It was definitely tricky; it was the end of October, cold, and the middle of the day. As always, Michael was an amazing model, and fearlessly just went right into it. It was hilarious, and I loved shooting every second of it! I knew exactly the spot I wanted him in — we would just drop the coat and shoot crazy fast and then run back into the hall again between rolls of film.

And then the police pulled up!

I grabbed my copy of the book and ran over to the police car and sweet-talked my way into letting them allow us to continue, after I explained what we were doing. The book came out to a lot of speculation and was sold under wraps because of her nudity, becoming instantly collectible and hard to get hold of. The officer I spoke to said something like, “Ummm … okay … let me see that book!”

After getting a good look, he handed it back and said, “Well, ok! But be quick about it!” And they drove off.

What a blast! We ended up using one of the photos as a poster that the Voice sold as a way to raise money for AIDS research, as well as running one in Michael’s column. It’s absolutely one of my favorite Village Voice memories.  ❖

Editor’s note: We’ll continue to bring you some of the stories behind the stories — and photos and cartoons and illustrations and ads — that have appeared in the paper over these past 66 years and counting.

The post Musto Does Madonna! appeared first on The Village Voice.

Frank Pizzoli: The 20th anniversary of 9/11 signals that threats to our safety are now internal, not external. Hasn’t the HIV/AIDS/LGBTQ community always had internal threats?

Peter Staley: Like some who were in charge of responding to our current pandemic crisis, Reagan and those around him shattered the idea that we all work from the same epistemological playbook by being dismissive of scientific expertise. That, plus a heavy dose of homophobia, allowed him not to lift a finger when AIDS first started, even after being warned that it would turn into a worldwide pandemic. And, of course, it did. So, we see what happens when public health threats of any kind are ignored. Same with COVID.

FP: In 1985, you received a positive HIV test result. That’s when you turned to activism — and you have not been silent since?

PS: I’ve always admitted that I came to activism for very selfish reasons. My HIV diagnosis came first. I was a 24-year-old closeted gay man working on Wall Street in one of the most homophobic, sexist, racist trading rooms in Corporate America, a bond-trading floor. After my diagnosis, I dove into researching the virus, trying to learn everything I could about it. About 18 months later, I was handed a flyer about ACT UP’s first protest on my way to work; I’d never heard of Larry Kramer. Within weeks, I was a bond trader by day and a radical AIDS activist by night. Attending meetings, I was overwhelmed by the glorious feeling of being part of something far larger than myself. I was searching for any type of hope. I decided to devote myself full-time to activism.

FP: Did placing a giant condom on the Virginia home of then U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, known as “Senator No” on AIDS, in 1991, give you hope?

PS: America’s best-known homophobe at the time, Helms was against any federal spending on HIV research, treatment, or prevention, so the condom read, “Helms is deadlier than a virus.” Referring to homosexuals, Helms said, “It’s their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease.” Prevention programs were his first target. Because of Helms, the government wasn’t allowed to fund HIV prevention campaigns targeting gay men. He was the devil, and I wanted to hit him hard. But the custom condom I needed to cover his house was going to cost $3,500. My boyfriend at the time, Kevin Sessums, of Vanity Fair, thought I’d be thrown in jail forever. While on Fire Island, he voiced his concerns to David Geffen, who reacted differently. He put a big wad of bills in my hand, asking that no one should know of his involvement.

FP: During the 1980s and ’90s, when ACT UP and other groups took shape, was the atmosphere both dynamic and fraught with conflict within activist circles?

PS: It was fraught with conflict. People were dying, and we were using whatever energy, money, and resources we had. But it was also exhilarating, forging a new path. I rely on my Martin Luther King analogy: He’s revered now but was very unpopular at the time. Same as ACT UP. We’re hailed now, but we were feared and scorned then, even within our own community. The first few years of the AIDS crisis created a huge backlash against gay Americans, and our national groups were fearful of making it worse. They practiced “don’t rock the boat” politics, but ACT UP blew that apart, saying, we don’t have time for this.

FP: Do your personal narrative and the narrative of Sarah Schulman’s new book, Let the Record Show; A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, conflict? Comport?

PS: My book, which I wrote before reading a single word of Schulman’s history, is a memoir of my experiences, not a complete ACT UP history. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we have very different takes on why TAG split from ACT UP five years after the movement started. The books are a great companion read for that reason alone. [ACT UP was known for combining inside (talking to those in power) and outside (civil disobedience) strategies to effect change. In later years, competing camps developed around choosing which strategy to concentrate on. The rift ended when key members of ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee split off in 1992 to form TAG.]

FP: Regarding current treatment activism, Annals of Internal Medicine (July 6) found that early death rates for Americans living with HIV and getting treatment are no longer very different from those of people who are HIV-negative. And soon, the U.S. Department of Labor will instruct insurance companies to cover the entire cost of prescribing PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV), which should lower initial infections. Having assisted with founding the PrEP4All Collaboration, is the double-edged approach of treatment and prevention at a turning point?

PS: We now have good friends at the CDC, so the Biden administration is giving us renewed hope that we can finally get serious about tackling HIV prevention nationally.

FP: You’ve added COVID to the work of the PrEP4All Collaboration? Make the connection for readers.

PS: Every AIDS activist feels a calling when a new bug hits. We are uniquely positioned to make a difference, having become essential workhorses within the public health establishment. We provide muscle for making sure the politicians listen to the science.

FP: Do you have any “do-over” moments?

PS: I think all of us are haunted by how many friends we lost along the way. Everything we tried just wasn’t fast enough. The same is happening now, with COVID. As I’ve often said, activism is about plowing through pessimism.   ❖

The post Peter Staley Is Still Acting Up appeared first on The Village Voice.

But what are decades of skepticism and caution around sports gambling worth when the monetary potential can reach Vegas-like heights? The explosion of sports-betting-related content has resulted in an onslaught of television commercials, radio spots, and promotions that have been embraced by media outlets small and large. If you’ve seen any Knicks or Devils games on one of the MSG channels over the past year, you know how desperate the powers that be are to get their message into your head. Returning from a commercial break, or even on a split screen during the game, a message from FanDuel might appear reminding you of the odds for that very game and telling you that it’s not too late to place a bet. And just like that, the pro sports leagues who helped demonize gambling are now interrupting their programs to persuade you to blow your money on betting.

And boy oh boy, is that a dramatic shuffling of the deck.

Sports betting was so taboo back in the day that Major League Baseball banned one of the most famous faces in the sport — and arguably the greatest pure hitter ever — Pete Rose, after it was found that he was placing bets on his own team. A manager at that time, in 1989, Rose denied the allegations, but the MLB reached its own conclusions. The Cincinnati Reds legend would no longer be permitted to manage, and would also be annually denied entrance to the National Baseball Hall of Fame — as a player. That’s how bad a stain gambling was on the MLB: Rose’s unrivaled accomplishments on the field were canceled by a transgression years later as a manager.

In fairness to them, the major sports leagues were given ample reason to avoid any connection to gambling. The mid-to-late 20th century saw a handful of point-shaving scandals — agreements by individual players to fix the offensive output of their team to better suit point spreads — in NCAA basketball. Of course, there’s also the infamous 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal, which saw the team throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for cash considerations from crime boss Arnold Rothstein. And the NBA took a hit in 2007 when basketball called a foul on referee Tim Donaghy for conspiracy; the zebra had been passing information such as player injuries, referee-player relationships, and more to bookies in exchange for cash. On the ice, the NHL’s biggest scandal included two Boston Bruins teammates, Billy Taylor and Don Gallinger, who in 1948 were found to have bet for and against their own team. Even as recently as this month, hockey’s troubled San Jose Sharks winger Evander Kane was accused of betting on and throwing games in recent seasons. Kane has vehemently denied the allegations, which were made by his wife in the midst of a divorce, but the league was quick to launch an investigation, given the severity of the claims. Meanwhile, the NFL is actually the cleanest of the four major sports in this regard, but even they have had players over the years ousted for betting on football games.

Obviously, no sports league ever wants to be at the center of a gambling scandal, large or small. The appearance of integrity is a monumental pillar for the success of professional sports. But the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a law instituted in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush that prevented states from regulating and taxing sports betting, was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2018. That meant individual states — and, by extension, the leagues — could now legally explore the near limitless potential for revenue through partnerships with major gambling organizations.

So have the leagues prioritized cash over the sanctity of their respective games?

Uh … yeah. What else would you expect?

