Beacon of Freedom

“Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a Midwest where things function again. A countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it. Taverns, too.” Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion

 

Historically speaking, the Supreme Court has never been a friend of us commoners. With few exceptions, the Court has advanced or protected the interests of capital and property, rich over poor, whites over Africans, males over females. That the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim ban was shocking at first, but when considered in historical perspective, not shocking at all. The United States -- beacon of freedom and liberty for the world’s poor and downtrodden, (don’t laugh) -- has blocked Chinese immigrants, Hindus and Sikhs, Syrian-Lebanese, and, of course, we shamefully incarcerated Japanese-Americans during World War II. North Korea and Venezuela were tossed into Trump’s mix to make it appear more palatable, but the target population was crystal clear: Muslims.

How many terrorist acts have been committed by Iraqi, Syrian, Iranian, Libyan or Somali immigrants? Zero. How many Iraqi, Syrian, Iranian, Libyan or Somali citizens have been displaced by undeclared US wars against their countries or by US support for countries like Saudi Arabia? Millions. Like presidents before him, Trump’s rhetoric inflated the danger and downplayed the reality. He is playing the very same card with regard to our southern border. Think about it, is the most heavily armed country on the planet really at risk of being overrun by brown-skinned immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them women and children? Demagoguery isn’t designed to make sense, it’s sole purpose is to stoke fear and make people act irrationally.

After upholding Trump’s Muslim ban, the corporate-friendly Court swung a lead pipe at the kneecaps of the last stronghold of organized labor -- public employee unions. The argument in JANUS vs. AFSCME, that collection of mandatory and involuntary agency fees (also called service fees or fair share fees) violated an employee’s first amendment right to free speech, was spurious at best, but this Court must believe that corporations don’t already have enough power and might over workers. The radical right has long sought to decapitate public employee unions and the JANUS decision might just do it. I was a member of a public employee union for many years, a local president, an activist, and I know that unions, like corporations, do dumb things; I got ticked off by the so-called “member leaders” who seemed as disconnected from reality as Washington politcos are from people who work for wages. But I always, and still, believed in collective action, people with shared interests, be they of whatever color or creed, standing together and making demands of the high and mighty. What remains of organized labor after JANUS must be more radical, more confrontational, more inclusive.

One bright light in this otherwise dreary week was the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina socialist in New York who whipped an entrenched Wall Street toadie Democrat. Ocasio-Cortez is smart, passionate, real, and she’s promoting issues like Medicare for All, free college, and so on, that make the Democratic Party establishment cringe, and Chuck Schumer’s hemorrhoid pop. Ocasio-Cortez just might be going places, making things happen, shaking the tree. We need that.

Short Takes:

Shocking news from the group stages of the World Cup: Germany, the defending champ, is out. The talented giant, tripped, then stumbled, and never recovered. My three favorites: Belgium, France, and Argentina remain in the hunt. The knockout stage is next.

I just began reading a delightful book about football by the late Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow. Here’s a quote: “In soccer, as in everything else, consumers are far more numerous than creators.”

And so it goes, in June of this terrible year.

Crazy, Cruel & Venal: Another Week In TrumpLand

“In American the quirk was that people were things...A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money.”  Colson Whitehead

The United States is failing in so many ways that it’s mind-boggling. The slow-motion train wreck continues to unfold, one ghastly image heaped upon the last, from terrified migrant children to the idiotic Melania, to the scowling visage of Stephen Miller. This nightmare can’t be happening, and yet it is, the dark, slimy underbelly of America exposed for the world to see, though most nations have understood for decades the brutality of my country. Except for the Vietnam War in the 60’s and the Nixon Administration, I can’t remember the country being so divided against itself, so full of hatred and fear.

The Trump junta is crazy and cruel and venal, playing to a small base of the misguided who don’t know where to direct their ire. Trump’s diehard supporters continue to believe -- against all evidence -- that their man is working for them and that their circumstances will improve, as the Orange Menace promised. That they won’t is a foregone conclusion. Trump and his cronies and family members are making everything worse for the many, as I knew they would. Kleptocracies serve the very few, and only the very few. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, Trump spreads chaos and confusion. He clearly enjoys doing so. Immigration, trade, foreign policy -- there may be some twisted method to what Trump says and does -- but usually his actions seem driven by whim and pique and caprice.

