Greenland!

“An antiracist idea is any idea that suggests that racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences -- that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.” Ibram X. Kendi 

Jared Kushner, Bill Barr and Mick Mulvaney sit in the Oval Office waiting for President Trump to come down from the residence. The President is a half hour late. It’s just after 1:00 p.m. on another humid D.C. summer afternoon. The three men are used to Trump arriving late or skipping scheduled meetings altogether. Barr stares out the window. Kushner and Mulvaney stare at their phones. It’s eerily quiet in the White House. Many offices are dark. Others look vacant.

Trump enters the Oval Office with a scowl on his face and sits behind his desk. Except for a telephone and three remote controls, the desk is absolutely bare. “We’re bombing Denmark, Trump says. “If they won’t deal with Trump for Greenland within 24 hours, they will get the shit bombed out of them. America First. Get that nasty woman on the phone and tell her the deal. Trump wants it done!”

Barr looks at Kushner. Kushner shrugs and looks over at Mulvaney. Mulvaney looks at the rug.

“No woman tells Trump no,” says Trump. “I’m virile, beautiful, the second coming of God, and the King of Israel. Who says no to the King of Israel?” Mulvaney starts to say something then thinks better of it and returns to staring at the floor. He knows it’s wise to let Trump get the venom out of his system. Early that morning Trump unleashed a storm on Twitter, accusing Hillary Clinton of interfering in his plan to buy Greenland, attacking the Federal Reserve for not cutting interest rates and the New York Times, MSNBC, CBS, and CNN for falsely reporting that the economy was taking a downturn, when in fact many people (three people on FOX News) were saying the economy was growing ten times faster than it did under Obama. Trump ended his Tweet barrage with a tirade against China and a guarantee that America will win the trade war and bring China to its knees.  

Turning toward the Attorney General Trump says, “You’re fat, Bill. You disgust me. You look like a sad sack. Get some exercise, lose some weight. Look at me, look at this perfect physique, I’ve got the body of a 25-year-old and I never exercise. My doctor thinks I’m a miracle. I could run a marathon if I wanted to. Probably break the world record.”

Mulvaney sucks his bottom lip into his mouth to stifle a snort. 

“Yes, Mr. President,” Barr says, “you’re absolutely right, I’m fat, I’m disgusting, but you sir are a tremendous physical specimen.”

Trump waves his hand dismissively and starts talking about how the United States deserves to own Greenland. Trump can see no reason for Denmark not to sell, other than to spite him, a mistake for which Denmark will pay. He orders Kushner to follow-up with the Joint Chiefs of Staff about a missile strike. “And see if Mnuchin can slap them with sanctions.” 

“I’m not getting any credit for the economy,” Trump says, looking accusingly at Mulvaney. “Why not? The economy’s booming, we’re making tons of money, terrific amounts of money. I’m the greatest American president since George Washington, I have more beautiful hair, better teeth, I’m smarter, richer. Women adore me. Men want to be me. Children worship me. I should give myself the Medal of Honor, just for being me. Yeah, a Medal of Honor is good for Trump. I want a big parade, Jared, the biggest in history. I want this to happen right after we bomb Denmark and they agree to sell Greenland. Once we have Greenland, I’ll award myself the medal. Obama never got a Medal of Honor.”

Bill Barr stares out the window, trying to block out the voice inside his head that chides him for selling his soul to Trump. 

Mulvaney again stifles the urge to say something, to tell Trump that awarding himself the Medal of Honor is a terrible idea, even worse than his inexplicable obsession with buying Greenland. Mulvaney feels dizzy and disoriented. Working for Donald Trump is like being incarcerated in a wind tunnel. 

“No, sir,” Jared says, “he didn’t. He didn’t deserve it. Obama made America weak. You’re making America strong. Who should present you with the medal? It has to be someone with great stature.”

“That’s a hard one,” says Trump, “since nobody’s stature is as great as mine. I might have to give it to myself. But I want Greenland first!”

  

Takedown

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill. 