These concerns over the integrity of North American sports aren’t part of some loony conspiracy theory that asserts faceless suits are secretly scripting the outcomes of games. Even former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has expressed serious unease over the normalizing of sports gambling. A part of that skepticism comes from the fact that he was a member of the Georgetown College basketball team, who in 1961 beat an NYU squad that was later found to have been point shaving.

“I still worry about some young guy and someone says to him, ‘Take the money,’ ” Tagliabue said of the incident, via USA Today. The former commish also stated that he never would have allowed an NFL team to move to Las Vegas, as current commissioner Roger Goodell has done with the Oakland Raiders, who now coexist in Sin City with the NHL’s Golden Knights. And who could say that pro sports players are less inclined to supplement their income today than they were years ago, when gambling was illegal in most places and access was far less direct? In matters great and small, complacency is often the death of standards.

Speaking of greater matters, the growing proliferation of sports-gambling advertising and its media presence cannot be overstated — according to ESPN and ad-measurement company iSpotTV, the most prominent sports-betting companies accounted for more than 10 billion television ad views from September 1, 2020, through March 31, 2021. Since 2018, out-of-home ads — billboards, posters on the subway, broadsides on busses — have increased by a whopping 193 percent. In March alone, $4 billion was bet with U.S. sportsbooks.

The outreach of sports gambling goes far beyond commercials, though. Aside from the incessant ad spots on the tube, radio stations, and billboards, legalized gambling has transformed the sports content we already consume. Along with interruptions on MSG and other networks for live betting updates, ESPN has adapted well to the times, by adding betting coverage in the form of shows such as Daily Wager and the podcast Behind the Bets with Doug Kezirian. Missed those shows? Well, ESPN has even added odds to their classic scrolling ticker at the bottom of each television channel. Elsewhere in sports media, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo interjects his takes on daily bets every morning on MLB Network, and he’s not the only talking head to adopt the new content. Still, you’d think Russo might’ve thought twice about hopping on this bandwagon, considering his voice-over role as a Mets commentator in 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, a devastating character study starring Harvey Keitel that features the dire results of a gambling addiction (among others). Elsewhere, even celebrities and athletes like Rose — who’s on the record saying that he’s lost more money than gained through gambling, and that true betting experts do not exist — have jumped in on the fun by offering their picks and being featured in ad spots.

Aside from the implications of fully integrating sports gambling into sports coverage for new generations of young fans, there’s a more immediate demographic that seems particularly overlooked with the programming overhaul: gambling addicts.

According to the International Center for Responsible Gaming, approximately one percent of the U.S. population has a gambling problem. And while that isn’t as pervasive as other problems, such as alcohol or drug abuse, it still puts well over three million Americans into a corner of addiction that undoubtedly goes under-reported. It would take a leap of faith to believe that this figure won’t rise with ongoing legalization across the country and ads that pound home the same message as the creepy ghosts of the twins in The Shining: “Come play with us … forever, and ever, and ever.” Tales of troubled gamblers can be heard locally on WFAN’s program Hello, My Name is Craig. Host Craig Carton covers all the hits: Massive debt. Lost savings. Blown college funds. Families destroyed. Dips into substance abuse. In many ways, severe gambling addictions can be as catastrophic as any substance-use disorder.

And it will be easier than ever to get someone hooked, with the emergence of mobile betting; while that hasn’t yet reached the finish line in the state of New York, daily fantasy sports (DFS) have been around since long before PASPA was erased in 2018. A monetized version of classic fantasy sports, DFS apps by the likes of FanDuel and DraftKings allow bettors to build a lineup for any given day or week for the price of an entry fee. Usually competing against thousands of other contestants, bettors are promised incremental prizes for finishing higher and higher in the standings.

Entry fees can be as low as cents on the dollar, but more costly tournaments naturally yield higher prizes. You may be asking why organizational behemoths like FanDuel and DraftKings would waste their time with 50-cent buy-ins. Well, why does Costco have a free-sample cart set up in every aisle?  They want you — no, need you — to want more. The only difference is that Costco doesn’t send push notifications to your phone to remind you how easy it is to get started sampling. A couple of quarters becomes a couple of dollars real quick, and if you make a profit you’ll start wondering just how much more you would’ve made in one of the more expensive matches. This thing leads to that, and before you know it you’re playing, well, “forever, and ever, and ever.” Between the cheap cost of playing and oh-so-helpful reminders, it’s almost like they do want to hook you. But major gambling enterprises would never try to exploit the highly profitable pains of addiction.…

And remember, there’s more on the horizon, as traditional betting moves to mobile devices. Could legislation similar to that which began the Marlboro Man’s long ride into the advertising sunset back in the early ’70s ease these concerns? Perhaps. However, sports-gambling advertising already has some regulations in place (at least in New York), including the requirement for “problem gaming assistance notifications” — “If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call the National Problem Gambling Helpline,” etc — and that ads must not run in programs where the majority of the audience is under 21 years old. Though it’s doubtful the inability to run commercials on a Nickelodeon chyron will hurt the industry much.

Plus, there’s the fact that advertising regulations won’t affect the integration of betting content into sports-media programs themselves. But hey — good luck going after Disney (ESPN’s parent company) and all the other big guys at that overladen table.

While we’re on the topic of futile pursuits, let’s address sports fandom in general.

Let’s face it, rooting for your favorite team requires a bit of delusion no matter who they are. The odds are never in a fan’s favor, yet we continue to watch and whoop and weep over the course of hundreds of games per year across the four major sports and more. While the highs are delightful, they’re also few and far between when compared with the inevitable lows. After all, only one team per season can be crowned. Such is the nature of fandom: We watch our teams loyally and cheer their victories, crucial and trivial, all in the hopes of one day seeing them stand alone atop the heap.

But throw $50 on the table and … maybe it would be okay if the Jets allowed an extra touchdown to Patriots tight end Hunter Henry. I put him in my DFS lineup, after all. And out of a long 162-game season, the Yanks dropping the one game I have money on wouldn’t kill me. They’ll pick that game right back up when Baltimore comes to town. Right?

I’ll admit, as a fairly inexperienced gambler with just a handful of low buy-in DFS matches under my belt, I’ve rationalized the pluses of my teams losing for even the most middling of payouts. Sure, watching the Yankees blast their way to victory is great, but six bucks is six bucks.

The point being, the prospect of becoming a successful bettor is counterintuitive to the fandom of the individual. As a serious gambler, you have to bet against your own teams if you really want to win — unless your team was the 17–0 Miami Dolphins in 1972. Because if your club had been the Patriots in 2007, you probably would’ve lost it all when they fell to 18–1 at the Super Bowl. This is no new concept. But the widespread availability of gaming and the apparent desire of the industry to turn casual sports fans into regular bettors implies that this degradation of fandom will only grow more rampant. It’s a sad by-product of the post-PASPA age.

Call me old-fashioned — or better yet, pour me one as a remedy for all these gambling come-ons blaring in my ears all day — but let’s slow down a bit, shall we? We all know that we can place bets on anything from points scored by the Jets (take the under) to how many Yankees get caught picking their noses on camera (just kidding … for now). We don’t need to be held hostage with our eyes forced open Clockwork Orange–style to understand our options. And maybe the conglomerate of million- and billionaires across professional sports, sports networks, and the gambling industry should give a little thought as to how their barrage against the athletic landscape affects the traditions of their products, and, more important, their consumers.

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. What happens when we’re five or ten years into the legalization of this enterprise? Could they possibly shove any more down our throats?

Tell ya what, whatever the line is, I’d take the over on that one.   ❖

The post Appealing to Your Bettor Nature appeared first on The Village Voice.

Social equity provisions like these are increasingly being adopted by states and local communities across the nation. Legislation that prioritizes the involvement of Black and Brown people in the cannabis industry can help serve the cause of redistributive justice. Attempts at finding some sort of economic redress for those who had been enslaved began in January of 1865, with Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15, which promised plots of land, much of it confiscated from Southern plantations, to freed slaves. The edict soon became known as “40 acres and a mule.” Not surprisingly, it was reversed later that year by the Southern-sympathizing Andrew Johnson, who had been elevated to the presidency when Lincoln was assassinated. A century on, the so-called “war on drugs” brought more devastation to Black and Brown communities. But perhaps now, cannabis, long unfairly portrayed as leading to “reefer madness,” might bring some economic healing after generations of harm.

Oakland Leads the Way

One individual who helped create a robust social equity initiative, in Oakland, California, is Ramon Garcia. He is a founding member of the San Francisco Cannabis Equity Working Group (SFCEWG), which provides guidance and resources to those starting to navigate emerging cannabis equity programs. Garcia learned about social engagement from his parents, who were activists in the Bronx during the civil rights movement.

