Officer Daniel Hodges, speaking to the Select Committee
He did it: Officer Hodges went there — he used that taboo word. The “T” word. Again & again.
Testimony: Officer Daniel Hodges, Metropolitan Police Department, excerpts from testimony July 27, 2021, before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. [Source: the Select Committee]
Good morning to the Committee, members of the press, and to the country. . . .
As the Chairman mentioned I am a member of Civil Disturbance Unit 42 and was working in that capacity on the day in question. A fully-staffed CDU platoon consists of one Lieutenant, four Sergeants, and twenty-eight Officers. . . .My particular station was in front of 1111 Constitution Avenue, where I stood on foot as the crowd poured down the street and into the park.
There were a significant number of men dressed in tactical gear attending the gathering. Wearing ballistic vests, helmets, goggles, military face masks, backpacks, and without identifiable, visible law enforcement or military patches, they appeared to be prepared for much more than listening to politicians speak in a park. . . .
Jurickson Profar #10 of the San Diego Padres runs off the field with family after what was believed to be shots were heard during a baseball game between the San Diego Padres and the Washington Nationals at Nationals Park on July 17, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)
Privilege and the Shooting Outside Nationals Park
By Jonathan V. Last
I’d like to tell you a story.
On Saturday I took my 13-year-old son, Flash, to the ballpark to see the Nationals and the visiting San Diego Padres. Here’s the view from our seats as the most exciting player in baseball took the field:
What a thrill to be able to watch Tatis and Manny and the rest of the Swingin’ Friars up close. Not just a thrill, but a privilege. Not everyone gets to do this. I remind Flash of that sort of thing often.
Midway through the 6th inning there was an incident. Behind us and above us there was a burst of semi-automatic gunfire. The sound was unmistakable. My mind immediately tried to figure out the distance. It was loud—everyone in the stadium heard it. But it didn’t seem loud enough to have come from the concourse immediately behind us.
I told Flash to get down between the seats. I scanned the section of the stadium behind us trying to figure if it had come from the second-level concourse.
The crowd was calm for a minute. I wondered if my mind had played tricks on me—maybe the sound had come from a speaker. Then I glanced at the field and saw that the Nationals dugout was empty. That’s when I got nervous. If anyone was going to have a good line to information from the stadium ops/security guys, it was going to be the home team dugout. I got down pretty low and watched the crowd begin to panic.
People started moving in flows. In right field, people ran up toward the concourse. People in the sections behind home plate surged laterally, toward us.
And that’s when I saw something that broke my heart: A bunch of the Padres players had sprinted down the third base line toward the family and friends section and grabbed wives, kids, older parents and random fans and dragged them back toward the visitor’s dugout.
The image from the night I’ll never forget is Fernando Tatis Jr. carrying a little blonde girl across his body and running toward the dugout like he was stealing home.
After a long-ish interval, the ballpark PA announced that an “incident” had occurred just outside the park at the third-base gate. This explained why I’d heard the reports behind and above me, and why it hadn’t seemed quite loud enough to have been a shooter on the ground-level concourse.
What seems to have happened is that someone in a car opened fire immediately outside the third-base gate. Three people were wounded. This is what counts as a happy ending in America, circa 2021: It was “only” a drive-by shooting. “Only” three people were injured. There was not a spree killer inside Nationals Park. Yay.
I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t scared even a little bit. But this wasn’t the first, or second, or third time that I’ve been nearby people getting shot. I lived in Baltimore in the ‘90s. This is a thing that happened.
As I was doing the mental calculations on where the shots came from, I was also assessing our position in case there was a shooter inside the stadium. I thought we were in a good place. Flash and I were in the second row behind the dugout. We had lots of hard cover and the freedom to move North, South, East, or West, as needed. It was a solid tactical situation.
And while I wasn’t thrilled to have to talk to my middle schooler about shooting angles, reducing his visible cross section, the supremacy of good cover, and how to think about freedom of maneuver, he’s 13. He can handle it.
But think about the little blonde girl Tatis carried into the dugout. The ballpark was filled with kids her age. Kids who aren’t old enough to handle this sort of stuff, but were sure as hell old enough that they’ll remember the terror for a good long time.
