End of the Decade

“Illusions were given credibility by a superpower moral overdrive. Any kind of mendacity could be used to fuel this ideological project.” Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation

Divorced from my normal routine, with work at certain hours of the day, the starting and ending hours pretty well set in stone, I get a little lost. The only reason I knew today was Tuesday was because yesterday was a dojo day, for me the final class of this year. Not that I mind getting head and body away from the job, who doesn’t like slipping the yoke for a run of days, when the most important thing on the agenda is the time the soccer match starts? Off the clock the rhythm of the day changes, slows down and comes into better focus. I see how I jam through my days without much awareness, without seeing things as I should. I guess this is why travel is so wonderful, a real luxury that many in this world can only dream of. Opens your eyes, makes you more aware of where you are, seeing new patterns, shapes, rooflines and rivers and birds and clouds over a new place. One thing I really appreciate is our trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Red-brick buildings, mid-19th century porticos and columns, houses with enormous front porches, the history. My son took more than a thousand photographs, but I haven’t seen them yet. He has an artistic eye and I’m excited to see what he saw. (Gabriel just launched a website showing his photographs.)

Link here: www.gabrieltanguay.com. 

It just hit me today that we are ending one decade and beginning another. End of the 2010’s. Start of the 2020’s. What’s going to happen to us all in the next ten years? Where will we venture next, as individuals and as a world? Our steps are all mixed up now, we’re tripping over one another, out of synch with the music, and a confusion of angry voices constantly argues over who deserves to own, divvy up, and distribute the world’s bounty. This is the foundation story, I think, of human history. Who rules and how do they rule? We’re wrecking the dance hall right now, breaking every stitch of furniture, tearing the curtains from the windows, rolling up the carpets. Up on a small stage stands Donald Trump, with Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and, finally, behind him, William Barr. Put different clothes or uniforms on these characters and they could be in ancient Egypt or Rome, and quite possibly more than we want to admit, Nazi Germany. Talk about power over our lives. I don’t want to be a paranoid person, but when you rationally consider how much government and corporate entities know about us, or can find out fairly easily, it’s unsettling. Think about what power the government has right now: the ability to watch, to intrude, to monitor, to censor, to imprison, to kill. There are seventeen different intelligence agencies in the United States. It’s boggling to think of all the data stored on all the servers these people own or administer. The margins seem much finer to me now that I’m older. That America has functioned without exploding since the Civil War is kind of astonishing. History makes old arguments new again, though it all comes back to the same fundamentals, who rules and why?

Very heavy material for the end of the decade. Hope tinged with fear. Our current American Emperor, mad King Donald I, loses more of his mind every day, and yet he’s protected and insulated by Rupert Murdoch’s giant FOX megaphone and the Senate majority led by Mitch McConnell, one of the wickedest devils America has produced. I don’t know if Mitch is worse than Murdoch or the other way around, but one feeds the other. Mitch ranks way up there with some of our history’s most illustrious Obstructionists, men who clung to their ideology all the way to the grave. Like Horatio Seymour, twice Governor of New York, who said, “This is a white man’s country. Let white men rule.” Next up: Theodore Bilbo, Governor, then Senator from Mississippi, who said, of a bill being debated in Congress, that it would “open the floodgates of hell in the South,” meaning white women by the droves would be raped by violent brute Negroes. The old sexual scare tactics. Strangely, it was quite acceptable in many places if a white man had sexual concourse with a female Negro. This was typically by coercion or force or just because the white owner felt like he could do whatever he wanted with his lawful property. Yeah, Bilbo was a big star. And one more: Jim Clark, Sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, who was known to go after civil rights activists with an electric cattle prod. These are McConnell’s soulmates, he is their heir. 

Part of me rebels against the idea that a man like Mitch McConnell has the power to stymie or suffocate any proposal he deems unacceptable. On the other hand, ours is a government of men, (mostly men in any case), and this is the way it goes. Political systems get corrupted, whether Soviet Communism or American neoliberal capitalism or ancient Rome. 

What the global climate may look like in ten years makes me uneasy. It will look much different than it does today, that we know. Again, the margins are fine and the balance point treacherously small. I know there is more happening around the world than I can see or read about. It’s tumultuous in so many places, because inequality is so wide, and people are full of want and fear, and fed up with struggling for the bare essentials. The rulers have done what rulers always do: take too much for themselves and their families, friends, and cronies, while the masses build up more grievances and justifications for their overthrow. The polity in America seems really dumb to me, I’m sorry to say. Give most a compelling spectacle to watch on a screen, and they will stand transfixed while their house burns. I don’t know what insane event, what calamity, will trigger millions of Americans to go out in the streets, as people have done in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Colombia, France and India, or whether or not it will be peaceful or violent when they do. Could go either way, obviously. We’re tromping backwards on history’s cobblestone path. 

