J. Edgar's Ghost

“The FBI took a shotgun approach to target and harass protesters partly because of its belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal.” 1976 Senate Report on the FBI

The FBI has come up with a new threat, BIE, which means Black Identity Extremists. Echoes of cointelpro in the 1960’s and 70’s when the FBI spied on civil rights activists and leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. If you actively protest the killing of unarmed black people by white police officers this might make you a “black identity extremist.” If you march, picket, hold a sign at a rally or follow Black Lives Matter on social media you might land on the FBI’s radar. Are black human rights activists -- because that’s what we are really talking about here, human rights -- a threat to the republic? More than the resurgent KKK and white supremacists armed to the gills? As far as I can determine, Black Lives Matter doesn’t advocate for the wholesale killing of white people; it’s goal is to stop the unjustified killing of unarmed black people by police officers.

What is missing in all the media furor over presidential condolence calls to the kin of fallen service members? Put aside the Orange Buffoon’s idiotic blathering -- by now we should know that Trump will always say the wrong thing, then lie about what he said, then attack someone when they question his lie. The question not being asked is why the United States deploys military personnel to places like Niger. Why are we there? Why are US military forces still based in Japan and Germany, Italy and England and South Korea and Turkey? Why are US soldiers in Kuwait? Why is the US still in Afghanistan after 16 years of futility? These are the questions that should be asked, debated, and justified.

Such a debate will never happen. The empire is a force that can only be perpetuated, never questioned. The military budget is sacrosanct. To argue against military spending is to be branded as someone who “doesn’t support our troops.” OK, I don’t, because I see America’s military power as a destabilizing force in the world, a force that is used to impose America’s brand of cut-throat capitalism and market domination.

The temperature soared to 102 degrees in Santa Barbara yesterday, a record, The heat was thick, oppressive. I watched the hills for signs of smoke, but thankfully saw none. The winds were calm. I sat on the deck with a cold IPA and listened to a podcast on FAIR.Org. Inside the apartment every fan was going full bore but having no real effect. I thought of the memoir I’m reading, For Love of the Dollar by J.M. Sevrin, an undocumented immigrant’s tale of survival in the northeast of America in the last decade of the 20th century, around the time Disney was scrubbing Times Square in NYC, making the area safe for tourists and small children. This made me think of the gentrification happening here in SB, on Haley Street and along Milpas, big projects on small lots, with limited parking and the usual exorbitant price tags that no wage worker can afford. Across the country affordable housing is in short supply, but in SB the supply is infinitesimal. The retail corridor on State Street is struggling mightily, and losing, the battle against behemoth Amazon and many storefronts sit vacant, windows staring. City fathers and mothers and the merchant class lay the blame for State Street’s woes on the homeless, demand the police run the homeless off to places where they can’t be seen by tourists. Out of sight, out of mind, but still a problem, only for someone else. The five mayoral candidates talk about leadership, vision, water, and housing, but the problems faced here are much larger than any of them will admit. The SB I was raised in died many years ago and is never returning. Another foodie joint, craft beer hall, wine bar or yoga emporium isn’t going to save the city.

And so it goes.

Harvest of Disaster

“We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” W. E. B. Du Bois

Leave it to Du Bois. A “harvest of disaster” is precisely what we are facing in this time of Trump and the collapse of American empire. Following the House, Senate Republicans voted on a tax plan that will stand as a massive rip-off of the public treasury all so “tax relief” can be delivered to their wealthy benefactors. What is left of vital social programs like Medicare and Medicaid will take a gut punch. The glee on the faces of the mostly white, male, and wealthy Senate Republicans after the party line vote was nauseating. If any more evidence of the fact that we are ruled by oligarchs was needed, Senate Republicans just delivered it. If a national budget is a map of a nation’s priorities then it is very clear that the only priority in America is to give more to those who already have the most.

The war machine gets its money. The fossil fuel extraction industry gets its tax subsidies, as does big pharma and agriculture, and of course the finance boys and girls -- best represented by Goldman Sachs -- reap all manner of perks at our expense. The rich will get even richer, wealth inequality will deepen; the poor and working poor will bear the burden, as they always do.

Year after year we sow the same seeds, reap the same harvest. Trump, as I’ve written many times, is not the cause, he’s a symptom of a diseased, corrupt and compromised system. Trump is only hastening America’s decline and laying bare for all with the will to see that this country has misplaced its soul. Writing on the Truthout website William Rivers Pitt put it this way: “You are certainly a man of the times, The Man, avatar of all that ails us. You are, among other things, the end product of a decades-debunked economic model that consigns a vast majority of Americans to poverty and stasis while lavishing trillions on the wealthy. This we call ‘trickle down,’ and we've waited half a century now for the rain that never comes.”

I feel like I’m watching a train wreck in super slow motion. Sparks and flames, metal twisting, glass shattering, and bodies tossed around like trees in a hurricane. I don’t understand how we can be so blind, so ignorant, so cruel. Has the US always been this fucked up and I just didn’t see it? We seek peace and stability by waging endless war; we propose to stop senseless gun violence at home by making it easier for more people to own more guns; we purport to blunt the jagged edges of climate change by denying science and the evidence of our own senses.

The Democratic Party, ever willing to render itself inept and irrelevant, tacks steadfastly to the failed ideology embodied by Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So much for the best and brightest.