Wendell Berry, Questionnaire

I remember black and white television, the V of the antenna protruding from the rear of the set. We got channel 13 from Los Angeles, the big city to the south of Santa Barbara, and on channel 13 we watched roller-derby with the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, boxing from the Olympic Auditorium, and professional wrestling. This was long before WWE took off and became a huge phenomenon, but the basic characters and storylines were similar, good guys and villains. The good guys fought fair, played by the rules, and with the villians it was anything goes. The only wrestler I remember was a good guy named Bobo Brazil, a black man with huge biceps and pecs and astonishing agility and athleticism. 

The crowd went wild when Bobo climbed into the ring against that night’s villain. Bobo usually started fast, with fancy footwork and a two-footed drop kick that decked the villain, but after taking some pummeling the villain always mounted a comeback, usually be jamming a thumb in Bobo’s eye or smacking him in the nuts. The villain would get Bobo on the canvas or pinned against the ropes and hammer away with a torrent of blows that no normal human could hope to survive. Bam! Bobo goes face first into the turnbuckle. Bam! Bobo gets body slammed. Bam! Bobo sails over the top rope and into the first row of spectators. Big Bobo would collapse on the canvas and the villain would pounce on his chest and try to pin him, but after a two count Bobo bucked the villian off and staggered to his feet. Knowing Bobo was dazed, the villain went in for the kill, karate chopping Bobo in the neck and slinging him against the ropes, then flattening him on the rebound with a wicked body block. Just when you thought Bobo was a goner, he rallied and launched a counterattack. Energized by the crowd, Bobo tossed his adversary around like a rag doll until he begged for mercy. With the crowd in a frenzy Bobo pinned the villain, proving once again that cheaters and bad guys don’t win in the end. 

But they do, or so it seems. A con man is President of the United States. The Attorney General of the United States is so consumed with kissing Trump’s flabby white ass that he forgets his oath of office. The Republican Party stomps on its moral compass and then tosses it from the top of Trump Tower. Democrats bicker among themselves, wring their hands, play the purity game, suck up to corporate donors and bow before the Israel lobby. Energy company lobbyists ransack the EPA. ICE agents terrorize little children. It’s a damn certainty that the US is going to launch a military strike against Iran.While Trump uses racial animosity to pit people against each other and completely distract and divide the nation, his bagmen and cronies line up to raid the treasury. The bad guys are like looters, smashing windows and making off with whatever they can carry; sirens wail, but when the police finally arrive they help the looters instead of arresting them. “Hey, Raytheon, yeah, we’ll pay $40,000 for a toilet seat. C’mon Goldman Sachs, feel free to take some risks, we’ll be here to bail you out. What you need, Exxon-Mobil, is another fat government subsidy! Let’s get you set up.”  

What tickles me most about Republicans is their sanctimonious hypocrisy. You have to admire the size of their balls. Mitch McConnell’s nuts may be old and saggy but his sack still has weight. Imagine if Barack Obama made disparaging remarks about some GOP maven’s grandmother; he’d of been lynched, either figuratively or literally, with Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham leading the charge of the Virginia chapter of the KKK. Trump’s base carry torches and shout “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” while Trump gives Bibi Netanyahu a blowjob and does everything he can to help the Israeli government replace the Palestinians. 

When Trump and his crew of miscreants finish raping America, Trump will build a Presidential Library, a gleaming monument to himself, that will of course be the largest, most expensive, most spectacular presidential library ever --many times more spectacular than Obama’s or Bill Clinton’s -- but what’s this library going to hold? Videos of Trump’s weird Nuremberg-style campaign rallies? Unedited collections of his insane Tweets? His collection of love letters from Kim Jong-Un? His golf clubs, a Confederate flag, a sword from Saudia Arabia, an NRA banner, maybe a Budweiser can autographed by Brett Kavanaugh? The first MAGA cap? A statue of Ivanka? 

The good guys are reeling, blood dripping on the canvas. How many more kicks in the ribs and stomps on our heads can we take? If only we could wipe the blood from our eyes and focus on the real villains, those fuckers in the expensive suits and shiny shoes, every last one of them sporting an American flag lapel pin. Ain’t hard to rob a bank when you own the damn thing. 

Letter To My Daughter

“All meaningful resistance takes place outside the formal political structures.” Chris Hedges, Truthdig

In a few weeks you will turn eighteen. You will be eligible to vote, a right that women in this country struggled to obtain for three quarters of a century. Fearless women. Women armed with iron will and determination. Resolute women. You should never forget -- or take for granted -- the blood, sweat and tears that made it possible for you to exercise the franchise. Civil rights in this country are never given -- they have to be won -- and then protected, guarded, with unrelenting vigilance. 