I worry about stuff, I can’t help it; sometimes I brood too much. As the year ends I’m reading two books I brought home from the Equal Justice Initiative book store. Segregation in America, a title published by the EJI, and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward E. Baptist. 2020 is almost here. Ready or not, here it comes. 

The Festive Period

“There are towns and villages in Brazil that have no church, but not a one lacks a soccer field.” Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow

This time of year is a football (soccer, for my American readers) fan’s dream. The matches come thick and fast as they say -- probably too fast for the players’ liking -- but it’s a delight for fans. My beloved Chelsea continued their bizarre home form on Boxing Day, falling to a Southampton team they should have defeated. The match itself was eerily similar to recent matches against West Ham and Bournemouth, both losses. Those clubs arrived at Stamford Bridge desperate for points, and Chelsea obliged. In all three matches, Chelsea started ponderously and played with a cloak of futility. Against Southampton, Chelsea might have played for two or three hours and never troubled the opposition keeper. Our attack sputters in the final third, as if our forwards, Willian, young Tammy Abraham, and Callum Hudson-Odoi, run out of notions when they reach the edge of the penalty box. The American Christian Pulisic is capable of injecting a spark of creativity, but he can also go AWOL at times. Frank Lampard scowls in his technical area, but he seems powerless to get more from his players. 

Chelsea are in a transition year, so expectations must be muted. Our youngsters -- Mason Mount, Abraham, Fikayo Tomori, Hudson-Odoi, Reece James, and Pulisic -- have each shown flashes of their potential and from time to time the ability to link up and play appealing football. But consistency and Frank Lampard’s squad are not well acquainted. A good performance, like the away win at Spurs, is followed by a dud against Southampton. It’s baffling. 

As a Chelsea fan I’m not supposed to say anything positive about Liverpool. I’m supposed to despise the Scousers at every turn, but the fact is, as a football fan, I enjoy watching Liverpool play. Jurgen Klopp has developed a style that suits the players at his disposal, and watching Liverpool play is a pleasure. The Reds are not just quick physically, they are quick mentally. They see space and exploit it without hesitation. They move forward with a relentless energy. The Liverpool fullbacks, Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, are often other-worldly in their ability to get up the pitch, creating width, and delivering pinpoint crosses to the front three of Firmino, Salah and Mane. Where Chelsea dwell on the ball, play it backwards to their goalkeeper, pass side to side, Liverpool plays one or two passes to get up the pitch and into attacking position. It’s slick and fluid, with the front three interchanging. Liverpool also have the best defender in the world at this moment, Virgil van Dijk, the rock at the back. There’s a reason Klopp’s side is running away with the Premier League. I thought Leicester might give Liverpool a game, maybe spring Jamie Vardy for an early goal, but it wasn’t to be. Liverpool dominated their nearest title rivals and left the King Power Stadium with a 4-0 victory. 

In about five minutes of play, Alexander-Arnold delivered more dangerous balls into the Leicester penalty area than Chelsea’s mediocre fullbacks, Cesar Azpilicueta and Emerson Palmieri, did over ninety minutes. When Chelsea have a corner kick they invariably fail to get the ball past the first defender. It’s very frustrating for the supporters. Even with good business in the January transfer market, I don’t think Chelsea should expect to finish higher than sixth or seventh this season. The gap between potential and results is too wide. Chelsea lack players with high footballing IQ’s, who sense where the space will be and run into it, who make the right forward runs at the right moment, who can make something happen when the team is chasing a game or under pressure. Chelsea have too many deficiencies at the moment. 

But it’s football and fans always hope. And, as Vicente Calderon famously said, “Soccer keeps people from thinking about more dangerous things.” 

Trump Joins the Club

“Second, if the Democrats were really a Left opposition party, the majority-Democratic House would already have impeached the Malignant One for any number of fascistic, corrupt, and ecocidal crimes more harmful to humanity than UkraineGate…” Paul Street

Trump is impeached. The Orange Menace joins Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in the ignominious Impeachment club and, forevermore, will be labeled the “impeached 45th President.” Serves the fool right. Despite the batshit noise and smoke and disinformation kicked up by Trump’s GOP enablers, impeachment was necessary. The only disappointment for me was that Nancy Pelosi left so many of Trump’s impeachable offenses on the cutting room floor. 

