Walking in the Darwinian Present

I take a walk from our place on Milpas to State Street to buy some bows so my wife can finish up the Christmas wrapping. Evening is coming and the mountains wear a rosy shawl and the sky is a lovely dark blue. I am wearing a t-shirt and shorts. The day has been warm, nearly 80 degrees – so much for winter and a white Christmas. In front of the museum of art a phalanx of homeless people are camped on stone benches; one guy strums a guitar. Across the street in front of Old Navy a woman has commandeered a wooden bench and piled it with her belongings and covered herself with blankets. Shoppers avert their eyes from her as they pass.

Earlier in the day I read a report that the Dow Jones topped 18,000 for the first time in history. Investors were said to be giddy, and the business media, as always, conflated the rise of the stock market with the health of the American economy, a false claim, but who’s checking? For ordinary people who work for wages, the economy hasn’t recovered from where it was in 2008, but we don’t talk much about this now, just like we don’t talk about the threat of climate change or the Ebola outbreak. Our media machine is brilliant at selecting what to report and what to leave out, what to tell us, what to keep from us; the machine frames every story within acceptable dimensions: the US only deploys military force in righteous causes; the free market economy equals personal freedom; capitalism is essential to democracy – myths and lies to whitewash the brutality of our Darwinian present. Damn fine time to be a robber baron in this age of inequality, where wholesale larceny goes unpunished.

I go into CVS, find a box of bows, and get in the checkout line behind a woman wearing saggy sweatpants and funky shoes; her ankles are swollen. The carpet is soiled and stained. The female checker is chubby and looks bored. Back out on the sidewalk a kid tries to slip a card in my hand advertising a Christmas concert sponsored by a church. I pass. The woman on the bench has been joined by another woman and a man in a wheelchair, and she is telling them about something that cost $500 a night, but the man is arguing that she has it wrong, that it is $500 a month not a night. The woman holds her ground. “Martin,” she says, “you don’t know what you’re talking about.” The new woman is barefoot and her feet are grimy.

Despair in a happy time, want and plenty side by side, light and shadow, storefronts aglow, voices from the restaurant on the corner; a homeless troubadour naps on a bed of white stone. Is this the life he chose to live, or did forces beyond his control overwhelm him? What mistakes or missteps led him here? His guitar case is scuffed and dented. I walk on, turn east on Anapamu, and head home in the deepening twilight.

Boulevard of Discarded Dreams

I met Duke downtown at the Sprocket, an independent coffee house owned by a couple of ex-professional cyclists. The Sprocket is a good antidote to the corporate java served by Starbucks.

I hadn’t seen Duke in more than a year. As usual, he had been out of the country, traveling with a series of female companions young enough to be his granddaughter. For a man who enjoyed fine wine, expensive Scotch, weed, and an occasional cigar, he looked ageless, as if he had every intention of living forever.

“So, what’s the haps, dude?” he asked. “What’s new in the maw of public education? Are the young ones learning anything?” Before I had a chance to respond he said, “Public education in California was doomed the day Prop 13 passed. This state used to have real vision, the best university system in the world, and political figures with courage and guts. All politicians care about now is power and graft – and landing cozy, high-paying sinecures when they leave office. The entire fucking system is rotted from within. What’s your son doing with himself?”

“Taking a gap year, working, trying to save money; he’s living with his grandparents. Given the way he feels about his mother and I, it’s better that way.”

Duke sipped his latte and nodded sagely. He had no kids of his own – at least none that he claimed.

“He’ll come around, in time, they always do. He’ll figure out that he’s not as smart, clever or self-sufficient as he thinks he is, and he’ll come to the realization that mom and dad aren’t imbeciles after all. You’ll see. You just have to outlast the kid, that’s all.”

“Easier said than done. I haven’t seen him in six weeks. He doesn’t call, text, e-mail. His mother is heartbroken. She loves that boy.”

“A mother’s love is a powerful thing.”

“What was your mother like, doc?”

“Well, she was kind, smart, and very curious. Also very practical. Died of cancer the year I turned nine. It was just me and my old man after that. Without her he was a basket case, a real lost soul, and I became a topnotch juvenile delinquent. If it was wrong, I did it, if it was forbidden, I tried it. If a kid did today what I did then he’d be locked up for the remainder of his life.”