Your education in our local public schools didn’t prepare you to be an engaged citizen, and our degraded media landscape, 95% of it controlled by corporations with their own interests and agendas, which, you will learn, has little to do with your interests. Corporate media mainly serves to obscure, confuse, or distract the public. How many times in your young life have you heard me rail at the television, furious at the mindless trivia that passes for news or apoplectic at the refusal of the weather person to say the words “climate change?” Understand, my daughter, that you must pay more attention to the subjects the corporate media doesn’t cover than those it does. If you want to be informed, you must look elsewhere, to independent media where real journalists are more intent on exposing the motivations of the powerful than they are cozying up to them and repeating their talking points. Here are a few names. Amy Goodman. Jeremy Scahill. Allan Nairn. Mehdi Hasan. Patrick Cockburn. Abby Martin. Robert Fisk. 

It’s no fault of your own that you have yet to realize how limited American democracy -- and I refer here to federal and state offices more than local ones -- is, and that it is so by design. The Founding Fathers, all white, all male, many of them slave owners, placed, from the beginning, the sanctity of private property above the needs of the people. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, and Thomas Jefferson, to name a few, had no love of popular democracy. They feared the mob, the uneducated masses whose passions might be manipulated by a demagogue or charlatan, and they created impediments to popular sovereignty. One of these constructions, the Electoral College, is why the nation and the world is saddled with the malignant fraud who currently occupies the White House. 

Polls consistently show that the majority of the American public supports some form of universal health care, secure retirement, good and affordable public education, protection of the environment, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and a reduction in military spending. The problem is that what people want and what the political system is willing to deliver are two completely different things. The United States Senate is firmly in the hands of the Republican Party whose base of support is in underpopulated rural states; our state, for instance, has nearly 40 million people, but we have the same number of Senators as Wyoming and North and South Dakota whose combined populations are puny by comparison. You are destined to learn about the tyranny of the minority. This is not an accident. It’s one reason why the popular will is continually thwarted. 

As it is want to do, money has perverted our political system. There is a pathology of great wealth in America. Too few hands control too much wealth, and that wealth enables these few hands to bend the political system to their will and for their interests. This breeds more tyranny. The wealthy are largely unaccountable. Their greed is sanctioned and protected by the legislators they buy and control. 

The broad American middle class built after World War II, when Germany and Japan and most of Europe was in ashes, has been shrinking for decades. Today it’s practically shrivelled. To go into all the reasons here would make this letter too long, but let me give you a thumbnail version: the decline of manufacturing and organized labor, and the decision of the Democratic Party to abandon its traditional constituencies after electoral losses in 1968 and 1972, coupled with a conservative backlash against the 1960’s counterculture, got the ball rolling away from the middle class and toward the wealthy. Ronald Reagan convinced people that government was the source of their problems, and that cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy was the magic solution. Democrats went right along. 

I have this nagging feeling that I haven’t done enough to leave you and your brother a more just world and a more promising future. I write this letter to you because I’m afraid of what’s coming, of the world you are soon to inherit. The dark forces of racism, ignorance, cruelty, brutality and bigotry are marching all over the world. Almost as deadly is the absolute denial in the corridors of power, particularly in Washington D.C., of the onrushing climate catastrophe. It borders on the criminal, but to whom can we appeal? The wealthy believe their money, power and influence will shield them from climate change, as if they inhabit an alternate biosphere. Climate change is only for the rest of us. 

The answer? I don’t know. Vote wisely, but don’t expect too much from political leaders. Cultivate a healthy suspicion and remember that all governments lie, as the great American journalist I.F. Stone famously said. Real social change rarely comes from the top -- it starts from the bottom, with people willing to demand change, like the brave women who agitated for decades until they won the right to vote. Carry that legacy into your future. 

