'The team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly'

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On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton under the headline "Tom Cotton: Send In The Troops, For Real." The piece was ostensibly written in response to the protests against the Trump administration's anti-immigrant crackdowns currently taking place in Los Angeles, and it argues that the administration should use an "overwhelming show of force" to put an end to the protests.

It's an odd piece of writing. For one thing, the troops have already been sent in—President Trump has sent National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to guard federal buildings and ICE agents, against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom. For another, the "show of force" has already happened—protestors have spent the last five days being beaten, arrested, tear-gassed, and shot with debilitating "less lethal" munitions. Taken on its own, it's hard to imagine what the editors of the WSJ opinion page might have expected moderately informed readers to gain from Cotton's piece, other than a vague sense of confusion and the less-vague sense that a United States Senator was upset.

Much has been made of an alleged “crisis of masculinity” among America’s young men. This sort of sweeping cultural proclamation should always make you skeptical. As an angle, it is catnip because everyone can fill in its details based on their own lives, and male writers, in particular, can use it as a launching pad to subtly cast themselves as the sort of well-developed masculine figure who might—now that you mention it—serve as a good role model.

I don’t know about all of that. What I do know is that if you are looking for negative role models for masculine virtue, there is an easy way to find them. They are employed by ICE. They are employed by the Department of Homeland Security. They are employed by the sprawling and unaccountable security state, and right now, they are out on the streets of our cities, snatching up mothers and infiltrating elementary schools. There is much to be said about the political processes that deployed these men, and the chain of socioeconomic failures that placed our nation in the position we find ourselves. But there is another important thing to be said directly to the men who go to work every day and don the tactical vests and facemasks and act like the willing gestapo agents of our idiot political leader: You guys are fucking cowards.

Tough guy? No. Straight up fucking coward, man. Pathetic. Jesus. Have some self-respect.

The Wall Street Journal reported on a meeting last month where Stephen Miller summoned ICE’s leadership to a meeting where he demanded that federal agents lower their standards and “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” outside of 7-11 or wherever. “‘Who here thinks they can do it?’ Miller said, asking for a show of hands.” The outcome of that demand can be seen in the ongoing terrorization of immigrants happening across the country.

Now, Stephen Miller is a little rat-faced Nazi bitch. Since his youth just about everyone around him has despised him because he has always been a miserable racist little shit whose evil heart is manifested in his detestable rodent-like visage. Knowing that, I like to imagine all those big, bad, ICE agents, manly men, so macho, shifting uncomfortably around a conference room table as they are harangued by that psychotic little bureaucrat, and then rushing out to kidnap working men from a Home Depot parking lot in order to demonstrate to their master, Stephen Bitch Ass Miller, how good they are at being America’s new gestapo.

“Oh, Mister Miller, sir! I put on 40 pounds of tactical gear and tackled a 55-year-old partially disabled day laborer! I prevented him from doing some drywall work and feeding his family, for you, sir! I yearn for your approval!”

Fucking clowns. Straight up clowns. All you guys lacked proper male role models or whatever. All you ICE agents wear shades and face masks because you huddle in deep fear of being seen. I’m quite sure you can hardly stand to look at yourselves in the mirror each morning before you set out to lick the feet of your racist paymasters. Change everything about your lives immediately or I promise that your self-loathing will consume you forever. Clowns.

Yesterday, I went to a union rally in Manhattan in support of David Huerta, the SEIU California president who was arrested while protesting against ICE in Los Angeles. There were hundreds of SEIU members there—32BJ building workers, 1199 hospital workers, everyone. They all came out and showed their faces. Who is more brave, do you think? The immigrant woman who works cleaning up office buildings who is willing to come out to a protest and hold a sign supporting a man who was arrested for opposing injustice? Or the six-foot-tall weightlifting ICE agent with a gun and a badge and the force of law behind him who is so scared of anyone knowing who he is that he has America’s worst Congressmen filing bills to make it a crime to reveal his identity?

I laugh at the cowardly ICE agents. There’s a reason people are yelling at you, man. It’s because you’re being a fucking asshole. Do you know what would constitute bravery? Saying, “No, I am not going to carry out this grotesque and racist government assault on its citizens, because I know it is unjust.” That would be brave. Saying “no.” Putting on your bulletproof vest and breaking up families and shrugging and saying “just following orders” and hiding your face is the most weak-ass thing I can imagine. “I’d rather destroy the lives of entire families than have the fellas make fun of me. I’d rather tear mothers away from their children than get a regular job.” Go fuck yourself man. Because nobody cool is ever going to fuck you. That, I guarantee. Keep on dreaming.

