Trump Haters Can't Even Honor Aretha Franklin Properly.

On its front page, alongside a normal tribute to the great singer, The Atlantic has "Trump Can't Even Honor Aretha Franklin Properly/The president described the deceased soul legend first as a person who 'worked for me,' a telling remark in his ongoing disparagement of black women" by Vann R. Newkirk II. Newkirk is a "politics and policy" writer at The Atlantic, and you can see here, he put up another article, a much more substantive and respectful one, on the day we heard of the singer's death...

That other piece, "Aretha Franklin’s Revolution/The soul singer was an architect of the civil-rights movement as much as a witness to it," ends:

The literal meaning of the genre’s name [soul] speaks to its purpose. That purpose was taking the animus of a divine creator from gospel and pouring it into the music of the world. It took the black experience, with all its urgency and certainty of overcoming, and transliterated it into the vernacular. Soul was and is a revolutionary art, and Aretha belongs in the broader conversation about this country’s revolutionary heroes with any provocateur or patriot who ever lived.

That piece — with its grace and optimism — was linked lower down on the front page, but not among the featured articles at the top. It looks as though The Atlantic didn't like the stately "architect of the civil-rights movement" approach. God forbid we should drop our guard and feel good about racial relations in America. The relentless feel-bad agenda must continue, and it must revolve around Trump. So a trivial phrase in Trump's effort at honoring Franklin is yanked out of context and magnified into another racial problem. Because we can never have enough racial problems, it seems.

It’s hard not to find effusive praise for a woman who managed so much in three-quarters of a century, and Trump’s comments indicate he has some sense of the scope of what she’d done. But with four simple words—she worked for me—he ruined most of that. With that clause, he turned the stunning career achievements of a woman who was nominated for at least one Grammy Award in 24 of the 27 years from 1968 to 1995 into supporting evidence. The most important thing, the thing he just had to point out, was that she’d worked for him....

And the most important thing, the thing you just had to point out, was that Trump said something that could be construed as a racial microaggression.

Calling bullshit on calls for civility.

That's something I always do. That's what my tag "civility bullshit" means: Calls for civility are always bullshit, because the real motivation is political advantage. Usually, the civility-demander is trying to get opponents tone it down and not take advantage of whatever hot passion and energy they've got on their side.

Sometimes though, the civility-demander wants a faction of his own side to rein it in, because it might scare the moderates and interfere with the message that we are the sane, reasonable, smart people. When that happens, you can get some in fighting, with the supposedly uncivil people insisting that now is not the time to be civil. These people are calling bullshit.

For example, today, I'm seeing, in The Guardian, a piece by David Smith, "How the Red Hen affair broke America's civility wars wide open/A restaurant’s choice to eject Trump’s press secretary stoked debate on how liberals should behave in an era of outrage":

The Democratic party establishment has urged caution, and asked supporters to resist sinking to Trump’s level. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said, “Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable”, while the Senate minority leader, Charles Schumer, said from the Senate floor that “the best solution is to win elections. That is a far more productive way to channel the legitimate frustrations with this president’s policies than with harassing members of his administration.”

But Pelosi and Schumer, aged 78 and 67 respectively, seem to have been left behind by liberal activists who believe that there can be no compromise in resisting Trump....

Neil Sroka, the communications director of the progressive political action committee Democracy for America, says: “It’s disappointing to see corporate Democrats hand-wringing over this. If they fall into the trap of the false equivalency, this is literally why we lose.

“I have a great deal of respect for Michelle Obama but I think 2016 showed us that ‘When they go low, we go high,’ does not work against Donald Trump. We have to be willing to call out the bigotry and the hate of this administration and make people feel uncomfortable for associating with that hate and bigotry.... The discussion of civility betrays how deep white supremacy is in our discourse. A black woman standing up there saying we should make these people uncomfortable becomes ‘uncivil'....”

And in The Atlantic, by Vann R. Newkirk II, "Protest Isn’t Civil/Attacks on incivility are rooted more in preserving the status quo than in addressing ongoing harms and violence":

Marginalized people remain at risk of being labeled “uncivil” for all but the most passive of disagreements. From outrage over black activists stopping cars in San Francisco to essays that lectured Women’s March participants for signs that “send a message of hostility to those conservatives and Trump voters,” to the two-year-long freakout about Colin Kaepernick’s choice to kneel, cries to return to civility often overshadow the actual violence being targeted by protest. Remarkably, the current national hand-wringing was provoked by two legal and entirely nonviolent methods of protest. Denying a senior administration official a meal is perfectly legal in Virginia; Waters advocated a campaign of public shaming, not acts of violence.

The term civility itself is more a reflection of majority-enforced social norms than of a proven set of rules for effective debate. Ironically, a country founded on on tea-dumping, property-smashing, and norm-breaking has as its major bipartisan project a robust defense of social norms. [Martin Luther King Jr.] understood this dynamic well, and even applied it to riots in the inner-city. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” King famously said in his “The Other America” speech....

What King understood was that civility stood not as a companion or a near-synonym to his project of radical, militant nonviolence, but as its most insidious opponent. King and his intellectual forebears engineered nonviolence specifically as a tool that would break the violent foundations of white supremacy, and doing so necessarily meant disrupting order and breaking the law. The current model of civility counsels accommodation to violent power, but that course of action is actually antithetical to the Kingian project...

The cruel irony is that the success of King’s own project has made the call for more civility from America’s aggrieved groups all the more routine. Poor people, immigrants, black activists, and perhaps LGBT employees at a restaurant in Virginia are bludgeoned into silence by the constant cry for civility, made to hold still as injustices are visited upon them. Meanwhile, those with no real fear that they’ll ever wind up on the wrong side of the power dynamic in America can scold and hector.....

Civility is an instinct that only serves to silence them. It is itself wielded as a cudgel against those already facing obliteration that dictates to them how they must face it. It snuffs out nonviolent and violent protest alike. Civility is the sleep-aid of a majority inclined to ignore the violence done in its name—because in the end, they will be alright.

Notice that complaints about calls for civility can also be one-sided. My "civility bullshit" theme treats everyone the same. I don't think Newkirk and Smith have my perspective. They think that their side can dispense with civility, and they don't like being told to stand down by people who are supposed to be their allies.