Garcia has stressed how necessary social equity measures are to developing the cannabis industry in economically oppressed communities. “How are you going to create something equitable from a system that is inequitable?” he asks rhetorically during our Zoom conversation. “We’re trying to recreate policies that are not endemic with those systemic racist undertones that have been in this the whole time. The only way to do that is to include the community, include the people who are impacted by those policies.”

Garcia sees the social equity initiative adopted by the Oakland city council in 2017 (the first such program in the nation) as a step in the right direction, not an endpoint. “The equity conversation was about providing that structure and system within all of our structures,” he says. “But cannabis was the place to start because we actually had data back from these equity reports and had admissions from the federal and local governments that [the drug war] targeted our communities … okay, then there needs to be some kind of reinvestment back into these damaged communities.”

Oakland, especially, has suffered over the decades. “Oakland historically was a center for the war on drugs,” Garcia explains. “The people were ready for social equity because the impacts were so great, like West Oakland was traditionally 70 percent, 80 percent Black-owned, East Oakland I think was 60-something-percent Black-owned. Through those 30, 40, 50 years of the war on drugs, all of that was lost.”

The stated goal of Oakland’s Cannabis Equity Program is to “address disparities in the cannabis industry by prioritizing victims of the war on drugs, and by minimizing barriers of entry into the industry.” The city is issuing permits for cannabis cultivators, dispensary owners, manufacturers, distributors, and transport professionals. Fully half of all of these permits are reserved for equity applicants (determined by income level, residential location, and previous cannabis-related encounters with the legal system). Assistance is offered to equity applicants in various forms, including no-interest loans funded by cannabis tax revenue, business coaching modeled after programs organized by micro-lenders and equity investors, technical instruction through workshops and online training programs, and free legal assistance regarding anything related to starting a plant-touching business.

Nina Parks is also a founding member of SFCEWG, and an activist (she joined us on Zoom). She has formed a new organization, the Original Equity Group (OEG), whose goal is to make sure that social equity applicants to San Francisco’s program have all the support they need to achieve their entrepreneurial goals. Garcia, Parks, and their associates have consulted with citizens and interested officials in San Jose, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, spreading the message about the value of social equity initiatives.

“I think it’s very important for people to remember that the strategy around the war on drugs was to break up people’s ability to community organize,” says Parks. “That’s why community organizing is always going to be important … the big thing about the equity programs is that we’re trying to empower individuals to take ownership of their agency.”

The Weaponization of Marijuana

Terry Gilbert has spent the past five decades of his life working in Cleveland as a civil rights attorney. He uses the law as a vehicle for social change, as he describes in his newly published autobiography, Trying Times: A Lawyer’s 50-Year Struggle Fighting for Rights in a World of Wrongs. Gilbert shared his thoughts with me over Zoom.

“The war on drugs has been a complete disaster on many levels, impacting people of color disproportionately,” he says, summarizing five decades of history. “The collateral consequences range from mass incarceration, aggressive and military policing in marginalized communities, an epidemic of pretextual traffic stops, SWAT raids, brutal excessive force, and police shooting deaths. These policies, endorsed by courts, have devastated communities and done little to keep them safe.”

Gilbert singles out the government’s quest to stigmatize and criminalize marijuana by conflating it with much harder drugs as equally damaging. “It was an oppressive tool … it was a tool of the war on drugs to destroy our communities, to give access to basically breaking down generational wealth and controlling what our communities were involved in.”

This is not opinion. The truth about the war on drugs was disclosed by former Nixon administration domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman. In a 1994 interview published in Harper’s magazine in 2016, Ehrlichman explained Tricky Dick’s decision to start a drug war: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Nixon’s politically cynical campaign was only the opening salvo in the drug war. The next significant move was made by the Reagan administration, which sought to establish its conservative “law and order” credentials through the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. This racially charged law mandated draconian prison sentences for crack cocaine possession while largely exempting the pricier powdered cocaine favored by wealthier populations from these edicts. It also included longer mandatory minimum sentences for selling or possessing marijuana, which increased incarceration rates in impoverished communities even further.

Not to be outdone by Republicans, in 1994 President Bill Clinton and his Democratic allies in Congress passed the 1994 Crime Bill, hyperbolically referred to as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Cowritten by Senator Joe Biden, this bill was the most sweeping and punitive anti-drug legislation ever passed. It included such goodies as truth-in-sentencing, the federal three-strikes rule, 100,000 more cops on American streets, and funding support for states willing to build more prisons to mass incarcerate marijuana users and other threats to public safety. Between 1995 and 2005, with the Crime Bill taking effect, the U.S. prison population increased by 40 percent. People of color arrested for marijuana possession were responsible for a sizeable portion of that increase. Biden, unlike many politicians, has admitted some of his mistakes, noting particularly in a 2019 speech that one of the problems with the Crime Bill was the disparate treatment of people who used crack as opposed to powdered cocaine: “We were told by the experts that ‘crack, you never go back,’ that the two were somehow fundamentally different. It’s not. But it’s trapped an entire generation.”  

Criminal prosecutions for marijuana possession are hardly a thing of the past. Between 2010 and 2018, more than six million Americans were arrested for marijuana-related crimes, with simple posses­sion accounting for 90 percent of the total. Black Americans are still 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, despite no disparities in usage levels between the two groups.

This selective enforcement reveals the self-perpetuating reality of systemic racism. It also helps create the rationale for social equity programs in 2021.

Possible Pitfalls for the Social Equity Movement

Social equity initiatives can work if they’re comprehensive in scope and implemented with commitment. But if they’re not, they may fail to reverse historical trends.

This is what happened in Massachusetts, which sought to be a pioneer in social equity when it launched its program, in 2018. A 2019 Boston Globe article detailed some of the reasons Massachusetts has struggled to meet its social equity goals: most Massachusetts cities haven’t fully promoted or publicized social equity; capital has been hard to come by, as banks remain reluctant to loan to marijuana businesspeople; and venture capital investments rarely go to Black-owned start-ups in the cannabis or any industry. The final approval process has been slow and costly, even when applicants seem to meet all program qualifications. The state government hasn’t allocated adequate funding for social equity, and attempts to increase financial support have failed to gain legislative traction. 

These factors mirror issues that Black and Brown entrepreneurs interested in cannabis have faced nationwide, with the lack of access to capital being especially acute. While Massachusetts has picked up the pace of social equity approvals recently, overall it has failed to thoroughly address the systemic issues that have kept Black entrepreneurs out of the industry since the beginning.

Another potential pitfall is corporate domination. With profit levels in cannabis projected to surpass $43 billion by 2025, big players are moving fast to gain control of the action wherever they can.

Orville Vernon Burton is a Clemson University historian and co-author of the new book Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court, which, among other subjects, charts how discriminatory drug laws have hurt the Black community. While he recognizes the possibilities offered by social equity initiatives, calling them “a wonderful retribution,” Burton is concerned that a corporate takeover of cannabis may be difficult to prevent. “The problem is now you have these big corporations, they are even taking over farms,” he says. “Money is one of the problems with America. Small people with some investment can do it, but eventually these huge farms and huge investments take control.”

Civil rights attorney Gilbert also worries about sharp business practices from corporate operators. “We have seen in the minority construction contract bidding process that investors and white established companies use minorities to get contracts, but the minorities have no control over the operation,” he says. “This could be what happens with marijuana.” He also cautions activists to be sure they press for carefully designed social equity programs to avoid corporate domination. “The devil is in the details,” he proclaims. “The social equity provisions need to be spelled out in detail so the benefits truly go to local community ownership, with tax revenues coming back into the communities, not into a shared fund.”

Transforming Community Health Through Cannabis

To make the industry work for entre­preneurs and members of marginalized communities alike, Parks and Garcia recommend a more inclusive, health-oriented marketing strategy.

Parks decries the overall de-emphasis on the therapeutic benefits of cannabis, which she sees as fundamental to its appeal. “All use is medicinal use, no matter if they call it adult-use or whatever, and it does everyone a disservice by calling it recreational,” she says. “All use of any drug is medicinal because there’s something that is ailing within the human spirit, within the psyche, or within the body that’s been calling for some kind of supplement.”

Garcia adds, “What you need to do is start marketing and providing education to the folks that are going to want to put a little tincture in their food, or want a gummy or a topical or a bath salt, or all these different things that allow them to relieve that pain.”

It is indeed ironic that an economic renaissance in the Black community may be sparked by the growth, manufacture, and sale of a substance that was weaponized to severely limit Black mobility and achievement. It is a further irony that a healing substance demonized as dangerous and addictive may prove its medicinal value in the very marginalized communities that its demonization damaged the most.   ❖

The post 40 Grams and a Bong? appeared first on The Village Voice.