And what kills me is that even this phrase—“kids who aren’t old enough to handle this sort of stuff”—is itself a mark of tremendous privilege.
Here’s a Washington news story from Friday night about a girl named Nyiah Courtney:
And here is a local news interview of an 8-year-old girl who had been at the Saturday game:
It was my second shooting, so I was kind of prepared, ‘cause I’m always expecting something to happen.
Going to see Fernando Tatis Jr. play baseball is a privilege. But so is being able to get your kid into his teen years without him experiencing a shooting. I am deeply aware that there are kids across America who grow up hearing shots fired in anger as part of their daily lives. This has been true for coming on two generations. And the fact that this is a long-running part of our culture does not diminish our national shame. It increases it.
It’s one thing for a society to fail. It’s another for a society to stop caring about its failures.
Jonathan V. Last is a writer for thebulwark.com. This post is from his daily newsletter; he says it was free to share.
Dowd: At 79, Bernie Sanders is a man on a mission, laser-focused on a list that represents trillions of dollars in government spending that he deems essential. When I stray into other subjects, the senator jabs his finger at his piece of paper or waves it in my face, like Van Helsing warding off Dracula with a cross.
When I ask Sanders if he thinks A.O.C. could be president someday, out comes the list.
“That’s not what I want to get into,” he barks. “I want to get into what this legislation is about.”
“You don’t want to discuss ‘Free Britney’?” I ask.
“No.”
— NYTimes, July 11, 2021
After all, for this chance Bernie put up with 30 years of ridicule & condescension from the likes of HRC.
Now he has the opportunity to get more done than she did.
It likely won’t come again, and he will not be distracted by media malarkey, liberal sectarianism, or even his own ego.
As I begin this post, Portland and Seattle are roasting, a Florida beachfront condo has collapsed, the lake keeping Las Vegas afloat is disappearing, and many more out West are dreading the start of fire season. Here in the East we’re keeping a wary eye on Xs and Os on the Atlantic hurricane map; and everybody should be concerned about those virulent variants.
Amid all these budding disasters, pieces of a paragraph from the early 1990s keep popping into my head:
I have a confession to make. I want my grandchildren to learn how to goatwalk . . . . I’m a survivalist where they’re concerned. Industrial civilization has destabilized the earth’s climate beyond the point of no-return. The fair-weather agriculture on which our civilization depends is doomed. In the course of the next century, much of North America will probably become desert. Even if it doesn’t, annual rainfalls and temperatures will fluctuate too wildly to sustain the agricultural systems on which we now depend. If humankind doesn’t self-destruct, my grandchildren will have to get along without industrial agriculture as it now exists. Maybe a more sustainable industrial adaptation will emerge, but I want them to know enough to survive the old-fashioned, nomad way, in case that’s a viable choice.
Learn how to Goatwalk? I have great grandchildren now, and why should they be learning to walk with goats?
To explain why, let me say something first about a Bucket. Or more precisely, a Bucket List. We can start with mine.
[Details on a live performance of “The Spirit of Harriet Tubman” 0n June 27 are below. Spread the word!]
During much of the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, felt almost like a prisoner. She lived in Canada, just a few miles west of the U. S. border at Niagara Falls. She was safe there, but itchy to help more enslaved people to escape.
Diane Faison as Harriet Tubman
And today, Diane Faison of Winston-Salem, NC, knows something of how Harriet felt.
Tubman, the Ace of the Underground Railroad, was a hunted woman. Southern slavecatchers wanted her dead or alive. She had secretly returned to the state to aid others several more times.
Friend (or rather, ex-Friend) Joshua Ashlyn Humphries, a banished Quaker and Anabaptist prophet/theologian, is dead, at 39.
Josh Humphries, in a happy moment. He deserved more of them.
Dead, and it’s a damn shame.
A shame for Quakers, Mennonites, and some others. I feel shamed too. But he was not an ex-Friend to me.
