“To be a poor man is
hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of
hardships.” W.E.B. Du Bois
The blank page. The wide world. Everything to write about, and
yet nothing to write about, a total failure of imagination and daring. The
voice inside my head is accusing and indignant.
California is in the grip of a serious drought. The Winter
Olympics are underway in Sochi, Russia; ice dancing, speed skating, downhill
skiing, hockey, and all the rest of the typical events. The mainstream media
reports that all is not well in Sochi. Aside from the military-style occupation
for “security” purposes, there are more practical problems like clean tap water,
hotel rooms with missing doorknobs, and, fright of all frights, gay people
mingling with straight people! This mingling happens on the down low, of
course, as public displays are criminalized in Putin’s prudish, homophobic
Russia. At least there is snow in the mountains. Seeing a quick glimpse of
NBC’s host, Bob Costas, I wonder what happened to his face. Botox treatments
are not always successful.
Speaking of Botox, there has been plenty of it on display at
the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Botox queens and mavens pour
into our city from Los Angeles and the hills of Montecito, their faces frozen
in permanent smiles or frowns or grimaces – trophy wives of trophy husbands.
State Street, our main tourist artery, is full of film industry-types,
hipsters, poseurs, and fans. Our restaurants and bars do brisk business this
time of year, and rooms in local hotels and B&B’s are very costly and hard
to secure. The American Riviera is on display, big stars walk the red carpet
beneath bright klieg lights, targets for hundreds of photographers, and fans
turn out to catch a glimpse of Leo, Marty, Bruce Dern or Bob Redford. This is
good, though, a celebration of art and culture, of our shared humanity and
conundrums. Good films show us things we may otherwise not want to confront.
We need rain, like a Biblical deluge of forty days and
nights, to replenish Lake Cachuma and the Gibraltar reservoir, and turn the
rolling hills from tawny to green again. But the sky won’t rain today, the sun
is out and the temperature is warm. Back to the rain dance or the silent
prayer. I will remind my children to keep their showers brief. What is not held
dear is often wasted or neglected. Kids, don’t take clean running water for granted;
don’t take or use more than you need, think of others. This advice is sure to
fall on deaf ears.
I have all manner of thoughts in my head, slippery as eels,
never still, always darting this way and that. It is black history month, so I
think of Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Cornel West,
of the book I’m reading by Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow; the name
Oscar Grant flits across my consciousness. America never has been, and may
never be, a colorblind society. Though it is less blatant, racism is still with
us, the constant current running through our society; we criminalize black drug
addicts, rehabilitate white drug dealers. Racism is more subtle, coded, but no
less prevalent.
It was also nine years ago this month that Hunter S.
Thompson ended his eventful life with a bullet to the brain. Thompson spared
himself the frustration of the Obama years. I suspect Thompson would have been
hopeful, as many were when Obama was elected, that change was coming after the
dreadful reign of Cheney-Bush. Hope lasted until Obama surrounded himself with
Clintonites, dug in deeper in Afghanistan, and unleashed drone warfare on a
level never reached by Dick and W. Watching Obama bend over for the GOP time
and time again would have been enough to make Thompson reach for his pistol.
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