It can be difficult to laugh at riot cops. But we should all try. Because they’re so fucking ridiculous. Hey, nice huge helmet and body armor and fake ass gun and shield to oppose a bunch of skater kids waving around flags. You all are the most terrified group of human beings in the United States of America. You all are the types of people who open carry handguns to go to Buffalo Wild Wings. You all need to stop getting your news from idiots on idiot websites. You all need to read some fucking books and gain a minimal sense of perspective. You all need to embrace the crushing realization that for your whole lives you have been afraid and confused and have embraced a misguided set of macho enticements that have seduced you into believing that manhood depends on looking like some sort of cartoon action figure when in fact it is this look that reveals to the world the deep inadequacy that haunts you every day.

You all need to quit your evil jobs and try to be nice to people and run away from this despicable thing you’re involved in as fast as possible because it is polluting your soul and I promise you that history will judge you harshly and your kids and grandkids will be ashamed that you were such an obvious moral failure, despite all that stuff they teach in school about how it was bad when other people in other places in history did exactly what you are doing now.

On one side of these protests you have women and children and grandmothers and teenagers and a skater kid who becomes a national icon by dancing around while you shoot at his feet. On the other side we have you and all your colleagues dressed up like a bunch of ridiculous fucking paramilitaries, as if you’re at war in Iraq instead of on a street in the middle of LA, shooting rubber bullets at people because they don’t want their neighbors deported, and because they believe in the First Amendment, and because, somewhere along the line, you made a bad choice in your life, and bought into the idea that this sort of thing makes you strong, badass, admirable, instead of admitting that it demonstrates to everyone with eyes that you are ignorant, weak, and cowardly. Too cowardly to say no when a bad person who doesn’t care about you asks to do evil things on their behalf. Real sad.

Twitchy, puffed up, goofy ass cops. No amount of guns and steroids and tear gas will ever make you cool. Fuck off, losers.

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• Related reading: Adult Babies; Young Morality and Old Morality; Anti-Immigration Democrats, Don’t Talk to Us.

• Abolish ICE. If you feel the need to grab people and let out your rage, take up boxing or wrestling or sex parties or interpretive dance. Many options.

• The name of this publication is How Things Work The reason that this place has been able to survive and grow for two years is that readers like you have believed in it enough to kick in a few bucks to keep it going. If you like reading this site, would like for it to continue, and would like to support free independent media, it would be much appreciated if you click the button below and become a paid subscriber, for a modest price. If we all chip in a little, good things can exist. Society. We love it. I thank you all for reading.

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In 2018, I wrote the post below about bedtime procrastination. The term was new to me, the concept was not. I was a bedtime procrastinator. And, spoiler alert, I still am a bedtime procrastinator. Zero improvement.

There’s a new term now, an even more delicious one: Revenge bedtime procrastination. Here’s how a Web MD article defines it: “It means you get ‘revenge’ for your busy daytime schedule by fitting in leisure time at the expense of shut-eye.”

Who am I retaliating against? In this case, I am both the subject and object. Who will win? Me, by reclaiming the time work, children, and chores have stolen from me! Who will lose? Me, by getting so little sleep I am irritable and exhausted the next day (or, because this is habitual, every day). Whee!

*****

Yesterday at 8:23am, my husband texted me a link. No note, just a string of random letters and slashes and dots. I clicked and landed on a research article titled “Why don’t you go to bed on time?”

The manuscript begins like this: “Most people do not get enough sleep on work days despite sleep’s importance for well-being, performance, and health. A phenomenon held responsible for promoting insufficient sleep on work days is bedtime procrastination. Bedtime procrastination is defined as ‘going to bed later than intended, without having external reasons for doing so’, that is, ‘people just fail to [go to bed].’”

Ah, bedtime procrastination. I had never heard the term before, but I am intimately familiar with the concept of failing to go to bed. If bedtime procrastination had a poster, I would be that poster’s child. My husband, on the other hand, does not procrastinate. He is a bedtime anticipator. A bedtime enthusiast. A bedtime yearner. He would go to bed right now if you let him.

The texted link was clearly the latest passive aggressive salvo in our years-long battle to define an appropriate bedtime. Me: 12-1am. Him: 9:30pm or, better yet, immediately.

According to the prevailing scientific theory, procrastination—of any task—can be explained as a failure to self regulate. That is, I want to go to bed at 10pm. I know I should go to bed at 10pm. I know staying up will cause next-day exhaustion and general grumpiness. But I still cannot manage to get my head on the pillow. Instead I stay up watching TV and eating ice cream. I give into delicious temptation.

The authors of this new paper, however, argue that bedtime procrastination might be driven instead by an individual’s circadian rhythms. In other words, I procrastinate going to bed because I am naturally an evening person (what chronobiologists like to call an “owl”), not necessarily because I am momentarily reckless and impulsive.