The official obituary does not say how or where he passed; presumably in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he had lived for more than ten years. It settled for the piously evasive: he “went to be with the Lord on Thursday, April 29, 2021.”
Yeah, sure; but what ticket did he ride?
The silence here leaves many questions: Josh had serious medical conditions (of which more anon); but just a couple of days earlier, in his last Facebook posts, he was both worn out — and intellectually busy: Continue reading A Banished Quaker Prophet: Josh Humphries (Updated)→
Are we ready for the canonization of St. Liz, of Cheney, Martyr?
Lifetime Catholic MoDo isn’t buying it: columnist Maureen Dowd bats away the shiny new blond miraculous medal. She won’t kneel, or even lean, to light the votive candle.
Her trouble is, mea culpa, Dowd remembers. And talks.
How uncouth, and inconvenient:
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, WASHINGTON — May 9, 2021
Dowd: I miss torturing Liz Cheney. . . .
How naïve I was to think that Republicans would be eager to change the channel after Trump cost them the Senate and the White House and unleashed a mob on them.
I thought the Donald would evaporate in a poof of orange smoke, ending a supremely screwed-up period of history. But the loudest mouth is not shutting up. And Republicans continue to listen, clinging to the idea that the dinosaur is the future. “We can’t grow without him,” Lindsey Graham said.
Denied Twitter, Trump is focusing on his other favorite blood sport: hunting down dynasties. “Whether it’s the Cheneys, the Bushes or the lesser bloodlines — such as the Romneys or the Murkowskis — Trump has been relentless in his efforts to force them to bend the knee,” David Siders wrote in Politico.
Yet an unbowed Liz Cheney didn’t mince words when, in a Washington Post op-ed a few days ago, she implored the stooges in her caucus to “steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”
That trademark Cheney bluntness made Liz the toast of MSNBC and CNN, where chatterers praised her as an avatar of the venerable “fact-based” Republican Party decimated by Trump.”
So far, so good, or at least so au courant. And then comes the legendary Dowd dagger:
“But if Liz Cheney wants to be in the business of speaking truth to power, she’s going to have to dig a little deeper.
Let’s acknowledge who created the template for Trump’s Big Lie.
It was her father, Dick Cheney, whose Big Lie about the Iraq war led to the worst mistake in the history of American foreign policy. Liz, who was the captain of her high school cheerleading team and titled her college thesis “The Evolution of Presidential War Powers,” cheered on her dad as he spread fear, propaganda and warped intelligence.
From her patronage perch in the State Department during the Bush-Cheney years, she bolstered her father’s trumped-up case for an invasion of Iraq. Even after no W.M.D.s were found, she continued to believe the invasion was the right thing to do.
“She almost thrives in an atmosphere where the overall philosophy is discredited and she is a lonely voice,” a State Department official who worked with Liz told Joe Hagan for a 2010 New York magazine profile of the younger Cheney on her way up.
She was a staunch defender of the torture program. “Well, it wasn’t torture, Norah, so that’s not the right way to lay out the argument,” she instructed Norah O’Donnell in 2009, looking on the bright side of waterboarding.
She backed the futile, 20-year occupation of the feudal Afghanistan. (Even Bob Gates thinks we should have left in 2002.) Last month, when President Biden announced plans to pull out, Liz Cheney — who wrote a book with her father that accused Barack Obama of abandoning Iraq and making America weaker — slapped back: “We know that this kind of pullback is reckless. It’s dangerous.”
Dowd remembers more:
For many years, [Cheney] had no trouble swimming in Fox News bile. Given the chance to denounce the Obama birther conspiracy, she demurred, interpreting it live on air as people being “uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”
Thanks to that kind of reasoning, we ended up with a president who fomented an attack on the nation at home.
In her Post piece, Cheney wrote that her party is at a “turning point” and that Republicans “must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”
Sage prose from someone who was a lieutenant to her father when he assaulted checks and balances, shredding America’s Constitution even as he imposed one on Iraq.
Because of 9/11, Dick Cheney thought he could suspend the Constitution, attack nations preemptively and trample civil liberties in the name of the war on terror. (And for his own political survival.)