Sleeping With The Fishes

“Men forget themselves too quickly, and a mercy is often the first thing revoked.” Esi Edugyan, Washington Black

Jeffrey Epstein sleeps with the fishes. It’s like something out of a Hollywood movie or an episode of the Blacklist. The accused financier commits suicide in his jail cell, despite being a suicide risk. How? How did he do it? With what? In the coming days and weeks conspiracy theories will sprout like toadstools. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if the far right media machine claims that Hillary Clinton slipped into Epstein’s cell and plunged a hypodermic needle filled with an untraceable neurotoxin (provided to her by Vladimir Putin) into his carotid artery. If Hillary could operate a pedophilia racket out of a pizza parlor, she certainly could off Jeffrey Epstein. 

Nor would it surprise me if some low-level jailer takes the fall for the failure of the “System.” Many pointed questions should be asked of the people who run the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Maybe Donald J. Trump’s attorney, William Barr, can get on that. I’m sure Barr will do a thorough job and provide a nice whitewash of this sordid affair. Protecting powerful people is Barr’s speciality. 

Doesn’t Epstein’s demise seem awfully convenient? It’s possible that the dirt the pedophile -- treated with such deference and solicitude by Alex Acosta in Florida -- had on powerful people (even Trump), was so incendiary that the last thing these people wanted was for Epstein to testify in court. It’s also possible that Epstein knew his goose was fully cooked this time around, no way his money and connections could buy his freedom, and was determined to do himself in. Sixty-six years old, facing years in prison, with no possibility of ever again molesting or deflowering an underage girl, maybe such a future was too bleak for Epstein to contemplate.

It’s axiomatic that rich white men in America rarely get the punishment they deserve. Money, family connections, pedigree, buys leniency, second and third and fourth chances, and the benefit of the doubt. Just the natural order in a country built on the protection of private property and white privilege, where money talks and Justice takes a long, lonely walk. 

A heavy stench of rot and decay hangs over America, so thick as to be almost visible. Jeffrey Epstein sleeps with the fishes, his evil erased from this world, but not from the bodies and minds of his victims. 

The Bullets of August

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to.” Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian 

Republicans have figured out the cause of gun violence in America. It’s not guns themselves. It’s not white nationalism. It’s not the unhinged brand of capitalism that has hollowed out towns and inner cities and hamlets, put people under extraordinary stress as they struggle against structural poverty and a diminished future, and made them look for scapegoats to explain their misery and anxiety and fear. It’s not our hyper-militarized culture and glorification of war, our “big, beautiful military” as Donald J. Trump calls it, the F-18’s screaming over football stadiums, and the endless “Thank you for your service” adulation given to our troops, even those who have never been within 5,000 miles of combat.  

Video games, violent video games, there’s your culprit. 

Video games. 

A video game didn’t drive 600 miles with the intent of launching a murderous rampage outside and inside a WalMart store in El Paso, Texas. El Paso. A border city with intimate ties to Mexico. A city of immigrants. A city that has pushed back against Trump’s demonizing. 

A video game didn’t load the assault weapon, aim and pull the trigger. A video game didn’t install fear of brown-skinned immigrants in the head of the murderer. A video game didn’t refer to immigrants and asylum seekers, over and over, as an invading force, a gang of criminals, rapists and drug dealers. A video game didn’t demand that Congress authorize funding to build a dubious border wall, itself a symbol of fear. A video game can’t claim to have the unfailing backing of the NRA and all the political clout and cover it buys. A video game has no influence over the United States Senate, and the bills that body takes up or ignores.  

If you have the power to act, but have no intention of doing so because it might cost you political support or campaign donors or invitations to appear on FOX News, you play the distraction game. You shout and point, over there, not over here where the problem is. Trump gives a master class in this misdirection nonsense every single day. 

As I write this I am being pilloried on social media for suggesting that Trump will probably make a quick run down to El Paso, not because he cares about the dead or the grieving, but because the optics might help his re-election effort. The people attacking me have forgotten Trump in Puerto Rico, tossing rolls of paper towels to people after Hurricane Maria. They have forgotten his deploying military troops to the southern border in the runup to the 2018 midterm elections. Trump uses people and places as props. A man who condones, even encourages for its chilling effect, the separation of small children from their parents at the border doesn’t care about people. But it’s me, and folks of my bent, who are the problem. Unpatriotic. Haters. We don’t love America. We are suspect. We are trolls. We should leave. 