The researchers didn’t find overwhelming evidence to support this idea. In fact, their results were decidedly mixed. But neither explanation feels very satisfying to me. It’s true I’m a night owl. And, yes, I am not great at resisting temptation. But there’s another factor the authors didn’t even mention: parenthood.

I have a two-and-a-half-year old who goes to bed at 8pm on a good night. She wakes between 6am and 7am. If I want to ensure eight hours of shuteye, I need to be asleep by 10pm. That gives me two hours of free time each evening. But not really. Because I need at least 30 minutes to get ready for bed and to fall asleep. So I’m down to an hour and a half.

Here is what I can do in an hour and a half:

1. Eat a piece of chocolate while sorting through the Subaru dealership coupons stuck to the fridge.
2. Pick up 27 Magna-tiles, 13 puzzle pieces, 11 paper coins, three stuffed dog toys, two pairs of underwear, one pile of smashed purple Play-doh, and a pretend sippy cup of pretend orange juice.
3. Contemplate reorganizing the living room.
4. Research possible Ikea solutions for living room reorganization.
5. Liberate a giant bouncy ball from under the couch.
6. Vacuum the living room really well (even under the couch).
7. Pour a glass of wine.
8. Fold the laundry while watching the tail end of some stupid cop or doctor show (is network TV composed entirely of cop and doctor shows?).

That’s it. That’s all I can do. And I have to really hustle. 10pm rolls around and the wine is not drunk. The laundry is not put away. And the vacuum is still lying in the middle of the living room rug.

I have not read a single word of my novel. I have not found an Ikea solution to my living room chaos. I have not pondered any mysteries or had Deep Thoughts or eaten a second piece of chocolate. I have not made popcorn. I have not done anything satisfying at all (except getting the bouncy ball unstuck). A 10pm bedtime doesn’t even allow me to watch the 10 o’clock news. I have to go to bed without knowing tomorrow’s weather. Like an animal.

And so the clock strikes 10 and I think “No!” or sometimes “NO!” I #resist. I stage a one-woman rebellion. I watch the local news and comment on its inanity. I finish my wine. I read a chapter of my book. I watch a highly acclaimed show of my choosing from start to finish. I live, goddammit! I live like no one is watching.

Usually no one is, because by then it’s 11:45pm. My husband (the Man) has been in bed for hours.

He used to try to cajole me into bed earlier by saying things like, “we should really try to get a good night’s sleep.” Or “we should go to bed really early tonight.” But that only added fuel to my bonfire of bedtime resistance. “You go to bed, old man!” I’d yell. And now he does.

Before I had a child, I could spend my entire evening eating chocolates and sorting Subaru coupons. Now my free time is condensed into that hour and a half between my toddler’s bedtime and my own theoretical one. By procrastinating bedtime, I am reclaiming my time. That reclaimed time is precious. More precious even than sleep.

***

Image courtesy of Lynn Friedman via Flickr

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

As a voter in the New York City mayoral race, I keep thinking about the rats and the garbage cans. The story of the election, as generally framed, is that Andrew Cuomo has come down to New York from the suburbs and back from political exile to offer his own hard-nosed, practical experience as an alternative to a field of candidates who are some combination of too idealistic, too leftist, or too unseasoned to handle the serious business of running a great and difficult metropolis. The city, he declared in Wednesday's mayoral debate, is in a "management crisis"—as well as a "fiscal crisis" and a "societal crisis"—and he is the one person who is prepared and willing to take on "dysfunctional city management." 

There are so many ways to solve a problem. And Seattle seems to have a lot of problems these days! Here's a big one: most of our elected officials are center-right politicians. They lead a city with a lot of center-left to really-left residents. Their decisions can be, let's say, wrong. Oppressive. Discriminatory. Harmful. But one of the things I love about Seattle is how vocal we are.

When police were raiding gay bars under the state’s draconian liquor laws, we spoke up until they changed it. Last year, the mayor and parks department tried to close one of Seattle's only queer nude beaches. Protestors clogged public forums for months (and are still fighting!) until they heard us and backed down. Our currently-elected officials don't always take public opposition to heart. Last fall hundreds of people argued against laws we all knew were discriminatory. That fight was not yet successful. And as predicted, the laws haven't made anyone safer.

