Maybe This Week, Maybe Next Week
11 September 2024
Night comes to the Outer Richmond district of San Francisco. Photo: Robert Gumpert 3 September 2024
Last night Donald Trump’s life may have caught up to him. The ex-prosecutor, now Democrat candidate for President, Kamala Harris didn’t so much debate Trump as prosecute him, leaving him looking and sounding tired and confused. Perhaps he is laying the ground work for pleading “diminished capacity” in his future trials.
“I’ve seen people on television.” Donald Trump sourcing his claim of “alien” cat eaters
Newsweek: Donald Trump Cat Photos Flood Internet After Migrant Pet-Eating Claims
A few interesting photo links
The New Yorker Photo Booth: Out of the Sky - In remote Kazakhstan, the photographer Andrew McConnell captured the places where astronauts return to Earth. By Keith Gessen
Right Eye Dominant - Jim Goldberg interviewed by Nick Tauro Jr.
Right Eye Dominant - Joel Meyerowitz: In Living Color by Nick Tauro Jr.
Mírame y sé color: The Vietnam War, Horst Faas
(Kickstarter) Coal Faces: A photographic epitaph to the ending of the British coal mining industry
Wait, What?
See-through mice created by using food dye found in Doritos | The Washington Post | by Carolyn Y. Johnson
The dye in Doritos can make mice transparent - 'It’s not magic, but it’s still very powerful.' | Popular Science | by Lauren Leffer
Red's Java House, a San Francisco institution once catering to longshoreman with hotdogs, hamburgers, sandwiches, and beer working the docks loading and unloading the cargo ships tied up to the piers with their warehouses.
Today the ships are gone, as are many of the piers. Red's now serves the same fare to tourists wondering along the now palm lined Embarcadero scene of "Bloody Thursday” during the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike that killed two strikers.. Photo: Robert Gumpert 7 September 2024
4 September 2024
Storefront display on Clement Street near 4th Avenue. San Francisco, California. 1 September 2024. Photo: Robert Gumpert
How the media blew 2024′s election | Will Bunch Newsletter The Philadelphia Inquirer “our profession’s weird value structure, where it’s more important to be savvy, cynical, and not …”
Mainstream media on a path to irrelevance | Mark Jacob on Stop the Presses. “too many political journalists are marinating in the Washington cocktail culture, writing for each other and for their sources — in service to the political industry, not the public.”
Accuracy, objectivity, and trust in photojournalism - Five lessons from the journalistic failings of Jan Grarup | David Campbell, Dispatches - The VII Insider Blog
ProPublica: Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia | by Joshua Kaplan
Make shift shelter at 5th and Brannan. San Francisco, California. 28 August 2024 Photo: Robert Gumpert
Hern Avenue near Corby. Santa Rosa, California. 29 August 2024 Photo: Robert Gumpert
Handwritten note on Corby Street telephone pole in Santa Rosa: “Bride groom coming, Go meet Him! Matt. 25:6
(From Bible Matthew - 6: And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him. 7: Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps. 8: And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.)
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A side street off Hollywood Boulevard. Los Angeles 1972. Photo: Robert Gumpert
Someplace on the road east, maybe around the Grand Canyon. 1972. Photo: Robert Gumpert
Hubert Humphrey primary supporter in the Charleston, W.VA bus station. 1972. Photo: Robert Gumpert
In 1969 the draft lottery brought a bit of predictability to the U.S. military draft. If your “number” was near the single digit end, you were going. I drew number 11, I was going.
Wen the draft board took a closer look at me, it turned out I was psychologically unsuitable for the military.
Somewhat to my surprise I remained in school and got a degree from Humboldt State. The year was 1972 and I was as aimless after four years of college as I was on graduation from high school.
With nothing better to do I went to graduate school. After barely a quarter, maybe ten weeks, it was obvious academics was not for me, and a friend and I set off hitchhiking across the United States.
It was April, 1972 and we decided, for forgotten reasons, to take the southern route hitching through Kingman, Amarillo, and Memphis, before turning south to New Orleans. From NO we headed NE to D.C., and then west via a more northernly route.
On May 16, 1972 we left D.C., heading west through Laurel, Maryland. I know that’s the date because as we were waiting for a ride just outside of Laurel, Maryland, George Wallace was shot by a man in a red, white and blue suit at his Laurel campaign rally.
At some point we were on the side of the road just outside of Cabin Creek, W.VA, watching cars driven by men in coveralls and dirty faces drive by. Coal miners headed home after work. That scene changed my live. Two years later I returned to W.VA, and then moved on to Harlan County, Kentucky.
My friend meet a lady and stayed on in Morgantown for a bit. I continued on Highway 40, headed west. At the junction for Dinosaur I got picked up by a dying powder man who took me all the way to the coast. He told stories, we picked up addicts, and finally made Salem, Oregon. It was the best.
But those are not the stories I meant to tell here.
That story starts when my friend and I got into a van in northern Mississippi. We were heading for New Orleans, a trip that would take us several more rides.
The driver of this van was a white guy, in his mid to late 20s. “Tiny”, as I will call him although I have no recollection of his name or size, was about our age, and talkative. Naturally he asked where we were headed and from where we hailed. New Orleans was too far for him, he said, but he would get us past the road detours into rural Mississippi and drop us back on the main highway. He allowed as the rural detours wouldn’t be a good place for two “California hippies”, many people were not as open and friendly as he was.
Over the course of a few hours we mostly listened to stories of segregation, Freedom Summer and the voting right act of 1965. Tiny was eager to explain how Mississippi had beaten the Feds’. In rural and small towns all across the state local sheriffs deputized all the white adult males, empowering them to arrest, jail, or shoot, any Black person as long as it was an official matter. Of course, being deputies, official matters were whatever they said they were.
As Tiny said, “the rightful order of things was maintained”.
For the last four years this country has been waiting for Trump, his cult and sycophants to be held accountable. Pundits, scholars and lawyers have maintained time, and time again that surely at the next level accountability will be come. Mostly it hasn’t.
“Tiny’s” stories have framed my understanding of power, and justice in this country. After twenty-five years documenting the criminal justice system, over and over the refrain. “it’ll be remedied on the next level” is uttered, usually it isn’t.
Trump and company’s ability to delay, postpone, or evade penalty has shaken the faith of many in the chattering classes, politicians and experienced lawyers. Most are white. All are successful and well off. All know how the system works from their side of the docket, the country club side. But like defense lawyers, or prosecutors who have never spent extended, unescorted time in lockup, they don’t know how the informal system works. As on a shop floor, there is a difference between day-to-day work practice and “working to rule”.
What Trump and company have exposed the system’s inequity so even the blind can see and now cannot ignore the biases in plain sight.
We are not a country that practices the Golden Rule of the Bible, but the other Golden Rule, the one that says: “Those with the gold make the rules”.
It is something people of color have always known.
These are my memories, but memory is a funny thing.
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“Division Street” – Order from Dewi Lewis: Orders: U.S.A – Britain - Canada