For a man who sees himself as a tough guy, Trump sure is a whiny pussy. That six page letter he dropped on Pelosi will go down in history -- not for the reasons Trump wanted -- but because it’s a perfect example of his blatant ignorance of the most basic aspects of the Constitution, and his complete disregard for the rule of law. Trump’s constant white is black, up is down, round is flat, 2 + 3 = 6 pronouncements are morally dispiriting and intellectually exhausting. Trump’s manifest venality wears his opponents down. How does one respond to a man who refuses to recognize reality? Who lies as he breathes? Who wears his intellectual sloth as a badge of honor? Who doesn’t, or possibly can’t, read? Who spends most of every day watching Fox & Friends and Tweeting utter nonsense? 

Wasn’t it comforting that Vladimir Putin came out in support of Trump? 

Every last Republican who voted against impeachment deserves a ringside seat in Hell. For siding with Trump, for standing against the Constitution, for contorting themselves into pretzels to defend Trump’s indefensible behavior, they have earned the wrath of history. These people are craven hypocrites, and they know it. If Barack Obama had extorted the President of Ukraine and withheld military aid, the GOP would have gone into a full-tilt existential meltdown, an absolute freak-out. It would have been the end of the American republic, treason, the worst crisis in American history. Mitch McConnell would have tied the noose and picked out the highest tree in DC himself. Sean Hannity would have soiled himself. Limbaugh would have suffered a coronary. 

But the news that most astonished me this week was the House vote to approve a whopping increase in the Pentagon budget, including funding for Trump’s racist border wall.  My local Congress-twit, Salud Carbajal, cast his vote for the increase, as did many other Democrats. Who cares about deficits? Who cares that the bloated American military is a first-class contributor to global warming, a massive, worldwide carbon-spewing machine? The GOP certainly doesn’t care, though when they are out of power all they do is moan about the federal deficit, demand the country tighten its belt and live within its means lest we bequeath our children an albatross. The Democrats tax and spend; Republicans cut taxes and spend. Even worse, this ridiculous increase came on the heels of reporting that the Pentagon (surprise, surprise) lied repeatedly about our nineteen-year-old war of choice in Afghanistan. Turns out that when the top brass said we were making great progress, we actually weren’t. Of course any simpleton had already grasped that the mighty US military lost the “war” in Afghanistan years ago. But let’s hand the Pentagon and the generals and Lockheed Martin more tax money to piss away. And because we do, what choice do we have but to consign thousands of low-income Americans to hunger and want by slashing food programs? 

When a country is as corrupt as ours keeping despair at bay is difficult. We’re ruled by bankers, hypocrites, liars, and assholes who will not be satisfied until they reduce all they behold to a smoking pile of rubble. The whole system is riddled with gangrene and cannot be reformed from within.  

Christmas nears. The abyss opens before us. The devil is laughing. 

The Presence of Justice

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension. It is the presence of justice.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Back from a four day trip to a place I’d never set foot in before, the Deep South, Montgomery, Alabama. My wife, 23-year-old son, and me. Our purpose was to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I was supposed to interview Bryan Stevenson on behalf of the Santa Barbara Independent, but his availability didn’t match our travel schedule. Still, I wanted to see the work of the man who wrote Just Mercy, was the subject of the HBO documentary, True Justice, and is soon to be portrayed by Michael B. Jordan in a feature film. Jamie Foxx is also in the cast. Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, spearheaded the building in Montgomery of a museum and a place of remembrance to the victims of racial violence. Makes sense, since the modern civil rights movement started in Montgomery, when Rosa B. Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white man. The City of Montgomery recently unveiled a new Rosa Parks statue. 

Montgomery is also home to the Dexter Avenue Memorial Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. presided as pastor in the 1950’s, and from whose basement King and others organized the Montgomery bus boycott. We visited the church on a Saturday and got pulled inside by a woman who insisted we join a tour in progress. She wasn’t a woman one could say no thanks to. We toured the basement and then climbed 16 steps to the church itself. The next day we returned for the 10:30 a.m. service, which also happened to mark the 142nd anniversary of the church. The congregation, almost all African-American, was gracious and welcoming, many people approached us and asked where we were from and why we had come to Montgomery. There was a group from South Africa and a couple from Australia. The choir wore red robes and when they sang my wife cried. Because it was Dexter’s anniversary a guest pastor delivered the sermon. His name was James Nuckles. He started slow but once he built up a head of rhetorical steam I understood what a Baptist church in the Deep South was all about. 