Gun violence is a serious issue in Seattle. People across the city are sharing their concerns about safety. Gun violence usually rises as temperatures do. It makes perfect sense that local officials would convene community forums. They'd want to hear from their constituents and neighbors, right?

a few rotten forums

Councilmember Rob Saka's district represents West Seattle. A recent forum he hosted drew more than 100 people who wanted to speak to people in power. But the only people speaking were the ones he invited–the ones sitting at the long table at the front of the room. I counted 8 speakers who kicked off the night with their own speeches. It was Saka's chief of staff, then Saka, then the city council president, then the police chief. Soon the audience heard from the heads of the parks department and the public utility. These folks spoke for so long that the forum left only 10 minutes to answer pre-written questions. One attendee commented,

"This was supposed to be a conversation about gun violence in our community something that’s affecting real people’s lives every single day. [...] We were talked at by a panel as if we were just an audience to manage, not people whose lives are on the line. That’s not leadership. That’s not accountability. And it’s definitely not community engagement. It was a disgrace.”

Saka received a mountain of critique for his forum. But he's not alone in crowd management. The Seattle PD hosted a community meeting in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. The police present were letting people speak and ask questions. But their responses kept leading the group back to the only solution of the night: more police! The department lamented that there weren't enough cops on the street. Hannah Saunders summarized the meeting like this: “The response from several SPD officers? Call 911 and wait until staffing levels rise[...]” We might expect this from a forum hosted by the police, but it's still disappointing. Lots of people feel unsafe around the police. Perhaps we need solutions besides the very expensive one that could kill me.

"why are these people yelling at me?"

What are the event organizers getting wrong? It's possible that these officials are afraid of the kind of unruly public outcries I described earlier. To paraphrase the commenter who wrote about Saka's event, they may want the appearance of a public forum without the public part. Whatever the reason, here's why these types of events aren't successful.

Officials already have a voice. Elected officials already have ways to get their messages out. If we want to hear from them, we can go to their press releases, interviews, media appearances, and more. The public can't say the same. When we demand face time with an elected, it's not to give them another way to air their opinions. It's so we can air ours.

Unwise use of expertise. Imagine having a chance to interview the foremost expert in their field. I'm blanking on a famous person who isn't problematic, so let's keep the name vague, it's not important. We go through the trouble of setting up an interview, finding a space, writing questions. And for 45 exquisite minutes, we tell them all about our cats. Then it's time for them to leave. Every community member is an expert in their own life. They have lived experience about their neighborhood and what's important to them. And there were more than 100 people in that room! I'd set off fireworks myself if it meant getting that many people together to complain about me. Instead, they wasted their time and I wasted mine.

Not listening to not understand. There's an unequal power dynamic between an elected official and a constituent. This dynamic may imply that the official's opinion is worth more than the person who voted for them. Think back to the Seattle PD community meeting I described. Residents came to talk about what was happening in their neighborhood. The only way the police could imagine solving their problems was with more police. "Call 911" was their main recommendation. The person with authority filters what they hear through their own lens. They consider their own preconceived notions of how to solve problems and what they are able to do. That becomes all that they can do, even if it doesn't solve the problem. Public officials must often have a big-picture view of complex issues. That view is still susceptible to the groupthink and pragmatism that shuts down real dialogue.

spaces for real dialogue

What if a community forum could focus on the community? What could that space look like if we built it for dialogue rather than information sharing? Here's how I'd design it.

1. Don't speak more than you have to. Start by thanking people for their time. Acknowledge what it must have taken to be there. Then set the tone. Why are we here? What do people want to get out of this time together?
2. Begin the sharing. Even in a large group, there are many ways to learn what people have to say. Ask questions that help you understand why an issue is important to them. Don't make assumptions about the solutions they're asking for. Sometimes the only solution people can offer is, "do something!" They might really be saying, "do something else!"
3. Rapid analysis. Ask participants for help summarizing what everyone shared. Group these into themes or topic categories. This can help you count the issues people spoke about the most, and which may be more personal topics.
4. Rapid solutions. If the space allows, have people divide into relevant topic areas. I like grouping people into smaller groups because we can cover more topics that way. It also allows quieter folks to speak up. But some folks hate when I put them into smaller groups. A large group can energize speakers or it can shut down real dialogue. It depends on the group. If the forum has coalesced around one or two major topics, it's okay to keep people together. Include your institutional experts in the groups where they're needed. These experts must take part in solutions generating. But their opinions can't be the only solution. It won't help if the experts spend the whole time shutting down solutions they don't like.
5. Next steps. Thank people for their time, and for contributing to the wisdom of the group. Now, what should happen after we leave? How would people like to stay involved? Do they know where to go if they need something else? A sign-up sheet, link to resources, or plans for follow-up can go a long way. Dialogue cannot stop when people walk out the door.

forums for the people

It can be so isolating when it feels like nobody is hearing us. If dialogue is how large groups stay connected, a lack of dialogue can further divide us. We have so many ways to share information. What we need are more opportunities to understand each other.