I was listening to Thom Hartmann on the radio the other morning, on my way to the dojo for a kickboxing session, and he was talking about the many ways the people who own and run this country operate. They could never succeed by coming straight out about their aims to reduce regulation on corporations, slash corporate and personal income taxes, bankrupt the social safety net, and keep wages low. Wouldn’t fly and the owners know it. They have to wrap their true aims in claims about murderous immigrants, dangerous Muslims, welfare queens (who are invariably African-American), drugs and drug dealers, morale decay and decline whose only cure is personal responsibility (thus no welfare check without a job), and the Christian church, prayer in public schools, etc.  We elect scads of politicians who spout these sentiments and then once in office, vote to cut regulations on corporations, slash taxes on the wealthy, gut social programs, and punish the poor. Bait and switch.

Short Takes:

Belgium and France are playing reasonably well in the World Cup, Mexico is through to the Round of 16, and Germany is back on track after some late heroics from Tony Kroos. Great, entertaining stuff. Brazil and Argentina are lurking, too. Portugal, as it did in the Euros in 2016, finds a way to advance. The number of Mexico supporters who travelled to Russia is astounding. How do they manage it?

This week I’m reading The Bonanza King by Gregory Crouch, Reporter by Seymour Hersh, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and Rendezvous with Oblivion by Thomas Frank. And the Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer. Some of these I will review for the Santa Barbara Independent, my other job that brings me a lot of satisfaction and allows me to meet interesting and accomplished people. The day job is a necessity and I’m OK at what I do, but books and ideas feed my soul.

Earlier this year the local media reported that the annual Solstice parade (one of SB’s major tourists draws) might not happen due to lack of money. The fires and floods, road closures, loss of life and general disruption had dried up donations. The parade came off yesterday, though the Solstice organization was literally pushing a giant black hat mounted on wheels up and down the street, while volunteers angled poles with bags tied on the end into the crowd, hoping to come away with a few bucks. Bills to pay and all that. It costs money to block off streets and pay the police and clean up the mess afterwards. It’s always difficult to tell at street level, but the parade didn’t appear as well attended as in the recent past. The marine layer was thick and the sun never broke through.

The Blind Pig Finds an Acorn

“Say no more to treating people like things and corporations like people.” The Reverend William Barber

Another crazy week in TrumpLand. Who else but Donald Trump goes to meet one of our perennial bogeymen and babbles about building condos on the beaches? Despite the fulminations of Rachel Maddow and what passes for the liberal media ( what a joke), the bumbling, idiotic Trump might actually have done something good in Singapore. As Hunter S. Thompson was fond of saying, “even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then” and if nothing else, it’s better and safer for the world when nuclear armed nations are talking, rather than threatening, one another. Every now and then a rank amatuer pulls off a miracle. Of course, Trump returned from Singapore talking as if North Korea had already disarmed, the whole matter done and dusted, just like that.

What a simpleton.

But then you turn around and look a the deplorable, cruel and inhumane treatment of migrant children at our borders, separated from their parents by order of the diabolical Jeff Sessions, and the reality of the Trump Junta comes screaming back into one’s face.

I imagine Kim Jong-un leaning toward Trump and asking, “So, Donald, what was it like to fuck that porn star?”

The United Nations -- yes, that despised body -- released its report on extreme poverty and lo and behold the U.S. is doing great! 40 million Americans living in poverty; highest infant mortality rate in the developed world; our citizens live shorter and sicker lives; our access to clean water and sanitation ranks 36th in the world; and, of course, we retained our title as the undisputed leader in incarceration. Can’t touch the USA there! Take that, Vladimir. For every one you jail, we jail ten.

The World Cup is underway. The three teams I am pulling for are France, Belgium, and Argentina. France because of N’Golo Kante, who plays his club football for Chelsea; Belgium because Eden Hazard is one of my favorites and also a Chelsea man; and Argentina because I’d like to see Messi get the international monkey off his back. How fun was the match between Portugal and Spain? Cristiano buried that free kick to rescue a point for Portugal before he kicked the ball, you could see it in his face.

