

How John Steinbeck’s ‘In Dubious Battle’ Helps Us Navigate Social Discord

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Rarely since the Great Depression has our country been as polarized and angry as it is today. On television, in newspapers, on social media, around the office water cooler, in line at the supermarket, even at the family dinner table, there is constant clashing and creating of divisions. Warring political parties, “special interest” groups competing for social change, and an endless series of labels–liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat, libertarian or evangelical–work to separate us from one another. More and more, Americans are being asked to take sides in this battle of interests and ideas, magnified by social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Inserting sanity into the crock pot of conflicting ideologies can be challenging. Reading John Steinbeck, one of America’s greatest writers and keenest observers, offers a way out of the insanity.   [Read more…]

Ghoulishness Envelops Arkansas’ Mass Execution Schedule

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Ghoulishness envelops Arkansas’ decision to pump deadly drugs into eight men over the next fortnight. Although two of the eight scheduled executions have definitively been stayed — and judges have issued orders halting the remaining six — the state has been vigorously appealing these roadblocks.

Articles about “midazolam,” the drug whose expiration date prompted Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson to schedule this unprecedented mass execution are abuzz on the internet and social media. By this point many Americans have heard or are generally aware that while midazolam is supposed to render the condemned unconscious and insensate, it has been linked to a number of gruesome and botched executions in the United States.   [Read more…]

Twenty Minutes with Reggae Legend Don Carlos at Belly Up Tavern

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With his signature sweet voice and a successful career spanning over four decades, Don Carlos is unquestionably a legendary figure in reggae music. The worldwide appeal of Carlos’ unique style of conscious roots reggae music is well-documented; an often-cited example well-worth watching on YouTube is from a concert Carlos gave in 2010 in Nairobi, Kenya; a massive crowd of an estimated 150,000 joyous fans turned out despite a sweltering African sun to dance, to praise Jah, and to listen to Don Carlos sing.

On April 8, 2017, I interviewed Don Carlos for approximately twenty minutes after he and his band Dub Vision performed before just a few hundred lucky fans at the Belly Up Tavern in San Diego, California. The many topics we discussed included: the controversy involving non-conscious dance hall music; new music he has released; a relatively new family-owned recording studio called Jus Time Records in Portmore, Jamaica; the importance of having a good sound engineer; the Jamaican government’s failure to properly invest in Jamaican music; and the influence that reggae stars Dennis Brown and Gregory Isaacs had on his career. What follows is a transcription of the interview modified only slightly for clarity.   [Read more…]

John Steinbeck’s ‘To a God Unknown’: How to Be a Writer In the Age of Donald Trump

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It’s easy to read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize, and as Stephen King describes in his best-selling book On Writing, to have “feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy—[thoughts like] I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand.”

Like King’s wise counsel about how to be a writer, John Steinbeck’s masterwork is a “spur” that “goad[s] the writer to work harder and aim higher.” During President Donald Trump’s regime of diminished-to-defunct arts funding, new writers—in addition to emerging musicians, painters, sculptors, photographers, and all creative people committed to contributing to civilization through art—can take inspiration from the inauspicious circumstances surrounding the publication of Steinbeck’s difficult second novel.   [Read more…]

Fortunate Youth: Twenty Minutes with Frontman Dan Kelly

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Fortunate Youth is a six-piece reggae band with roots in Hermosa Beach, California. Since 2009 it has toured heavily in the United States and overseas and its albums and individual songs consistently top the Billboard and iTunes Reggae charts. The band just opened up a nationwide tour to promote its newly released eponymous album; they’ll play 50 shows over 70 days hitting as many states as possible.

On March 18, just hours before the band played to a sold-out crowd at The Regent Theater in Los Angeles, I was blessed to meet with Fortunate Youth’s frontman, lead vocalist Dan Kelly, for about twenty minutes. We discussed the band’s new album, its maturation over the years, the stigma facing “white reggae bands”, respect for Jamaica and Jamaican culture, and finally, some of the obstacles in the music business.   [Read more…]

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