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.