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John Steinbeck’s Road Map For Resisting Donald Trump

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A recent blog post of the National Book Critics Circle asked members “at this time of cultural shift” in the dawning era of Donald Trump to identify their “favorite work of resistance literature.” The writer Paul Wilner identified John Steinbeck’s “quietly furious” strike novel In Dubious Battle as his personal choice.

“We may not see the future lying before us,” Wilner explained, “but Steinbeck has provided a valuable road map to the lessons of the past. He may have fought kicking and screaming against the label of ‘engaged’ writer–he’ll never be confused with Sartre, to his credit–but he understood the power, as well as the perils, of resistance.”

True enough, but my choice of road map for resisting Donald Trump would be The Moon Is Down, the play-novella John Steinbeck wrote during the early, dark days of World War II about anti-fascist resistance by the citizens of a Nazi-occupied country in northern Europe. Steinbeck’s little book inspired citizen resistance in Nazi-occupied territories from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It contains practical advice for Americans opposed to Donald Trump’s attitudes and actions as president, 75 years after it was written.   [Read more…]

Trump’s Cowardly Immigration Policy Imperils The Public And The Police

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Standing stiffly in overly-starched police blues it was obvious, even before he admitted so himself, that Officer Sean Dinse wished he wasn’t addressing the congregation of the Community Church in Woodland Hills, California.

But, in the tremulous wake of President Donald Trump’s xenophobic and terrifyingly aggressive immigration policies, Officer Dinse said it was important as a matter of both public and police safety for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to “put the word out” that local police do not – and they will not – enforce federal immigration laws. Dinse said that beginning in January the department began reaching out to religious and other community-based organizations to schedule speaking engagements where they could communicate this message directly to the people.

Stressing the difference between LAPD and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Dinse said: “We are all human. We have to respect the law. But we also have to respect people who are just trying to survive.”   [Read more…]

Truth or Twitter? Why Donald Trump Is No John Steinbeck

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Donald Trump has bragged that someone once called him “the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.” There is no evidence that such a thing was ever said, though that is hardly the point.

Unfortunately for us, the new president possesses neither the courage nor the self-control of Hemingway, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature for writing unforgettably about bravery under fire. As the problems created by Trump-tweets pile up, the source of Trump’s addiction to Twitter has become all too clear. Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist, described it in words worthy of John Steinbeck: “Trump’s Twitter tantrums are a message of weakness.”
  [Read more…]

Off Limits: “Of Mice and Men” and the Death Penalty Today

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Seventy years after its publication John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men continues to stimulate debate, pro and con, about the death penalty. But justifying capital punishment was the last thing on the mind of the author, a liberal thinker who created the character of Lennie to increase our understanding of the mentally challenged and the American underclass.

As a defense attorney who admires Of Mice and Men for this very reason, I’m angry that Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Cathy Cochran used Lennie in a 2004 legal opinion about imposing the death penalty when mental capacity is at issue. The “Lennie standard” she proposed continues to have consequences in the courts, and in the lives of the condemned.   [Read more…]

Flint’s Water Crisis Must Be Near Top Trump’s Agenda

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The interminable failure of government to marshal all available resources, brainpower, imagination, and resolution of spirit, to finally solve Flint, Michigan’s contaminated water problem, stands, in relief, as a giant scarlet letter branded on the breast of America. One only needs to supplant the shame-evoking, blood-curdling, familiar image of the red “A” for “adulteress” with an even uglier, ignoble, black “R,” for racist. (And, perhaps, to emphasize this continuing environmental nightmare’s classist features, add an accompanying money-green polo-shirt-emblem-sized “c”.)

Buried in the press cycle of post-election hype, hysteria and dashed-and-undashed hopes around the country, is the fact that, last Thursday, a judge in Michigan – that’s right, in Michigan, not in some underdeveloped country like Rwanda, Somalia, or Ethiopia – ordered the State of Michigan and the City of Flint to immediately start home delivery of four cases of bottled water per resident of Flint, every single week, for the foreseeable future.   [Read more…]

Finding Solace in Steinbeck During the Time of Trump

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In a jittery, newly authoritarian land of hatred and hurt, chastened criminal and social justice reformers and human rights advocates can find solace and sustenance in the words and works of the incomparable John Steinbeck, one of America’s greatest writers and psychoanalysts.