Despair is a bitch. Staring into the abyss for hours on end is exhausting. We must still rise from our beds, do whatever work is before us, pay bills, help children with homework or with navigating the treacherous shoals of social life, take care of elderly parents, and deal with the unexpected. In other words, though our ears are ringing and our face is battered, we have to keep coming off the corner stool and walking to the center of the ring.

California Burning, America Vanishing

Parts of California are burning. October and November are fire season in the Golden State, but what has happened in the Napa area boggles the imagination -- some neighborhoods look like they were bombed by an invading army. Houses reduced to smoldering ash, cars torched, as if Mother Earth pitched a temper tantrum and decided to retaliate for how shabbily we have treated her. Climate scientists have been warning for years that one potential result of human-caused climate change will be fiercer storms, floods, and wildfires. Houston, Puerto Rico, Napa. Get the idea now?

I have Trump fatigue. How about you?

The Orange Buffoon embodies the most reprehensible and vile aspects of the American character: ignorance, bombast, greed, cruelty, racism, arrogance, and violence. In less than a year, Trump has turned the White House into a risible shitshow. His approval rating is in the low 30’s and will not climb any higher unless he launches war against North Korea or Iran, in which case the political class and corporate media will grovel at his feet and a majority of Americans will rally around him as if he were the reincarnation of George Washington. All occupants of the Oval Office understand this reliable escape route from tanking poll numbers or domestic scandal.

Neal Gabler wrote a piece for the Bill Moyers website recently that put forth the idea that we are viewing Trump and his entourage of miscreants through the wrong lens. We can’t, Gabler wrote, view Trump through the standard political lens but must view him through the lens of entertainment, of ratings and clicks and social media traffic, the same lens through which we see Kim Kardashian. Trump, with his incessant demand for attention and adulation, is flipping the usual script, replacing politics with entertainment, and as long as people keep tuning in, he will keep attacking African-American athletes, US senators, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the people of Puerto Rico, his own Secretary of State, and the corporate media; he will constantly up the ante and create false drama with arch comments like, “You’ll see.” An approval rating in the low 30’s matters little when you can still command all the media attention, and when that attention is all you care about. Gabler’s hypothesis is intriguing and might be the only way to understand the disaster that is Donald Trump.

While Trump preens, postures, lies, attacks, threatens, and makes an ass of himself, the kleptocrats around him are doing serious damage to the nation, making every economic, social and environmental problem worse by dint of their greed and incompetence. The Trump Administration’s response to the devastation of Puerto Rico is criminal, but no matter how many Puerto Ricans suffer or perish, you can bet that no one will be held accountable. That is, unfortunately in this awful year of our lord 2017, how our system works -- the political and economic elites, the wealthy, play by a completely different set of rules. Like white police officers who gun down unarmed black men, there is never a penalty to pay.

When our country is this jacked up and corrupt, nobody is obligated to stand for the national anthem, salute the flag, or recite the pledge of allegiance. No matter what Trump and Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions say, dissent is never unpatriotic. Dissent is the essence of patriotism. If we don’t demand an end to predatory capitalism, rigged elections, shitty medical care, endless wars, racism, gun violence, jingoism, and ecocide, nothing will change. Kneel, sit, bow your head, turn your back, raise a clenched fist, be an American, stand for something and demand better before it’s too late.

World Leader in Death

“Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.” Henry A. Giroux

Columbine. Virginia Tech. Aurora. Sandy Hook. San Bernardino. Orlando. Las Vegas. By some estimates I’ve read, there are 300 million firearms in the United States, and every single day in this country, 92 people are killed in firearm related incidents. After a mass shooting I always feel the same sense of unreality, numbness, and then outrage because no matter how murderous the rampage -- and the scope of the Vegas massacre is almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around -- nothing changes. The NRA still presses campaign donations on easily purchased members of Congress, and launches a PR blitz designed to blunt any criticism, and of course remind us all of the sacred Second Amendment. Politicians wring their hands, offer prayers, tell us to honor the innocent victims, but in the next breath declare that now isn’t the time to have a debate about sensible firearm protections. (If not now, when?) Whoever the sitting president is makes a speech condemning the violence, knowing full well that the carnage will continue in another place, at another time. Obama’s rhetoric after a mass shooting brought people to tears, but his beautiful words never changed a thing. (As emotionally stunted and inappropriate as ever, the current occupant of the White House offered his “warmest condolences.”)

Firearms are historically, politically and culturally embedded in our American DNA. Violence is as much a part of our creed as the Declaration of Independence and the Star-Spangled Banner, as college football and NASCAR.  

More details about the Vegas shooter emerge in fits and starts, as they always do in the aftermath of a mass shooting, though his motive remains murky. Was his intent only to inflict death and pain and trauma, to forever alter thousands of lives, or just to etch his name in the history book as the architect of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history? Job accomplished on all counts. The man is in the annals now, the latest, but not the last, deranged white man with demons running around his brain and a huge cache of weapons and ammunition in his garage.

The numbness returns. A woman who trains in the dojo I attend was at that concert in Las Vegas on Sunday night. She survived unscathed, physically, but her husband told me that she has descended deep within herself, suffering from wounds unseen.

This madness never ends. America has never been great, and only good when it suits the powerful, but nobody can argue that we are not the world leader in death, at home and abroad.