Keeping Americans afraid was a small price to pay for engorging executive power, which the former Nixon and Ford aide thought had been watered down too much after Watergate.
By his second term, W. had come around to his parents’ opinion that Cheney had overreached, and the vice president became increasingly isolated.
Liberals responded to Trump’s derangements by bathing the Bush-Cheney crowd in a flattering nostalgic light.
So, shockingly, the Republicans who eroded America’s moral authority — selling us the Iraq war, torture, a prolonged Afghanistan occupation and Sarah Palin — became the new guardians of America’s moral authority. Complete with bloated TV and book contracts.
Trump built a movement based on lies. The Cheneys showed him how it’s done.
Thanks, MoDo. Like the nun’s rap on my knuckles with her thick wooden ruler, back in parochial school an eon ago, (or more like a whack upside the head), I can see I needed that. I won’t buy the miraculous medal either.
But I admit I might be tempted to light her a candle one of these days.
The beatified one and her Dear Old War Criminal Dad.
At the same time, I’ve lately been reading about & listening to some of St. Liz’s ex- Republican admirers. I’m thinking of the agonized public conversation going on among some of the most cogent anti-Trumpers, now recovering and at least somewhat repentant ex-Republicans. I’m thinking particularly those associated with The Lincoln Project & The Bulwark.Continue reading A Tale of Two Conservatives: Liz & Longwell→
Anyone, even you or I, can now cuss on the grounds of the historic old Alamance County Courthouse, in downtown Graham NC. You could even do it right on the courthouse steps.
Right there. In front of God & everybody — everybody including Sheriff Terry Johnson.
Tom Friedman, longtime NYTimes columnist, treats us to some snippets of diary entries from his first trip to Afghanistan, in early 2002, with then Senator Joe Biden. Friedman opens the piece in the posture of sadder-but-wiser sage:
“I was not surprised that Joe Biden decided to finally pull the plug on the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Back in 2002 it was reasonable to hope that our invasion there to topple Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies could be extended to help make that country a more stable, tolerant and decent place for its citizens — and less likely to host jihadist groups.”
Was that really a “reasonable idea? In what is justly called the “graveyard of empires”, or more properly the graveyards of too many loyal troops sacrificed on the altars of hubris erected by heedless, foolish imperial “statesmen”?
“History doesn’t repeat,” Mark Twain supposedly said, “but sometimes it rhymes.”
Are the conflicts within so many American churches over LGBTQ and associated issues part of some cruel karmic sonnet?
The Separation Generation’s three volumes approach this question in prose, by chronicling disruptions among five American Yearly Meetings extending roughly from 2011 to 2018 (along with sketches of some precursor struggles). This wave of division was likely the most damaging to Quakerism since the “Great Separation” of 1827.
In a larger cultural/political context, this period roughly parallels the era of the Religious Right, the Tea Party ascendancy among Congressional Republicans, and then a successful insurgent presidential campaign followed by a highly disruptive administration, culminating in a violent insurrection at the Capitol in January 2021.
Also in the background is the 2015 landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-gender marriage nationwide, but did not end the conflicts over that or related issues.
It’s hard to draw direct connections from these notable outside events to the specific disagreements among Quakers. In Quaker worship, Quaker business process and other contexts, we’re supposed to be listening to God speaking through the Light of Christ in each of us. Thus one would (in theory) not necessarily expect to find direct influences from the broader culture, as Quakers seek to commune with and to learn from a God that presumably transcends culture.
That’s the theory. In practice, as we gain more distance from these momentous events, evidence of such broader influences becomes clearer. We eagerly await further insight from Quaker memoirs, scholarly research and blog posts from those who have been most involved in this often difficult and Quaker-world-changing series of events. Continue reading Broken Churches, Broken Nation (Again?)→
Learn how to Goatwalk? I have great grandchildren now, and why should they be learning to walk with goats?
“I was not surprised that Joe Biden decided to finally pull the plug on the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Back in 2002 it was reasonable to hope that our invasion there to topple Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies could be extended to help make that country a more stable, tolerant and decent place for its citizens — and less likely to host jihadist groups.”