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The stranger seeks to suss out Walter “Hawk” Newsome, cofounder of the Greater New York Chapter of Black Lives Matter, who has already endured nearly five grueling hours of isolation. That seemed to him to be punishment inflicted before being brought to trial. Along with scores of antiracism demonstrators protesting the bald-faced trespasses of the MAGA far right in their city that Sunday, Newsome had been summarily snatched off the streets, supposedly by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and rendered to this cold and drafty lockdown.

A self-described “officially recognized” New York Police Department “community liaison” — not authorized to speak about counterintelligence operations they’ve “heard others being briefed on” — told the Voice on condition of anonymity that the activist is among “the highest-profile black militants” most likely to be under surveillance at any given time. He can’t be left alone, the watchdog claims, “because of the charismatic role he continues to play” in the urban theatre of Black identity and anti-police-brutality accountability politics.

“I’m paranoid, brother,” says the 44-year-old Newsome as he sits down to Halal food in the Bronx 10 months later. He hastens to bring up an incident in which an overwhelming presence of  “human eyeballs” tracked his movements the day he marched with 20,000 souls in Times Square to deliver a legislative action plan called “Black Opportunities.” His observers, according to Newsome, wore buttoned-up polo shirts with a distinctive American eagle insignia, and dark slacks. “I noticed these guys in these weird shirts standing next to my fucking car and I was like, ‘Damn, is this the Feds? This ain’t NYPD.’ ” During another march, he encountered the same crew and took photos of their attire. “We got the shirts, and it was NYPD counterintelligence,” he says. “It was counterterrorism.”

But nowhere did this paranoia kick in more fiercely than in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd, trapped under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin, had begged futilely for his life. Dogged by grief, Newsome led a delegation of BLMers to the site where Floyd’s knell of death — “I can’t breathe!” — became the anthem of a new generation of civil rights warriors.

And there, Newsome recalls, the spies, the enemies of Black lives, followed them. As he tells it, a young white man, who’d been tailing the group for several blocks, pounced on them as they sprawled out on a sidewalk, weary from marching and shouting themselves hoarse. He kept asking too many questions, “Hey, what are you guys doing out here? Where you from? Do you know what the fucking plan is?”

Newsome spoke out, letting their tormentor have it, just in case he happened to be “Minneapolice” or “FBeye.” “Don’t nobody know what the fucking plan is!” he sneered.

The man kept on babbling, digging for the answers: “What you guys doing down here?” Again, Newsome bristled. “Nobody knows what the fucking plan is! It’s the will of the people. We down here to support the people. Who wanna march, then we march with the people.” To dispel any lingering doubt that he’d blown the cover of an agent provocateur, Newsome turned to his followers and declared, “We gotta get the fuck outta here!”

What really landed Newsome behind bars back in his hometown of New York seven months later was the police expectation of a throwdown in defense of social and racial equality going terribly awry (we will come back to this in detail later.) But the crushing denouement of the would-be clash with the far right may have a lot to do with who this native son is, and what one federal court judge referred to as the “unlawful surveillance of African American groups” and leaders “solely based upon … race, social and or political positions.”

Newsome would be equally, if more intensely, scrutinized if he crossed the line into New York’s suburban Rockland County. Almost all of the admitted spying on Black Lives Matter and other movements for social justice in the upstate county, where a little-known challenge to their First Amendment right to free speech was fiercely litigated, has been accomplished via outlaw enforcement of so-called “intelligence-led policing.” The social and political ramifications of this blunt force instrument of suppression would extend far beyond Rockland County, as law-enforcement authorities and law-and-order hawks sought the upper hand in their war of attrition against the Black Lives Matter movement.

As early as 2013, as the Black Lives Matter movement burgeoned in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin, in Florida, law-enforcement officials in Rockland County, under the guise of wanting to combat “criminal activity” with a bigger stick, entered into a security pact between the county and the town of Clarkstown, one of its five municipalities. That scheme, for want of a better description, would come to be known as the Rockland County Intelligence-Led Policing and Prosecution Center​​, Special Investigations Unit (SIU). It was flawed from the beginning.

At best, the SIU’s attempt to “monitor, collect and share data” about criminals operated more like a fishing expedition. At worst, it included surveillance of the Rockland County chapter of Black Lives Matter, and attempts to ensnare them. The SIU had also trained its focus on other Black activist groups, which at the time were warning that systemic police violence was endangering the lives of Black men and boys.

According to court documents, in July 2015, the SIU “learned of the existence of  ‘WE THE PEOPLE,’ an African American community group in Rockland County with no criminal records or history of violence.” As part of its mission to awaken consciences around the topic of racially motivated police shootings of Black people, We the People planned to stage a play entitled A Clean Shoot? The court documents went on to note: “Advertisements for the play featured an image of a police car with a ‘white subject pointing a handgun out of the vehicle window.’ ”

Barely a month later, according to the same documents, the SIU “conducted an electronic investigation” of We the People. Again, despite not finding one iota of incriminating evidence that “any of the members of WE THE PEOPLE were engaged in or were reasonably suspected to engage in criminal activity,” the SIU generated a report rife with innuendo. By November 2015, according to the SIU and Rockland County DA reports, the unit had “conducted electronic surveillance on two Black Lives Matter Movement members [but] found no criminal misconduct or threat of criminal conduct from Black Lives Matter or those two individuals.” Despite concluding that there wasn’t “any justifiable basis” for spying on the group and its members, the SIU ramped up “electronic surveillance” on six other BLMers — and again it came up empty.

But concern that the unit might be going rogue raised more than a few eyebrows of those who had been peering into its activities. “I mentioned before, you really should not have Black Lives Matter listed as a target for surveillance,” the Rockland County DA’s office chafed in an email to SIU director Stephen Cole-Hatchard. The SIU, presumably, had by then taken on the starkness of a SEAL Team and become a law unto itself. During a Black Lives Matter rally, in July 2016, activists “observed snipers from the Clarkstown police department on a nearby roof.” Vanessa Green, a Black Lives Matter member, said that during a speech delivered by Dr. Weldon McWilliams IV, a preacher and founding member of the Black Lives Matter Lower Hudson Valley Chapter, she “saw a red sniper rifle dot appear on” him.

In a federal lawsuit it filed against the town of Clarkstown, the Black Lives Matter group maintained that their activities were based entirely on a “call for justice” and racial equality and “that the killing of unarmed people of color by law enforcement must stop.” In a mixed ruling in 2018, Judge Nelson S. Román, for the Southern District of New York, agreed with the activists that they had the “right to be free from retaliatory surveillance and intimidation” and that the surveillance “resulted in the chilling” of their expression of free speech as protected by the First Amendment. Judge Román opined that the BLMers’ “pursuit falls squarely within matters of public concern, particularly at a time when awareness of violence between law enforcement and unarmed people of color is rapidly increasing.”

However, he also ruled that SIU director Cole-Hatchard and another town official were entitled to “qualified immunity,” meaning (in this interpretation of the trending hot-button issue in American policing) they were “not personally involved” in the SIU’s  “illegal actions.”

With protests erupting daily throughout the nation and the world over the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, Tamir Rice, and other unarmed Blacks, targeted surveillance allegedly led to a further uptick in so-called false flag attacks being carried out against the myriad movements for Black lives and legacy civil rights organizations. Rogue law-enforcement officials and their far right compatriots have sought to hamstring some of Black America’s most outspoken political leaders and anti-racism activists through trumped-up arrests, malicious prosecution, and frivolous lawsuits.

Local and federal law-enforcement agencies operating under the aegis of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which may have been involved in knocking Hawk Newsome off his bully pulpit, have been following all too familiar tactics drawn from the playbook of COINTELPRO — the FBI’s dark and dreadful Counter Intelligence Program, which infiltrated, discredited, and encouraged the assassination of leaders of the civil rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s and ’70s. That COINTELPRO now rears its ugly head, disguised as intelligence-led policing, may augur ill for the Black Lives Matter movement, and should come as no surprise.

“It continues today,” the veteran radical lawyer Lennox S. Hinds tells the Voice. “Nothing has changed in terms of the approach that law enforcement has taken,” adds Hinds, who defended the Black communist Angela Davis, Black Liberation Army fugitive Assata Shakur, and, later, wrote the prescient Illusions of Justice: Human Rights Violations in the United States. “There is still a coalition between federal and local law enforcement in the sense that the local police forces have an intelligence unit, which is linked with the FBI. And who they are targeting are the modern or contemporary individuals and groups they identify as domestic security risks.”