We spent a morning at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I didn’t feel a sense of guilt as a white person, instead I felt a sense of great sadness. EJI has identified more than 4,000 cases of lynching, though the actual number is probably higher. From Reconstruction well into the 1950’s, African-Americans suffered wave after wave of racial terror, a campaign designed to maintain a rigid social hierarchy, whites on top, blacks subordinate. Lynchings were often advertised in the newspaper and sometimes thousands of white people would gather to watch, the atmosphere almost that of a county fair or carnival. It wasn’t uncommon for spectators to fire pistols at the hanging body.  

Much of downtown Montgomery appeared blighted to me but a woman I spoke to at the Visitors Center said a lot of progress had been made to revitalize the area, particularly on Commerce Street. New hotels, a performing arts center, restaurants, bars, and the Legacy Museum were bringing more people downtown. Still, when we walked up Dexter Avenue to the state capital on Monday morning we saw very few people out and about. The huge state government buildings, white, with columns and porticos, were impressive.

We returned to Santa Barbara and the regular routine of our lives, work and household chores, paying bills, taking out the trash, turning the compost, laundry. I came down with a cold and felt lousy for a couple of days.  

Old Black Friday

“The total opposition of world views between the elites and the people is going to explode.” Roger Hallem, Common Sense for the 21st Century. 

Black Friday. Let the games begin, the shopping and frenzied buying with maxed out credit cards and backpacks full of student loan debt, and the rent, always and finally, the rent. But do your part for the consumer engine and buy a new TV, iPad, toilet seat, latest iPhone, shirts, slippers, ties, underwear, socks, packs of condoms, cigarettes, wine, beer, spirits, hammers, cordless electric drills, cutlery, pots, pans, skillets, coffee makers, blenders, silk panties, leather belts, shoes by the dozen, buy and buy, consume and spend because the folks with ALL the money don’t play in a frenzy. They're sophisticated types, with money here and money there, wealth managers, CPA’s, hefty mortgages, they hoard their dough and wait for the financial winds to shift. Then there’s all the billionaires who can probably weather the storm no matter what. They’ve got fuck you type money. They’ve got the money to buy judges and politicians, to get an initiative placed on the ballot at their own cost, to buy companies for their offspring and private islands for their trophy wives.  Wealthy individuals and corporations hoard the big money, send it chasing its own tail, endlessly, until the inevitable happens, again. How bad this time, how much misery for how many people? The corporations buy-back their own stock to keep the stock prices propped up, and everyday like clockwork the corporate media reports that the market is up another 100 points, the economy is strong, and it’s nothing but high times in the big houses on the hill. And climate change is still far off…

The people down below know something is way out of whack, and they’re showing signs of waking up to the fact. Bolivia. Colombia. Ecuador. Iraq. Venezuela. Hong Kong. Climate activists like Greta Thunberg. Folks who hold membership in the ACLU. Folks who care about mass incarceration and the heinousness of Trump’s white nationalist border policies. Folks who know it’s not normal for a country to be at war somewhere on the planet all the time. Not normal at all. Not sustainable, either. Folks who are just stone tired of Donald J. Trump’s mug, his stupid expressions, his girth, his endless bullshit, his magnificent ignorance, and the sound of his fucking voice. That’s millions of people right there. Fed up enough to vote this time. 

People down below sense that the elites are nervous. That’s why we see so many strongmen types around the globe: Trump ( Note that Trump’s strongman status lies mostly in the tangle of thoughts inside his head.) Bolsonaro. Duterte. Putin. Modi. Xi Jinping. They’re preparing to hold on to power, most by whatever means necessary. The elites know the windows are going to get smashed and the fires burn and the blood run in the streets. It’s starting to happen. The cork’s coming out of the bottle at pace. Better prepare to duck. 

The people are like steam in the kettle, getting heated to a roil by the harshness and insecurity they face, the discrimination, prejudice, injustice, wealth inequality, shit jobs in shit conditions, decay and decline, poverty, and slow death. It’s not entirely their fault, and for the first time in years they see that the Ayn Rand-inspired fairy tale about economic winners and losers, free markets, hands-off government, privatization of everything possible, deserving individuals and parasitic masses, self-made by force of iron will and hard work, terribly hard work over many years, is starting to look like what it is: a con. They might not have a name for it, or any theory, they just know it’s unfair and not right. People know something’s not working, not right, and these people are sensible enough to know that blame cannot be laid solely at the feet of undeserving immigrants and criminally lazy black and brown people. The villains we face are in our midst, though most of us will likely never set eyes on them or know their names. Most are men, most are white, most, but not all, are older. Many pretend pious Christian faith. Many give money to foundations and charities and hospitals and symphonies and libraries. Good works for the little people while they continue the pillage of communities and the planet. 