As he did so many times, the great James Baldwin said it best. To paraphrase, I love America so much that I reserve the right to criticize it. I reserve the right to demand that my country live up to the ideals enumerated in its founding documents. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All men are created equal, with certain inalienable rights. Due process under the law. Freedom of speech and assembly and religion; freedom from unlawful search and seizure.

And, yes, the right to bear arms. But the right must come with responsibility and a measure of common sense. If you want to operate a motor vehicle, you have to take a test and obtain a license; in most states you also have to prove that you have insurance because a motor vehicle can become a danger to others. Periodically you have to renew your license. States mandate this and we comply. States also mandate that our vehicles be registered, that our tags are paid for and properly affixed. We don’t lose our minds and scream that the government is intruding, abridging our rights. Why shouldn’t this be true for purchasing and owning a firearm? You can have one, or more than one; you can own pistols and rifles and shotguns. Undergo a background check, take a safety course, obtain and maintain a license. Seems like a fair trade-off, given the damage a firearm in misguided hands can do. 

But here’s the thing: assault-style weapons are for the battlefield, not the mall, the nightclub, the concert hall, the theater, the school, the synagogue, the church, the mosque, the university campus, the city hall.    

And most definitely not a WalMart in El Paso.  

America is a violent, angry, confused and divided nation; we’re angry because we’re afraid of who might lurk in the shadows, afraid they might take what we have, even if all we have is an illusion of how exceptional we are; afraid of a future that looks grim; afraid of the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians; afraid of Islam. Fear breeds hatred, and hatred breeds violence, and violence breeds more violence. 

And here we are. Again.

Seeing the Contours

“The color is innocent enough, but things with which it is coupled make it hated. Slavery, ignorance, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn.” Frederick Douglass

One

I compost kitchen scraps and leaves and clippings in a medium capacity plastic composter in our backyard. One of those drum composters, with two compartments and rollers that allow it to be spun. I’ve composted in our narrow backyard for years, in bare piles and homemade bins fashioned with scrap wood and chicken wire and, until it fell apart, a plastic bin from Smith and Hawken that was my mother-in-law’s. The drum is the best composter yet, even though the aperture is a bit small. I like the idea of turning waste into fertilizer. Seems like a good metaphor for life. It takes time to make fertilizer, some patience and care, just as it takes time for the contours of life to start making sense. What I mean is that it takes time to learn to see the contours, how they fit together. It’s easy to miss a lot of signs along the way. What seems monumental today may be meaningless further down the road, and the apparently meaningless might turn out to be monumental. 

Two

The real criminal types aren’t satisfied with taking over a street or village or city. Real criminals think much bigger. They take over governments and entire countries, fix the laws for their own benefit and the benefit of their compatriots and collaborators. Hasn’t this always been so? 

Three

My congressman, Salud Carbajal, put his finger to the breeze begun by others with more courage, and only voiced his support for the impeachment of President Trump when it was safe to do so. Political pragmatism, I guess. Courage is more admirable in my book, especially when the most fundamental principle of representative democracy is at stake. Even while we watch Trump take hammer and chisel to the integrity and legitimate authority of the Legislative branch, Salud waited, hesitated, calculated. On the question of whether the chief executive is immune to, exempt from, and above the law, Salud followed the herd, but only when it was politically safe to do so. Not exactly a profile in courage. 

Four

Fiesta time in Santa Barbara. For some, a time to remember the city’s Spanish and Mexican origins, for others it’s all about commerce, hotel occupancy rates, bed taxes. We saw some of the parade on State Street, men on horses waving and calling out, “Viva La Fiesta!”, horse-drawn carriages or wagons hauling local bigwigs. Ladies on horseback, their colorful dresses flowing, flowers in their hair. Little girls in traditional dress tossing flowers into the crowd lined along the street. Horse hooves clip-clopping on the pavement. The image that stuck with me was of a vaquero holding an American flag. I imagined the days when State Street was packed dirt and Fiesta was a much smaller, more local affair. Progress. Maybe. 

Five

We used to think big in America. Send a man to the moon and bring him back safely. Eradicate poverty. Establish the Peace Corps. Now we think small. Once we had confidence, now we’re afraid, all the time, of shadows and just about everything else. What happened to us?

Six

I’m reading Sam Shepard’s last book, a slim volume called Spy of the First Person. Just finished Stony The Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.