Law for Black Lives, a relatively new organization of radical lawyers advocating for social change, is one such group that attracted the attention of the federal government. The FBI launched an investigation of Law for Black Lives, alleging that it is part of a domestic terrorist network. According to one account, unpacked by Hinds and shared for the first time with the Voice, the probe had been kept under the radar until the FBI notified Law for Black Lives that it was the target of surveillance.

“I was contacted to provide some legal representation because the founders of Law for Black Lives were contacted by the FBI,” affirms Hinds, himself a founder of the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL), the 53-year-old, once-feared bulwark against FBI overreach. (The group had been on hiatus for the past 15 years, but in the wake of the creation of Law for Black Lives, which had stepped in to fill the void left by its predecessor, it is staging a comeback within the younger, more alacritous movements for Black lives.)

Law for Black Lives itself is an offshoot of the Black Lives Matter movement. “When that movement emerged, the intelligence unit of the FBI and local law enforcement began targeting them identical to COINTELPRO,” Hinds claims. “They were trying to find out who these people were, who came up with this slogan and this organization. What is their background? Who they’re linked with, etc.” The aim of the FBI, Hinds alleges, is to undermine the core mission and purpose of groups like Law for Black Lives.

“There will be demonstrations out there and demonstrators are going to be arrested,” Hinds offers. “They’re going to need bail, they’re going to need people to represent them in court, because when people demonstrate, try to exercise their First Amendment rights, they end up being criminalized. Police beat them up and charge them with assault. So, you will need this new generation of radical lawyers to defend them.”

Seething with outrage fueled by unprecedented public mourning over George Floyd’s gruesome murder, Hawk Newsome’s BLMers had signaled a more hard-line stance against a heap of MAGATS (Make America Great Again Trump Sycophants) who had descended on a still-
COVID-ravaged New York City that Sunday before the presidential elections.

The threat alone of direct action would not have sufficed to rout the MAGATS back to their malodorous swamp: Because, as Newsome puts it, “If you don’t meet these white supremacists head on they grow in power.” Etched in Newsome’s psyche is the “Unite the Right” rally stomping, with murderous consequences, through Charlottesville, Virginia. A prevaricating President Donald Trump had given free rein to what the journactivist and professor Jason Johnson calls “the Ku Klux and its Klan.” With Trump’s tacit agreement, the KKK openly recruited diehard nativists to embolden its resurgence under the MAGA leader’s watch.

“So, we’re not having it, right?” recalls Newsome that recent afternoon in the Bronx, as the Voice jogged his memory about the day the MAGATS came to town, and how it was he, not they, who got thrown in jail. “We got down there [only to realize] it was the police turning on us, trying to stop us from walking down certain streets, trying to disband what we were putting together instead of focusing on these Trump supporters.”

Inside the precinct, Newsome was isolated from the rest of the detainees in a cell down the hall. So, hearing his name being bandied about the joint unnerved the paranoid brother. It had echoed from what turned out to be the jolting megaphone voice of a white detective. Newsome instantly disliked the man’s persona. This wasn’t your typical “po-po”: In Newsome’s mind, the guy was a ranking Five-O, a sinister face of NYPD intelligence.

“Hawk Newsome!” The prisoner’s name rang out once more, with that type of I’m-coming-for-you resonance one would expect from criminal-underworld woofin’. “He seemed like a very arrogant white man who didn’t give a damn about me,” Newsome recalls thinking at the time. After the cop confirmed Newsome’s suspicion that he was indeed from NYPD intelligence, Newsome lashed out. “Don’t you have any white supremacists to investigate? Because according to the FBI, they’re the biggest terrorist threat in the country.”

The cop seemed nonplussed by the question, the way Newsome tells it, treating it more like a flippant joke. “Well, I was out, hanging out in Long Island with my son, and they called me and told me I had to investigate you,” the cop reportedly retorted. “So, I need to know what’s going on with you and Black Lives Matter.” Newsome was so energized by the banter that he was oblivious to the hushed silence at the time: Everyone, it seemed, was eavesdropping. But that lull gave him time to reload on the fly a rapid fire of full-throated zingers for the man he now calls “a racist white boy.” (Newsome wanted to make clear why he had used the belittling pejorative so candidly, in his talk with the Voice.)

“I was like, ‘Don’t you understand why we out here fighting? Don’t you know what this is about?’ And he looked me square in my eye and said, ‘To me, all lives matter.’ Now, this is not something that average white people say. This is something that racist white people say. This is something that Republicans say…. When somebody looks you in your face and says, ‘All lives matter,’ that means they’re against you and everything you stand for. And what’s crazy is … what’s concerning is, this is the NYPD counterterrorism unit. This is a small department with a lot of power that they use not for terrorists, but for protesters. So it’s amazing how they classify us who are fighting for civil rights. They classify us as terrorists.”

Next, the investigator teasingly broached the topic of comedian and rapper Nick Cannon’s close ties with Newsome’s chapter of Black Lives Matter. Cannon has been one of the group’s most gracious benefactors, promoting and funding its causes and direct-action protests throughout the country. “So, you and Nick Cannon are building your own police force, and you want to replace all white cops?” asked the officer, gnawing at the raw red meat MAGATS relish. It was a mocking reference to published remarks Newsome says were taken out of context. “No!” he told his inquisitor. “Actually, what I said was, ‘We’re  going to defend our communities at all costs.’ That’s what I said.”

Now, it’s “the white boy” playing the race card: “You and Nick Cannon, you’re going to kick all the white police out of your communities?”

“Did you read the article?” Newsome asked him, growing resentful of the bad Abbott and Costello routine that seemed to be drowning out matters of real life and death. “Did you actually read the article and listen to the interview, so you can know exactly what we’re doing? And he said, ‘No, I don’t get into all of that.’ He didn’t do his research and he didn’t care. Either that or he was just trying to get me excited to get [an actionable] response out of me.”

Then Newsome “flipped it back on him”—that false concern the cop had expressed over the exclusion of whites and white cops in particular from the possibly all-new, totally Black-run neighborhoods: “You should be more worried about white supremacists than about us because they’re the ones responsible for the most bloodshed in this country, for centuries of bloodshed in this country.” So, no, he’s not building racist outposts, Newsome emphasized to the cop. What he wants is that DMX moment of temporary sanity before he totally loses his mind “up in here.” What he wants, to put it explicitly, is to “get the fuck outta here!”

Not giving up, Newsome continued to lay out to his interrogator what he believes is the NYPD’s hidden motive behind its stepped-up campaign of illegal surveillance of the Black Lives Matter movement. “So, this is what y’all do, right? This is what NYPD counterterrorism does. They follow people around who are fighting for rights for Black people — people who feed our communities, people who open schools in their communities. You’re fighting against us who are really doing good. Y’all are fucking jokes.”

After that, the cop who’d reluctantly taken on the impossible assignment of flipping Hawk Newsome left without so much as a goodbye. “In all honesty, I got the sense that he had the feeling I wasn’t going to say anything to him, but he had to come and see me as a formality. You know what I mean?”

This whole experience of agitating against police brutality while having to watch one’s back from all fronts has given Newsome a  thicker skin, which he says doubles as psychological armor for this paranoia triggered by injustice. “We are the only group that I know of who didn’t grow during George Floyd,” he says. “We didn’t want any new members. We actually cut. We lost members. We were very paranoid…. Our [leadership] circle is very, very, very small — just in case they trying to infiltrate.”   ❖

The post We Are Not Your Terrorists appeared first on The Village Voice.

In the image he’s burnished for 20 years, he is covered in that sickly grey-white dust, the fitted Yankees cap pulled tight over his pate, walking purposefully up West Street, a cloud of collapsing tower behind him. While George W. Bush was flown in circles seeking safety — offline and unreachable by the press for several hours after the attacks — Rudy was on the scene, as he’d been at so many fires, water-main breaks, snowstorms, and parades. Twenty years later, he’s still struggling through that cloud of death, perhaps more consumed by it now than then. On 9/11, even critics of Rudy’s mean-spirited mayoralty ceded that he was Churchillian, offering surety to a shaken city. But so many “What happened to Rudy?” stories have been written by now that we’re panning already-sifted fool’s gold, the last bits of the reputation of a man who long ago became so much smaller than himself. These pieces all feel like eulogies for Rudy. But Rudy didn’t die. A different New York did.