Wow! That’s some heavy shit on a clear, cool afternoon in November. The yard is muddy from a couple of days of rain. The temperature is in the mid-50’s but feels cooler. It was in the low 40’s when I went to the dojo at 5:30 a.m. Only 10 people willing to roll out of bed at that hour and break a sweat. Went to Smart & Final for provisions. Took a nap. Read. Wrote this.

There And Back Again

“Like a dormant cancer waiting for the right conditions to flourish and kill its host, the true face of the system is being revealed as our advanced technological capacity is enabling accelerated economic turnover to satisfy the market’s need for constant economic growth, clashing with natural planetary limits.” Peter Joseph, The New Human Rights Movement

I just returned from Monterey where I attended a conference. I’ve always liked the feel of Monterey, its familiar Mexican street names, adobe and red tile roofs, the nearness of the sea, and the tourists, who come year after year, as regular as migrating birds. The conference was educational and for the most part enjoyable, and in a couple of ways it will help me do my day job a shade better. No taxpayer money was squandered sending me to Monterey. There was a lot of talk during the conference about pension obligations, and how cities and the state Public Employee Retirement System, or PERS as its known, face growing gaps between their funds and their future liabilities. This dilemma is seized upon by a small army of attorneys, advocates, and consultants who offer their expertise and insight in exchange for fees. Judging by the figures and names of donors flashed on huge screens in the main ballroom, the insurance brokers are making out well. They act as go between for agencies and providers in the search that goes on year after year for medical plans that employees can actually afford. The whole system is fraught. Investment returns for PERS haven’t entirely recovered from the 2008 Crash. Due to pressure from labor and environmental groups, PERS has begun divesting from fossil fuels and tobacco stocks.  One consultant argued that this principled approach was hurting the fund’s returns. The same person also said a downturn is imminent. The question will be: how hard will it hit, how long will it last, will the United States recover, and when it does, what will it look like? With a mentally unstable president watching TV in the Oval Office and railing against his enemies, real, perceived or made up out of whole cloth, the last question isn’t trivial. Trump can do even more damage to the country and its rickety institutions than he already has. The Orange Menace, Dictator Donald, King Donald I, Mob Boss Don Trumpito and his crime family -- call him what you choose -- has it in him to wreak more carnage, and in his second term -- which I am resigning myself to believe awaits us -- he will. The rot is simply too deep, the corruption too commonplace and tolerated, the populace too disunited and blinded by ceaseless propaganda masquerading as news. 

During my trip I finished reading How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. There was much in this book that appealed to me, the importance of unplugging from the electronic world and its relentless algorithm’s and engaging in a practice of deep listening being one thing. Odell is an artist as well as a writer, and when she puts her attention on something, she sees it, and usually she names it very precisely. Good reminders. With that done, I downloaded on my Kindle the latest Le Carre novel, Agent Running in the Field. It’s what we have come to expect from Le Carre, now in his productive twilight years, a story that starts in motion and never stops, and writing that never gets in its own way. As I think about it, Jenny Odell reminded me not to neglect Krista Tippett and the brilliant ideas she and her guests make real. The stuff soothes the soul and reminds one to breathe and be hopeful. There are a lot of people doing important work in this country, all over, who value people and the planet over profit-making and speculation. How does a political party represent these people, workers and students, and elderly folks on Social Security, black and brown and whatever else, any gender and sexual preference? Where a person wants to pray, if they choose to do so, doesn’t bother me. What I fear are fanatics of any stripe and those that impose their will by brute strength or force of arms.  Where’s the party that has the guts to stand up to the Pentagon, the defense contractors, the private spy agencies, the insurance industry, Wall Street, and other financial vultures circling as global capitalism marches grimly toward mass destruction? Has to be people-powered, but that can get out of hand easily. Richard Nixon was scared to death of hippies and potheads and anti-capitalists, and he wasn’t alone. You can start with the most glorious intentions and end up doing the same crap that you once railed against. The Trail of Good Intentions requires many, many compromises along the way. Like most people, I prefer not to be under the yoke of another, except voluntarily, and with the freedom to leave when it suits me. 