In his opus and Pulitzer Prize winning, The Grapes of Wrath, spotlighting exploitative and inhumane labor practices and living conditions of migrant agricultural workers during the Great Depression, Steinbeck masterfully wrote: “[F]ailure hangs over the State like a great sorrow . . . . And the smell of rot fills the country . . . . There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success . . . . [A]nd, in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is the growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

In the dawning, gloomy, metastatic malignancy of a Trump Presidency, do not Steinbeck’s hallowed words resonate every bit as much, if not terrifyingly more? Do they not poignantly describe the heartbreak and fear of so many?   [Read more…]

What Bob Marley Can Teach Us About Donald Trump

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If he were alive, the Honorable Robert Nesta “Bob” Marley, O.M. (Order of Merit), would have celebrated his 71st birthday on February 6. Even with the thirty-fifth anniversary of his tragic death from cancer last May, Bob remains the most recognizable ambassador of reggae music the world over.

Marley’s timeless appeal and continued relevance stems in no small part from the stirring political, racial, and social consciousness painstakingly infused in his songbook. From tracks like One Love to War (adopted from Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I’s historic speech before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963), Them Belly Full (But They Hungry), Get Up, Stand Up, Concrete Jungle – and many, many more of his songs – Bob Marley used the bully pulpit of international music stardom to disseminate the treasure of his accumulated moral wisdom.   [Read more…]

Prop 66 Promotes ‘Shotgun-Style-Appointment’ of Unqualified Defense Attorneys

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Qualified death penalty lawyers don’t grow on trees, which is another reason to vote “No” on Prop. 66, and “Yes” on Prop. 62.

In response to The San Francisco Chronicle’s recent editorial, Fight crime, not futility: Abolish the death penalty, which thoroughly eviscerates Proposition 66 – the Grim Reaper ballot initiative seeking to speed-up state-sponsored executions – Sacramento D.A. Anne Marie Schubert promised California voters that, “[t]he overall changes” needed to repair the state’s discriminatory and horribly dysfunctional death penalty are, “easy fixes.”

To anybody who believes that: Not only do I have a snazzy bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, I’ll throw in a bridge to nowhere gratuit.

The Chronicle, which published Schubert’s glib and disjointed talking points under the header “dissenting view” was also clearly unimpressed. It excerpted just one devastating paragraph from its prior full-length blistering editorial to run beneath Schubert’s superficial, scatter-brained response.   [Read more…]

Former Public Defender: Proposition 66 — and the Death Penalty — Victimizes the Innocent

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The death penalty victimizes the innocent children and family members of condemned men and women. These are citizens of this country who have committed no crime, and yet, because of capital punishment’s ignominious existence, they are punished too.

Their state-sanctioned suffering, one that Californians will be directly responsible for promoting if they vote for Proposition 66, is severe.

For the children, just think about it: they didn’t do a damn thing wrong except be born. And then, on an especially dark, dreary, and evil day, they’re being brought to prison to see their pa or ma one last time. And they’re in some sterile room, and everyone’s watching; the warden, the prison chaplain, the press, a gaggle of attorneys and guards, all of them are watching to see how these children of the condemned are going to carry it.   [Read more…]

Black Uhuru Blesses San Diego’s Belly-Up Tavern

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When legendary reggae band Black Uhuru began playing the hypnotically addictive, haunting, head-bobbing, foot-stomping beat of their world-famous song, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, at the Belly Up Tavern in San Diego (on the night of September 1st), a jovial, overly-sauced patron screamed out: “Black Uhuru is the best reggae band alive!”

And, more than anything else, it was this proclamation that best summed up the feel good, get-on-your-feet-and-dance vibes then pulsing through the Belly Up’s joyful, equally exuberant, filled to capacity crowd – who chanted in unison, at the top of their lungs – the song’s famous refrain and its opening lyric: “Guess who’s coming to dinner, Natty Dreadlocks.”   [Read more…]

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