Whatever relevance he held into the Trump years was the flickering half-life of prestige earned on September 11. That itself was a reinvention. On September 10, 2001, Rudy Giuliani was a lame-duck mayor who’d scuttled a U.S. Senate run the year before as his marriage and health imploded. His political career was at an end. He had dismal approval ratings among New Yorkers, who had long since soured on his peevishness, brownshirt disregard for civil liberties, and compulsion to throw oil on the fires of racial discord. As Rudy, in his first term and emboldened by the “Gingrich revolution” of 1994, rolled out one cruel and dehumanizing policy after another, these pages and the lips of many an outraged New Yorker cried fascism. Little did we know. On September 10, New Yorkers were ready for Rudy to exit stage right.

Then the planes hit.

We have a Churchillian image of Rudy in the crisis because he wanted to make sure we did. As Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins reported in Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, Rudy was downtown on 9/11 because he was walking to his bunker, one of the most stupidly placed emergency command centers ever built. The prime requirement for this risible shelter was that it be within walking distance of City Hall. A more logical location would have been MetroTech, in downtown Brooklyn, where the fire department and 9-1-1 system already had a state-of-the-art facility. Rudy’s $61 million bunker in the sky was 23 stories up, occupying a full floor of the overpriced building at 7 World Trade Center, part of a complex that everyone except Rudy Giuliani understood was a bull’s-eye for terrorists. In 1993, the North Tower had been the target of a gargantuan truck bomb, engendering a flurry of reports on the urgency of improving communication and cooperation between the police and fire departments and between 9-1-1 dispatch operators and first responders in the field; on the need to bring the Port Authority-controlled World Trade Center into compliance with NYC fire safety and egress building codes; and on the necessity of overhauling the FDNY’s protocol for fighting mega-high-rise fires. None of these issues were resolved in the eight years of Rudy’s mayoralty. 

All of them proved fatal on 9/11.

Damaged by debris from the first plane, the emergency command bunker was impossible to enter, and the mayor scurried from one makeshift location to another seeking somewhere to set up a crisis center. 9/11 wasn’t Rudy Giuliani’s finest hour. It was the first day of the rest of his self-aggrandizing life.

Within weeks, he’d be grasping for a third term and railing against Juan Gonzalez for writing muckraking Daily News columns exposing the lies his administration and the EPA were spreading about the air quality in Lower Manhattan. And he refused to enforce basic safety procedures during the clean-up of the mountain of toxic debris from the fallen towers — even as fires burned into December — in favor of advertising the city as open for business. That decision continues to extract its toll among those who spent time near Ground Zero. He congratulated Motorola for its great work, even though the company had sold the FDNY defective and inoperable radios in a sweetheart deal. 

There were acts of breathtaking bravery, heroism, and generosity on 9/11. They deserve all of the veneration they’ve received. But hundreds of people might have been spared had the years of warnings that emerged after the 1993 bombing — from the NYPD chief of department to the FDNY assistant commissioner of communications to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force — been heeded. On his way out the door, Rudy lined up million-dollar consulting contracts for Giuliani Partners, a flim-flam job cashing in on his leadership that day, when every warning given since he took office was ignored. By the time he threw in his lot with his old collaborator Donald Trump on Trump’s presidential run, Rudy had become, as Wayne Barrett called him in these pages, a “used 9/11 memorabilia salesman.”

Rudy has now spent more years portraying that dust-caked 9/11 leader than he spent as a corruption-busting federal prosecutor turned two-term mayor. Now he’s a guy who recycles John Birch Society garbage in a pretend office, talking into a little box to the willfully ignorant.

Maybe 9/11 is when the country went berserk. Psychologists say victims of trauma either integrate the injury and recover or, failing that, become deformed by it. Rudy followed what was least in himself. And we accepted a war in Iraq built on lies, a regime of torture, permanent extrajudicial detention, a catastrophic erosion of media spine, and corporate surveillance masked by social media’s mass distraction. There are the 9/11 diseases of the lungs and there is the hurt that festered into fascism or simple nihilism. The hard hats and uniformed services that reported to the smoldering pile, stoic and sacred, sifting rubble for human remains — a lot of them voted for Trump, twice. 

We rebuilt. But we rebuilt a SimCity of empty glass towers, pieds-à-terre for people from nowhere, vastly more stratified than the city that struggled together on September 12. The undocumented immigrants who decontaminated the offices below Houston Street as unprotected subcontractors are hunted now by COVID and living off delivery apps, if they survived Obama’s and Trump’s deportation machines. Nineteen years after 9/11, the pandemic ripped through a city less connected, more transient, with fewer hospital beds, and more people living in extreme crowding because the cost of housing bears no relationship to the wages of most inhabitants. 

After 9/11, we are less committed to reason, more willing to believe utter rot if it will comfort us or bolster our next 15-second battle. The 9/11 Truthers were an early warning of this alienation-driven appetite for nonsense, from QAnon to health quackery. Rudy spent 20 years exploiting proximity to a disaster when his actual leadership was a failure, a harbinger of the image-over-substance society we live in now.   ❖

The post 9/11: The Fall of ‘America’s Mayor’ appeared first on The Village Voice.

For all the pomp politicians have long put into memorializing 9/11, guaranteeing healthcare for survivors never topped their priorities list. It wasn’t until 2010 that Congress passed the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named for the first responder whose death spurred strong suspicions of a link between chronic illnesses among survivors to toxins that had contaminated Ground Zero. The act set up a federal health monitoring and treatment program for 9/11 first responders and community survivors, including residents, workers, and students affected by the disaster. Five years later, Congress passed legislation to ensure the program’s longevity and reauthorize the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.

In the first 50 pages of Nordstrom’s memoir, we experience the catastrophe through her 17-year-old self, a chilling glimpse of the chaos on the ground in the wake of the Twin Towers’ collapse. The debris from the collapsed skyscrapers coated several blocks of the city in a hazardous haze (one of the Village Voice’s own reports noted that the smell and the smoke from Ground Zero were detectable for weeks in the outer boroughs, often mistaken for local fires). She and some other students made it out of Manhattan that day guided by a young phys ed teacher. One of Nordstrom’s classmates generously opened her Queens home — Nordstrom had refused to return to her own family in Chelsea, as nowhere on the isle of Manhattan felt safe to the traumatized teen. That need to escape finally drove the native New Yorker from the city, and she eventually built a life in California. But she was kept tethered to NYC, and by extension, to the one day she’d rather forget, by suspicious health issues that arose among her former classmates. (Nordstrom’s asthma had also worsened after 9/11.)

Myriad health reports later connected the illnesses experienced by many first responders to toxins that contaminated Ground Zero. Lesser understood was that nonresponders in the area, such as students, were also vulnerable to developing 9/11-related illnesses, ranging from chronic acid reflux to various cancers. By 2007, Nordstrom and her classmates had become part of 9/11’s survivor cohort, which grew as health experts uncovered the true extent of the tragedy’s impact. Nordstrom struggled to secure healthcare as part of a pre-Affordable Care Act generation that survived one of the worst tragedies in U.S. history —  halving her dosage to stretch out medication, flying cross-country to access the free program for survivors — and her narrative takes us through the pitfalls of advocating for a student community largely left out of the 9/11 conversation.

Nordstrom’s story is one of struggle, but it’s also rife with politics, which in America touches everything, including healthcare. While 9/11 was draped in political theater, many survivors were left without support to deal with their ruptured lives. (Nordstrom herself sought therapy 15 years after.) Not just then but now, in the COVID-19 era, politics triumph as warring ideologies fight over masks and vaccinations and lockdowns and reopenings, placing party loyalties and economics squarely above public health concerns.

Some Stuyvesant students rebelled against the politicization of their victimhood (reciting the pledge of allegiance or not became an interesting proxy for the divided student body), but as kids, they were mostly powerless against the political tide. Stuyvesant was among the first to bring their students back into downtown, just a month after 9/11 — there were six schools within walking distance of the WTC, with roughly 23,000 students in total — as school and government officials rushed to normalcy despite evidence of health risks brought up by the Parents’ Association (which hired its own environmental investigator, who found the school contaminated with 9/11-induced toxins). As Nordstrom can attest, that negligence proved disastrous.

The Village Voice was the first publication to cover advocacy efforts by affected Stuyvesant alumni, in a 2006 article, the headline of which inspired the memoir’s title. The Voice’s 9/11 reporting is heavily cited in the book, but Nordstrom ultimately laments that she was disappointed with the paper because it didn’t follow through with more coverage on the Stuyvesant students’ struggle. In her eyes, the story wasn’t deemed “sensational” enough by the paper for a follow-up, the sole trait she believes makes a topic newsworthy to the press. As Nordstrom puts it, that experience was her first lesson on the media, and spawned her negative views about the press as a whole, a perception frequently held by the politically active—from leftists to Trumpers—who feel that their cause is not advanced by mainstream media.