I’ve been bothered for a long time that we have trees and plants in our yard that I cannot name. With help from an app called iNaturalist, I have put names with some of the living things that have been part of our lives for over twenty years. We have twelve silver dollar gum trees, one Chinese banyan, a tall West Indian cedrela, a twenty foot tall crimson bottlebrush and two high pittosporum. Because of this foliage we see many birds in the yard, though with the exception of blue jays, hummingbirds, crows, and an occasional woodpecker, I don’t know their precise names. Before I changed my compost container to a black plastic barrel, rats visited often, drawn by the compost bin, which they made a mockery of finding their way into. We heard them, and often saw them at night moving as if on a highway through the silver dollar gums. We also have rosemary, Mexican sage, and a couple varieties of lavender. The soil here is hard, stratified with clay and rocks. Only on those rare occasions when we get consecutive days of rain can I easily turn the soil with a shovel. 

Good to get away, and a relief to have a home and family to return to. My daughter just finished her run as Marianne in Santa Barbara City College’s production of Sense & Sensibility. My son came up from LA to see her and we got to hang and talk some. My kids mostly talk to their mother. One would be a fool not to appreciate such basic good fortune. It’s all most people in the world want. Maybe part of our problem in the so-called First World is our notion that we are the only ones who deserve to live a decent, full life.    

The Nadir of the American Republic

“But that boundless blind faith is beginning to fade now.” Hunter S. Thompson

My head aches. I listen to bits of the House impeachment proceedings, then read about them on my usual outlets -- Truthout, Truthdig, The Nation, Counterpunch, Politico, Democracy NOW -- and try to make sense of it all. What’s abundantly clear is that the Republicans have sold their souls and their children and their pets to Trump, and can no longer even be described as a political party. Noam Chomsky has said numerous times that the current GOP is a criminal organization. When it comes to the Orange Menace, they see no evil, hear no evil and speak nothing but nonsense. Naturally, the blowhards and miscreants over at FOX News spin and slant their coverage to make it appear that the Democrats are throwing punches but not coming close to landing a glove on the innocent Trump. 

It amuses me to hear Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, talk about how the State Department attempted to school the newly established Ukranian government in anti-corruption practices. Coming from the United States -- whose Representatives and Senators are, with few exceptions, purchased, owned and operated by corporate interests, and whose foreign policy history is rife with coups, election interference, regime change operations, spying, invasions, assassination attempts and other malfeseance -- this is laughable, like a convicted pedophile priest teaching sex ed to teenage boys.  

When I think of American corruption, I think of the silky smooth rhetoric of Barack Obama, who couched the power plays of the American empire in words like self-determination, democracy, liberty and justice, and then turned around and authorized targeted assassinations in Afghanistan or wherever else he felt US power needed to be demonstrated. Measured, reasonable language and a Sidewinder missile is how America has always preferred to operate its Empire. The Trump Administration is completely different, of course, crude, clumsy and overt, the shiny facade ripped away to reveal the base intent of Empire (or is the objective now only to enrich Trump and his family?), which is, lest we forget, to thwart global rivals, control natural resources and markets, put down popular uprisings, and justify ever-increasing contributions to the Pentagon war machine. 

The divide in this country, between reality-based citizens and those who dwell in the FOX News ecosystem, is now so deep and broad that I fear America is finished as a representative democracy. We’ve reached such a nadir the two political parties cannot even agree on the most basic facts. If Adam Schiff asserted that Abraham Lincoln was 6’4” tall in his stockings, Republicans would immediately accuse Schiff of inflating Lincoln’s height, Tucker Carlson would call him the biggest liar in American history, and Sean Hannity would devote an entire show to “Height-Gate.” No republic can survive in this atmosphere, not when the economy is primed to implode and the impact of anthropogenic climate change is accelerating by the day. 

Here’s a dim and not very original prediction. The House will impeach Trump on a party-line vote and the Senate will acquit him, also on a party-line vote. If the economy doesn’t implode between now and election day, Trump will lose the popular vote, again, but prevail in the undemocratic Electoral College, again. Four more years of Trump will spell the end of America as we’ve known it. If you can think about that without feeling a sharp pain in your lower intestine, you must be very wealthy, stone dumb, or high on the most potent chemical concoction Big Pharma can come up with. 

The Worst and Dimmest: the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump

“Rich man wanna be king/And a king ain’t satisfied/Till he rules everything.” 

Bruce Springsteen

If hell exists, Devin Nunes will occupy a front row seat in Satan’s luxury box, near the fiery pit, where the smell of sulphur is most pungent. Listening to his opening statement for less than five minutes made me want to puke. An acquaintance, the comedian Kimmie Dee, put it aptly, albeit crudely, when she posted on Facebook that Nunes’s ability to speak with Trump’s dick in his mouth is remarkable. Indeed. Nunes is quite a talent. 