Duke paused to watch a slender blonde woman in tight jeans walk across the shop. His eyes brightened and a smile played across his lips.

“God, I love women,” he said. “Marvelous creatures. I could never resolve to limit myself to one only because I’m far too fond of falling in love. Ah, well, why do you think the price of oil is dropping?”

I told him about an article I read that hypothesized that the Obama administration was trying to stick it to Russia by encouraging Saudi Arabia to boost production and flood the world market, lowering the price of oil, and thereby further crippling a Russian economy heavily dependent on hydrocarbon exports and already dealing with economic sanctions. This was all part of a great global competition for control of the world’s energy resources which the US naturally felt entitled to dominate.

“Geopolitics,” Duke said, “is a vile business. Watch the alternative media on this one because as sure as I’m sitting here, the US is angling for a conflict with Russia. Imperialism and racism stride hand in hand across the backs of the poor and less fortunate, as they always have. Meanwhile, the air is foul and the water is poisoned, the oceans are croaking, and glaciers are melting. And you and I are still alive in the second decade of the twenty-first century, shuffling along the boulevard of discarded dreams.”

“What to do, doc, what to do?”

“First, people have to learn to connect the fucking dots, to understand that foreign policy and economic policy and climate policy are intertwined and play off one another. Second, accept the fact that the US is a declining empire just as Britain was at the dawn of the 20th century. The elites can read the writing on the wall and that’s why they’re panicking and willing to risk starting a war.”

I asked Duke about his Christmas plans.

“I’m bound for Nepal. I’ve got to escape all this American-style commerce and false cheer or else I’ll go mad. You should come along.”

“Tempted, believe me, but I’m grounded here.”

When we parted on the sidewalk half an hour later, Duke again told me not to worry about my son.

“Thanks,” I said, knowing there was no way I could stop worrying.

“I’ll bring you a souvenir from Nepal.”

I walked up State Street in bright sunshine, thinking about Russia and oil, the British Empire, and the back room machinations of multinational corporations, unseen hands pulling strings and watching us puppets dance, all for the purpose of securing more power or depositing more coin in their purses; wherever these unseen hands toiled, Justice lay in a pool of blood.

The Exceptional Nation?

It’s always the same, isn’t it?

Our government gets caught in a lie and only reluctantly acknowledges gross wrongdoing, incompetence or criminal behavior, but in the same breath says that no one will be held accountable, prosecuted, convicted, or sent to prison because it’s all in the past and we must move on.

When Obama assumed office after the financial crash of 2008, he   immediately declined to pursue the architects of the collapse – the greedy, criminal bankers and speculators who fleeced billions of dollars from millions of Americans. No, Obama, beholden to the financial interests that helped put him in the White House, said the nation needed to move on, focus on the future, not the past.

And now the long awaited torture report is out (heavily redacted, of course) – a report Obama administration officials did everything in their power to delay, block, water down or bury – and the president once again says we must focus on the future, not the past.

The report excoriates the CIA for lying to Congress, the White House, and spreading disinformation through our lazy, co-opted corporate media establishment.  On the one hand, the Obama administration claims credit for allowing the report to be published at all (see how transparent and open we are!), but on the other says no one will be held to answer for his or her crimes (see what cowards we are!).

The higher one climbs into the echelons of power, the less accountability one finds. CEO’s lose billions of dollars of shareholder dough on fraudulent transactions, and what happens: they earn huge bonuses.

High-ranking government officials – like Dick Cheney and Condi Rice -- condone the torture of individuals who never posed a threat to the country, and what happens: the officials skip away scot-free, entitled to their pensions, free (taxpayer subsidized) health care, lucrative book deals, or cozy jobs in corporate America.

A black teenager arrested for possession of two ounces of marijuana will be convicted and sent to prison -- guaranteed.

Steal billions, no problem; torture innocent human beings, no harm, no foul; lie to Congress, no worries.

Over and over we are told that ours is a nation of laws, and that everyone stands equal before the law. What a crock of shit. Hey, Mr. President, tell the truth – we are not the indispensable, exceptional nation that you keep talking about. We are just as ruthless, brutal, secretive, and sadistic as any other nation.

We torture. We support dictators who torture. We lie and falsify, dissemble and obfuscate, start wars on false pretexts, and interfere in the domestic affairs of other nations.

Exceptional? Hardly.

Hypocritical? Definitely.