Stuyvesant’s push to reopen as quickly as possible while risking students’ health mirrors New York City’s tangled attempts today to return to normal amid this seesawing pandemic, including debates over school safety protocols in the face of COVID health risks to teachers and children, and rising rates of infection and hospitalization. As the delta variant triggers another surge—largely among the unvaccinated, which includes all children under the age of 12—debates around the pandemic neglect to consider the long-term risks of contracting COVID-19, designated as “long COVID” by health officials. The condition refers to health effects that can linger well after a person recovers from the virus, including brain fog, shortness of breath, and even internal organ damage. In severe cases, long COVID is considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Research on the true scope of long COVID is preliminary so far. The good news is that further studies are expected, after $1.15 billion in funding was approved by Congress late last year. Still, it will likely be years before we fully grasp the health struggles of today’s COVID long haulers, reminiscent of how it was for student survivors suffering from not yet understood health effects in the years after 9/11. Will long haulers, too, have to scrap for healthcare over illnesses brought on by an event outside their control? Some COVID survivor groups have already lobbied for supportive legislation on Capitol Hill, just as 9/11 survivors fought for help. In that light, Nordstrom’s story of politics over public health and the continuing fight for affordable healthcare is uncomfortably relevant today. Some things never change, as the country is divided and people, inevitably, get left behind.    ❖

The post 9/11: Fighting Not To Be Forgotten appeared first on The Village Voice.

For the first time — the first of a perpetual time — there are young men and women alive who have no memory of September 11. Every generation has a lament like this one — the first not to remember the end of the Great War, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassinations. Slowly, like glaciers breaking off into a warming sea, the memory-havers depart and those who are left behind must consult books and search engines to build a collective reality of what was. For anyone cradling such a memory, there must be a tingle of exceptionalism: I was there and you weren’t, and you can only know so much.

Yes and no, yes and no. The aging millennials who came of age in New York City, my own cohort, do carry certain realizations from that day that can’t be explained to someone who wasn’t there. On September 11, 2001, I was 11 going on 12, a Brooklyn kid living in a neighborhood of cops and firefighters. Bay Ridge is a 12-minute-or-so drive to Lower Manhattan if traffic vanishes—you have to wait until late at night for that to happen—or a one-seat ride to Ground Zero, if you want to endure the creaking R train. There are Bay Ridge side streets named for the dead; a number of them died on that one day.

The attack was, for me and many others, the shattering of a childhood. If the 1990s, to older Americans, feels in retrospect like a kind of extended revelry, the dot-com bubble taking us to the End of History, that decade was equally halcyon for middle-class kids like me. This is one reason, I think, that the ’90s remain so fetishized today, what the ’50s were from the vantage point of the anxious ’70s. The 1990s knew nothing of 9/11, and would’ve treated the concept as fodder for a summertime blockbuster. The Independence Day aliens never blew up the Twin Towers, but they easily could have. 

Like the more than one million other New York City kids on a Tuesday in early September, I headed off to school, just a short bus ride away from the apartment where I grew up. My parents went to work, and unlike a decent chunk of the neighborhood, they were not Irish- or Italian-Catholic cops and firefighters. They were Jewish employees of the federal government. My mother, then as now, worked at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, across the street from the courthouse where Law & Order films and just a brief, wending walk to the World Trade Center. My father, now retired, worked out of Six World Trade Center, a squat eight-story building in the shadow of the behemoths. Sometimes he would take me rocketing up the elevator to the famous observation deck of the WTC, never venturing toward the edge. When my mother turned 50, we celebrated, like many New York families, at Windows on the World. 

On that Tuesday, my father had a breakfast meeting scheduled at the restaurant with a man named Neil Levin, the executive director of the Port Authority. They knew each other well, and were going to discuss a job opportunity for my father. The meeting, overlooking the vast city, was something of a formality.

The World Trade Center, it must be remembered, had a daily population of 130,000 people: the tenants, the businesspeople, the tourists. It was a city unto itself, like a science fiction dream made real just in time for the fiscal calamity of the ’70s. One-hundred-and-ninety-two-thousand tons of structural steel, 3,000 miles of electrical wiring, 43,600 windows, 4,000 doors, 198 elevators, and 50,000 telephones. It was an accumulation of sums, a testament to the extreme reaches of engineering.

In 1976, the Port Authority agreed to allow a limited number of diners into Windows’ exclusive luncheon club on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower. Up to 120 nonmembers were admitted to any of the club’s dining or bar areas, with a surcharge of $10 for the host and $3 for each of the host’s guests. The Liquor Authority had originally denied the permit, because the Port Authority wanted to make Windows on the World a private club at lunchtime and a public restaurant for dinner. But state law, according to the Liquor Authority, required that any establishment with a restaurant license must always admit the public. And so the doors were opened.

Port Authority leadership battled with Twin Towers architect Minoru Yamasaki over the fact that the restaurant’s vertical windows were extremely narrow, and convinced Yamasaki to widen them by a half-foot each before Windows on the World opened. But the architect insisted on symmetry, so the corresponding windows on the South Tower also had to be widened, where there was no restaurant, only offices. The idea behind including an elite luncheon spot had been to sell prospective office tenants on the two monoliths that now occupied New York City, dramatically and permanently blotting out the skyline. A multinational corporation would rent a floor, perhaps, with the promise of access to a multi-floor restaurant and catering hall — the power breakfasts, lunches, and dinners always on tap. And those not bound so directly to capitalism’s onward slog would spring for a night so high in the air, cocktails making their heads light, the ocean of dark sky pressed against the tall, thick glass. Yet during the long years of construction, my parents, particularly my father, remembered the endless array of cranes and scaffolding and deep digs and minor explosions, and a steel skeleton surging into the clouds. The Twin Towers, at the time, were a great intrusion.

But the people eventually came. By the time my mother booked her 50th-birthday party, Windows on the World was the world’s highest-grossing restaurant, bringing in nearly $40 million a year. By most metrics, it was a wild success. Over the decades, there were restaurant critics who disparaged the food and drink, who pronounced its offerings passé, who vowed never to dine there again and urged others to do the same. Like the New York Yankees, Windows on the World had become a city institution with the heft and power to be regularly resented by those who believed they knew better. But the experience could not be argued with — there was majesty in being on top of the world.

As a child, I never hated the Twin Towers, because I only knew a city with them. The vanished Radio Row, felled by eminent domain to make room for the complex, meant nothing to me. I drew pictures of skyscrapers, always starting with the biggest.

In the seventh grade, I took an introductory Latin class. It met in the early morning. We were gathered, ready to begin, when the news began to float through the hallways. This was before cellphones were ubiquitous — I didn’t own one, and smartphones certainly didn’t exist — so it must have been passed in the older, mythic way. A person heard it on the radio, somewhere, and told someone else. None of us were alarmed. A plane hit the World Trade Center. Okay, a Cessna? We were curious and confused. Someone must have taken a wrong turn. Soon, we were summoned to the auditorium. 

The head of the middle school, a bull-shaped man in glasses, misspoke. A plane hit the Eiffel Tower, I mean Twin Towers. The news, as it does, cycled through the large room, a theater for the stage productions I would never act in. Two planes had struck, one at each building.

Bursting through the doors not long afterward was my mother. “Happy birthday, Ross,” a classmate said to me, and I recall being blank-faced. I am almost certain my mother was the first parent to arrive at the school. She was one of the last New Yorkers over the Brooklyn Bridge, in an automobile, before it was shut down.

Unlike me, my mother had seen it. When the first plane hit, she was down in the lobby of her building, talking with coworkers. She went outside, gathering with onlookers further downtown, around Church Street, watching the first tower burn. There was a sliver of time when it all seemed like an awful accident and prayers would have to be murmured for a wayward pilot and a few unlucky office workers.

When the plane crashed into the second tower, she sprinted for her car. She was certain we were at war.

What I remember next is my mother’s bedroom, sitting and watching the television. I watched the towers smolder and collapse. It was then that I began to cry, the horror like nothing I have known since. The pandemic has killed far more people in New York alone, and upended everyday life in a more radical way, but there was no single shock event, no spectacle for it all to cohere around. No day to end one version of history and begin another. Outside, I saw the streak of black smoke across the sky, trailing over Bay Ridge and beyond. There is a biking and walking promenade on the water, and we went there, my mother and I, silently watching the cloud of smoke and fire gain strength. It would stay there, this roiling gap in the city, a cloud hanging for months. That afternoon I was supposed to be excitedly looking forward to the new season of Dragon Ball Z.