What is the strange hold Trump has over many Republicans? Why does this bombastic, ignorant, narcissistic, ridiculous failure scare the bejesus out of the GOP’s rank and file, its leadership, and the Republican National Committee? I suppose one can ask the same question about any cult leader. Logic, reason, morality, and common sense go right out the window. Here, drink this Kool-Aid and all your doubts and difficulties will evaporate.  There was never any mystery about Donald Trump or any question that he would govern the same way he ran the Trump Organization or that he would fail spectacularly; spectacular failure is Trump’s stock-in-trade, as is lying, cheating, and defrauding others. What is mysterious, baffling, is the utter, complete lack of honor among congressional Republicans. Damn near every last one of them has debased himself or herself since Trump got anointed by the Electoral College. Loyalty to a political party or a leader at the expense of the law, the country, or principle is a hallmark of despotism. Every last member of the GOP has forgotten that he or she swore to uphold and defend the Constitution. The Constitution, not the GOP and certainly not Donald J. Trump. 

What is wrong with these people? Wake up, open your eyes and look at whose ass you’ve been kissing for three years. 

I’m so tired of hearing Republicans claim that Democrats are trying to overturn the 2016 election. Republicans conveniently forget that their boy Trump lost the popular vote; the only reason he made it to the White House is because the undemocratic Electoral College favors small states over larger ones. Impeachment is not about the 2016 election. Impeachment is about one co-equal branch of our government checking the abuses of power by the executive. Our Founding White Fathers had many shortcomings, but their fear of unchecked executive power was grounded in experience. 

Having no defense, all Republicans can resort to are spurious attacks on the process.

Thank You For Your Service

“We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors like the war on terrorism, or poverty, or AIDS into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.” Gore Vidal, Dreaming War

Cal never liked Veteran’s Day. Too overhyped. What were we celebrating, after all, but death and destruction? He avoided the parade down State Street, white-haired WWII and Vietnam era vets riding in vintage Army jeeps, waving little flags at the people lining the sidewalk. Everybody clapping. Every year a foursome of old bombers flew over the city, low and lugubrious. Cal thought WWII was righteous, necessary, but every American war since had been dubious, and the so-called War on Terror was a cruel joke, an endless joke, with too many boys coming back maimed or mental. The government had little use for them then, and Cal saw many veterans camping on the steps of the art museum or under the overpass. If I had a son, Cal thought, I’d never let him enlist in the military. 

Cal served eight years in the Air Force. He spent three years in South Korea, one year in Japan, the rest in Texas. He enlisted a few years after Saigon fell, got discharged before the first Gulf War. He remembered the first briefing at the base outside of Wichita Falls, given by a burly Master Sergeant with a flat-top. “I advise you to steer clear of downtown in general, and in particular don’t go down there in uniform. The good ol’ boys around here don’t have much tolerance for military personnel. A couple of airmen got their asses kicked a few weeks back.” 

Times change. Now it was “thank you for your service” everywhere you went, even if, like Cal, you never served in war time. People just assumed he’d been in combat when he told him he was a vet. Since the draft was long gone, most people were clueless. Wars were remote now, out of sight, forgotten. It was hard to believe that young people once flooded the streets to protest the war in Vietnam. The government doesn’t even bother to declare war any more. It’s usually the president who decides that some country or terrorist group is an imminent threat. Once the shooting starts the media loses its mind, oohing and aahing and interviewing retired generals who can’t say enough about America’s ordnance, which is so sophisticated and precise that only enemy forces are targeted. If civilians die it’s never on purpose. You’d think they were talking about Tom Brady’s throwing arm. Dissenting voices are blacked out, so it feels as if the entire country is of one mind. Cal marveled at the effectiveness of the brainwashing; it didn’t take much to convince people that the latest shooting war was justified. It wasn’t like Vietnam when every night on the evening news there were images and casualty figures. Vietnam felt close and real.  

Cal drew the curtains in the living room. Across the street his neighbor Roger had put his American flag out. Roger never served in the military, but he loved the technology of war, especially fighter jets and drones. Roger thought the US had every right to bomb what he called evil nations like North Korea and Iran. Roger got pissed off one time when Cal told him that the US was the biggest threat to peace in the world. Cal had just shrugged and told Roger to check the history, it was all there. A fact is a fact, even if it contradicts what you believe. 

Don’t thank me for my service. Ask me what I did while I served. The closest I ever came to being injured was one day in a dreary little strip mall outside the base in Wichita Falls when a redneck in a Chevy pickup tossed a half-full can of Coors at my head. 