Maybe the thrill is gone, maybe it never was. It’s Father’s Day and I’m thinking of my dad, the smell of cigarette smoke on his coats hanging in the closet of our house on Ardilla Drive, and how little I knew of his interior life, what he thought and believed, what gave him joy. Ironically, I knew my father-in-law more intimately than my own father; they’re both gone. I’ve tried to lay down some markers for my kids so they’ll know who their old man was, but by the time they know, I’ll be gone, too.

And so it goes.

Bill of Goods

“People come, people go

Some grow young, some grow cold

I woke up in between

A memory and a dream

So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint

Let's head on down the road

There's somewhere I gotta go” Tom Petty

The daughter of one of my wife’s oldest friends graduated from a local high school on Thursday, an afternoon full of sunshine and a light breeze. The line of people filing into the stadium was long and moving slowly through the gate; parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, some clutching balloons that were not allowed into the stadium by the hired security guards, who also checked bags for contraband, air horns, signs, and anything else deemed verboten. An instrumental group was on the artificial turf field playing musical numbers from movies. White chairs for the graduates, arrayed like a chevron, and a three person Navy color guard. The mood in the area where we sat was expectant, light, tinged with relief, graduation being an end and a beginning. As we watched people stream in I thought of my son, for whom high school was one long agony of not fitting in or connecting; he stacked his time and couldn’t wait to be free of what he considered a soul-sucking waste of his time.

The instrumental group began playing the graduation march and the students filed in, two by two, girls in red robes, boys in blue; as the students passed the stands family members stood up and waved or called out, hoping for a wave in return. Pair after pair until all the students were seated on the white chairs. The school principal asked everyone to stand for the pledge of allegiance -- that strange ritual -- and then a choir sang the national anthem (no one took a knee in protest). The principal, an embattled figure who is currently suing the school district for its decision to return him to a teaching position next year, introduced two of the school board members who voted to oust him, an ironic twist. I wondered what was going through his mind, knowing that this was his final graduation exercise at the school where he had worked for nearly 20 years. He began speaking about what a record-breaking year it had been for the athletic department, with something like eight conference championships and two state titles, an odd place, it seemed to me, to start a graduation speech, given that the majority of students are not involved in athletics, and then he spoke of the award-winning choir and the theater department, using, within the first two minutes, the word “amazing” three times. Most of his speech consisted of platitudes to hard work, learning from adversity and never giving up, stock phrases, many of which were repeated by the white girl who spoke next; she reminded her classmates that they had begun four years before as wide-eyed, weak-kneed freshman, and now here they were, confident and accomplished seniors, ready to step out into the wider world and seize all the opportunities she was positive were waiting. Her pigmentation or surname would never stand between her and her dreams, and the cynic in me suspected she came from a family with dough, maybe even a Hope Ranch clan.

The final student speaker was a special education kid who got a big cheer when he finished. I wondered what his future would be like, if he would find his place in the world, or if this accomplishment would be the highlight of his life. The times are so different now, the American Dream is dead, the American Empire is in decline, and the can-do American spirit that existed in the the quarter century after World War II has been replaced by fear and cruelty and grotesque, brazen corruption that kills hope. As the long roll call of names began I wondered if my generation had sold these kids a bill of goods, a false promise, and a bucket of piss. I hope not. I hope these kids will wrest power from the oligarchs before it’s too late.

Short Takes:

Donald Trump: “All the best Constitutional scholars agree that I am above the law, below the law, immune to the law, better than the law, and beyond the reach of law. I can pardon myself any time I want to.”

Razan Al-Najjar was only 21 when she was murdered by an Israeli army sniper. Razan was a medic, trying to provide care to a wounded Palestinian near the fence that keeps Palestinians trapped in Gaza. The medics wore white vests and held their hands up, not that this universal gesture matters to the Israeli Defense Forces. Israel is now spinning the fairy tale that Razan was no Florence Nightingale, she was providing care to Hamas. Nobody believes this BS except Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the UN, and Bibi, of course.

Anthony Bourdain, RIP. You told the truth about what you saw, as well as what you ate.

According to Seymour Hersh, the award-winning and legendary investigative reporter, the most lethal words to come out of the mouth of a guest on cable news are, “I think.” Hersh could care less about what guests think -- he only wants to know what they know and can prove. Amen.

Trump is possibly the most brazenly corrupt American president in history. The US Constitution has a mechanism for stopping him, but only the corrupt US Congress can make that mechanism work, and the chances of that happening are slim.