“Is Dad okay?” I must have asked. He was. He was not at work. He was not where he was supposed to be. At the last minute — and at the urging of my mother — he had scrapped his meeting with Levin to get a colonoscopy, after his doctor moved his appointment to Tuesday morning. My father didn’t want to disappoint Levin, but my mother insisted he get the colonoscopy because he’d have to wait another month for a new appointment. Levin didn’t mind. Could my father meet him on Thursday instead?

At 8:46 a.m., while my father was at St. Vincent’s Hospital, the first hijacked airplane struck the North Tower. Levin’s obituary states that he died there, though his exact location in the tower at the time of his death was never determined.

I was old enough to understand that the world had changed forever, but young enough not to know the particulars. There was a mayoral primary that was postponed, a little-known Republican billionaire vying to face off against whomever the Democrat would be — the Democrat, most people presumed, would win. The rest of the story is well-worn. Rudy Giuliani, against all evidence and odds, became “America’s Mayor” and endorsed Michael Bloomberg, whose billions buried the liberal Democrat, Mark Green. Months later, we would be in Afghanistan, and in 2003, Iraq.

That day, like so many kids, I began to hurtle away from childhood. The Saturday morning cartoon years had lifted. There was a crackle in the air. Terrorists were coming here, or were here, and we were warned of the imminent explosions, warfare in the streets. None of it arrived, though the fear stuck with you.

My father’s office was obliterated. Gone were his tchotchkes, his plaques, and a photograph with Richard Nixon. None of that, of course, mattered. He could come home to us.   ❖

The post 9/11: A Childhood Fractured By History appeared first on The Village Voice.

At first, Don said, “I know. We have the TV on. We’ll do something next week.” It was a Tuesday, and that week’s issue was already at the printing press; it would be loaded onto trucks for distribution in a matter of hours.

Then I added, “I have the name and number of a guy with a digital camera who took pictures.” He lived in the neighborhood and had been standing in that scrum on the corner; I had instinctively pulled a reporter’s pad out of my bag and asked for his contact info. We were still half a dozen years away from the first iPhone. There was no such thing as social media. Don told me to hurry to the office.

Dazed, shaken, guided only by the purpose Don had bestowed on me, I joined the throng trudging up Centre Street, interviewing along the way some World Trade Center secretaries who hadn’t quite made it in to work before the first plane hit. When I arrived at the Voice, at Cooper Square, Don insisted on pouring me a scotch — I looked ghostly, he said — then set me up at a terminal outside his office and instructed me to write what I saw and heard and felt. He tore out the page from my notebook with the number of the guy with the camera and left me alone. Maybe an hour later, he peered over my shoulder and picked up the phone on the desk where I was working, to call the plant. “Stop the presses,” he told them.

 When the Voice hit newsstands, its cover bore a photo of one tower spewing fire and debris, the other, a cloud of gray ash. (And a headline — “The Bastards!” — that I hated. “Don’t even try arguing,” Don said, cutting off my objection. “I’m not changing it.”) My fevered account ran on the first inside page. In the meantime, my partner and I stood in line outside (the now departed) St. Vincent’s Hospital with dozens of others hoping to give blood. None was needed; there were few survivors.

For a time, the city changed — or more accurately, its best qualities surged to the fore. New Yorkers became solicitous in that way Rebecca Solnit writes about in A Paradise Built in Hell, when, in the face of disaster, people recognize their common plight and caring purpose. Strangers on the subway asked after each other’s well-being. Folks hailing cabs at the same time insisted that the others go first. Even Mayor Rudy Giuliani — locally reviled for his racist tough-on-crime campaign, efforts to ban protests and censor art, deployment of cops in schools, and gung-ho defense of police brutality (he had an approval rating of only 37 percent in April 2000) — gave voice to our shock and stoked our resilience. He was lauded as “America’s Mayor,” and as ludicrous as we knew that designation to be, we could take some comfort in his saying the right things. In the two decades since, what Giuliani has become stands as a perfect — and loathsome — emblem of our current national state, as our democracy faces an even graver threat than we confronted on that terribly beautiful September day in 2001. Calm and resolute as he strode north from the collapsing towers, coated in soot, then; sarcastic and whiny as he spouted conspiracy theories about election fraud in the parking lot of Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping on another blazingly bright day last year.

To the late great Voice muckraker Wayne Barrett, those two scenes would not have appeared so far apart. His reporting on the mayor — and on the real estate mogul — includes a 1993 exposé showing how, in 1989, Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney, quashed a probe into the dodgy financing of Trump Tower, soon after which Trump co-chaired a fundraiser for Giuliani’s first (failed) mayoral campaign. And in the book Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, Barrett and co-author Dan Collins undo the myth of the 9/11 hero, chronicling ways that the mayor blundered in establishing security measures for the city — or ignored them altogether.

Meanwhile, many of us covered the developing War on Terror, whose excesses — whose very essence — abroad and at home also ended up helping to lay the path to our perilous circumstances today (as Spencer Ackerman argues in his new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump). With unsuppressed alarm, we reported on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security; inflamed anti-immigrant animus and an exploding detention industry; the assault on civil liberties through expansive surveillance and arrest powers granted by laws like the USA Patriot Act (which passed speedily and almost unanimously); a hounding of Muslim and Arab New Yorkers (or those presumed to be Muslim or Arab) so severe that hordes fled the city to request asylum in Canada; a ramped-up rhetoric of jingoism that among other things led to harassment of academics, artists, writers, and others who raised questions about this disorder. The president’s spokesperson warned that Americans should “watch what they say” and the attorney general huffed that anyone expressing concern about the Bill of Rights was engaging in “tactics [that] only aid terrorists.” We followed, too, the militarization of the police, racial profiling as national policy, government monitoring of political and religious gatherings, “preventive detention,” secret trials, the brazen use of torture. And, of course, the military invasion of Afghanistan, with its benighted rashness, and Iraq, based on bogus intelligence. All in the name of “national security.”

But what did security mean? And who got to have it? The measures claiming to “preserve our freedoms” were curtailing them for untold numbers of people at home, while the civilian casualties abroad were fomenting fury and producing new enemies. Much of the U.S. tolerated such measures and even cheered them on — after all, they mostly didn’t affect white people. It was easy enough to sacrifice someone else’s rights and liberties.

This is an old story in the United States. You can find plenty of precedents in America’s history for the nativism, polarization, suppression of dissent, Islamophobia, xenophobia, warmongering, and violent white supremacy that heaved up as the towers fell. The post-9/11 reaction didn’t by itself produce Trumpism. The demise of the Fairness Doctrine, along with other Reagan-era deregulation, and, more recently, the lifting of restrictions on campaign spending the Supreme Court handed to corporations in Citizens United, and the Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, to cite only a few major blows to democratic progress, also deserve a share of the blame. But, as Ackerman suggests, Trump “recognized that the 9/11  era’s grotesque subtext — the perception of nonwhites as marauders, even as conquerors, from hostile foreign civilizations — was its engine,” and he stepped on the gas. He cast himself as savior from the humiliations of the “forever wars,” and made politics tribal.

The Trumpian tribe, as the Republicans have become, puts its faith in one unshakable idea, the same tenet that the War on Terror required: American innocence. The conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni attacked universities as the “weak link” in America’s response to 9/11, and in a report naming more than 40 professors who had made “anti-American” statements, condemned as seditious sentiments such as, “We need to understand the reasons behind the terrifying hatred directed against the U.S. and find ways to act that will not foment more hatred for generations to come.” It’s the same principle that has incited hysteria over a twisted idea of “critical race theory” — the U.S. need never examine its own injurious actions or goals, for it can never do any wrong.

Otherwise, the party has no political program or policy agenda. Its primary objective is to own the libs. Even if that means aggressive voter suppression and gerrymandering. Even at the expense of thousands of lives lost to the pandemic. Even at the cost of dire environmental calamity. The demolition of voting rights, the mutating coronavirus, and accelerating climate change are the urgent threats to American security today — those and one more: an armed base gunning for a fight that has bought into the falsehood that Biden illegitimately usurped the presidency. On January 6, they came much closer to destroying the seat of government than Flight 93 on 9/11, which had been aiming for the Capitol and crashed when passengers rushed the cockpit.

I will avoid the 9/11 commemorative hoopla this year. I have never been able to stand listening to the hyperventilating descriptions on the radio or watching the endless loops of disaster footage on TV on any anniversary. I will honor the day by lighting a candle for a friend lost in the rubble, the sweet-natured firefighter Pat Brown. And I will know that it is the homegrown terrorists who hate the rest of us for our freedom.    ❖

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