Bukowski Pissed Here

“Because a man is born with a particular knack for gathering in vast aggregates of money and power for himself, he may not on that account be the wisest leader to follow nor the best fitted to propound on a sane philosophy of life.” James Truslow Adams

My son sends me a photograph of a sign he saw in the men’s room of Cole’s an LA eatery famous for its French-dip sandwich: Charles Bukowski Pissed Here. Old Hank pissed in plenty of bars and restaurants in LA in his day, but if Buk rose from the dead and strolled around LA today he might not recognize his old haunts. A lot of the bars he drank in are gone, as are the factories where he toiled at meaningless jobs. In Buk’s heyday LA was still King of Aerospace, and workers machined parts and assembled fuselages and tested engines. A man could work at McDonnell-Douglas or Hughes Aircraft and make a living wage; he was likely a union member with health benefits and a pension. 

Buk’s LA is mostly a memory just as the Santa Barbara I knew as a boy is mostly a memory. The physical beauty of SB hangs on, but it’s harder and harder to ignore the angst of wage earners over rents and college tuition and medical care, the ranks of unhoused people, and creeping gentrification. Amazon, the behemoth that has done more to kill the State Street retail core than anyone else, will soon occupy a large building on State Street. Irony, I suppose. Seeing the Amazon logo is going to piss me off every time I walk by. Retail cleansing. It’s not that different from a hedge fund buying thousands of single-family homes on the cheap, forcing the owners into foreclosure, and then renting the homes out. Extraction is the name of the game. 

Will the economy belly-flop before the 2020 election? A serious global downturn might be the dagger in Trump’s shriveled heart, and the only thing that can keep him from a second term. His B-team of looters and grifters hasn’t strengthened the economy for anyone except the already wealthy, but then, that was predictable. When the next crash hits the Fed and the rest of the world’s central bankers will have few cards to play. I suspect it will be very ugly for many people, myself included. I don’t own any property or a stock portfolio or a sack of gold bars. I was a working-class kid and I’m a working-class adult.  

Like Henry Miller, Hank Bukowski figured out very early in life that the whole American set-up was a big con, a system of exploitation owned and operated by the wealthy and moneyed interests for their benefit. The rich always climb on the bent backs of the poor. Miller called America “the air-conditioned nightmare.” Then, like now, it was a country of crass commercialism and spiritual emptiness. I think Bukowski saw it as a madhouse, full of dull-eyed, soul-dead people prepared to follow the next snake-oil salesman to come along. Donald Trump in the White House would not surprise Bukowski in the least. Buk watched a number of regimes come and go, Truman, Eisenhower,  JFK, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton. What was the real difference between them? Bukowski would remember that at least until the Carter Administration, the Democrats supported organized labor and needed labor’s backing to retain power. But after Carter the connection between the Democratic Party and labor was ever more tenuous. The Dems began sucking up to banks and insurance companies for campaign dollars. Money started to tilt the playing field. The rich declared war on the spirit of the New Deal and the Democrats helped them wage it. 

The game is fixed, the dice loaded, the house always wins. Figure the game out and a pair of muscle-bound bouncers with thick necks toss you out on the sidewalk. The attention span of the average American is short and Fox News spreads misinformation 24 hours a day. We are lost in a digital wilderness. 

I imagine tracking Henry Miller down to a cliff near his house at Big Sur. I hand him the latest iPhone, demonstrate what he can do with it, and watch as he turns it over in his hands. He stares off at the blue sky. Is he day-dreaming of his days in Paris, living on his wits and guile, hell-bent on becoming an artist and escaping the bonds of convention? He was always more of a sage than a pornographer. Henry wanted to discern the meaning of life, past lives, future lives, all life, every sense awake. I can visit the great museums of the world on this? He asks. I nod. Find photographs of ancient Greece? Yes. Pornography? Yes. Henry smiles at me then tosses the phone over the cliff. 

Donald Trump: “There should be no public impeachment hearings. No private hearings, either. There should be no hearings because it’s all a hoax. My call with the President of Ukraine was perfect, perfecto, no quid pro quo, no collusion. The Bidens should be investigated, they’re crooked. What about Hillary’s emails? All those disappeared emails? The Democrats should investigate that, not me. I can’t be investigated, I have unlimited immunity, perfect immunity, it says so in the Constitution…”

What to do but uncork another bottle of wine and raise a glass to those who refuse to be bought, bribed, fooled, fucked with, deceived or defeated.