Menace

 “At some time or other in life, everyone finds themselves at an important crossroads and must tackle their fate head-on.” Varlam Shalamov, Sketches Of The Criminal World

Menace is at my feet this evening. That’s not the puppy’s real name, not yet, though it would be appropriate. Since my mother-in-law bought her from a woman in LA, the Shih-Tzu pup has answered to Martini, Chula, Cali, Calliope, Xochitl, Sweetums, Lil’ Mama, and Jessie, the latter being my mother-in-law’s choice, which she’s sticking to even though the entire family hates it. Not long after getting the pup Mother-in-Law had to have hip replacement surgery and that curtailed her ability to care for her new charge. We have the baby. I call the puppy Menace because she’s always getting into things, gnawing on power cords, having the occasional bodily accident on the rug. She likes to eat her own shit and will wolf it down in the blink of an eye. Menace has learned that people often drop food in the kitchen, little morsels, crumbs, and if quick enough she can snatch a treat. At this very moment she is sitting by the open back door, chewing on one of my Adidas slides. Tipping the scale at about two pounds, she’s a playful, schizophrenic ball of brown and white fur. The tip of her tail is white. We’re all infatuated with her, though I will be glad when she stops nipping at my toes.  

How can people be happy when life’s so shitty for so many? How can life be so beautiful and so ugly at the same time? Dealing with contradiction is part of the human condition. The cruelty of America often stuns me, though it shouldn’t because our history as a nation overflows with it. We’re not unique and hardly exceptional, except when it comes to the number of savage gun deaths we tolerate year after year. Atlanta and Boulder have joined the club. Columbine, Las Vegas, El Paso, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Orlando, Parkland. Too many places to list because in this American culture mass shootings happen so often they no longer shock. The motives for the killing sprees in Atlanta and Boulder are not entirely clear; young men with serious problems and easy access to killing equipment. 

To operate motor vehicles in this country we require that people have drivers licenses and insurance in case they hit something or somebody. There are tests, written and performance, and fairly strict rules of the road that must be followed after the license is issued. Licenses can also be revoked. This system works reasonably well, although an argument can be made that too many people still die each year in automobile accidents. But the point is that collectively we accept drivers’ licenses as a necessary, reasonable method of ensuring we can all enjoy the privilege of driving with a measure of safety. But when it comes to guns we require very little. Why? Well, one reason is that gun ownership has become -- was deliberately made to be -- a deeply contested, hot-button political issue, a litmus test for conservatives. The GOP and the NRA were a marriage that worked to make gun ownership a third-rail of American politics. After every mass shooting that I can recall, the NRA immediately mobilized its might and pressured Congress to do nothing -- and Congress complied. The 2nd Amendment has been twisted like a pretzel, out of all proportion to its meaning and the context of the time when it was written. The men who wrote the Bill of Rights could not have imagined the lethal weaponry ordinary people would one day find easy to get their hands on. Semi-automatic pistols, assault rifles with extra large magazines. My friend in Michigan knows firearms better than I do, and can quote make, model, velocity, types of ammunition, the whole catalog. I don’t own any firearms, never have, but I respect my fellow citizens’ right to own rifles, pistols, and shotguns, whether used for sport or protection. I have no problem with people owning firearms for these purposes. But I think buying and owning a firearm should require some effort, a few hoops to jump through before a permit to purchase and own is issued. Is a background check or waiting period that unreasonable? Guns are a public safety issue and only the State has the power to regulate them. Regulation isn’t foolproof or failsafe, nothing ever is, and as soon as the government declares something illegal, whether alcohol or heroin, some enterprising, cunning people will find a weakness to exploit and make money supplying the forbidden to willing buyers. 

The gun manufacturer’s lobby is another reason no real action is ever taken; the making and selling of firearms is big business. 2020 was a record year for gun sales. 

The NRA isn’t the potent political force it once was, mired in corruption and bankruptcy proceedings, but the arguments it pushed remain articles of faith among many conservatives, and the likelihood of any sensible legislation emerging from Congress is slim. Republicans will employ the usual scare tactics, accusing Democrats of wanting to take away everyone’s guns. Debate will run in circles and no matter what measures are proposed, they are certain to die on the floor of our dysfunctional Senate. This sick process will repeat after the next mass shooting. Our political “leaders” protect the right to bear arms more vigorously than they protect the welfare and safety of citizens. 

In national polls a majority of Americans favor stricter gun controls, a trend that has been consistent for years. But if there’s one thing our political system excels at it’s ignoring the will of the majority. The next mass shooting is coming to a city, town or hamlet near you. Ready your thoughts and prayers. 

Sailing Under the Black Flag

 “White supremacy is ravenous and vicious. It is America’s embryotic fluid. America was born in it and genetically coded by it.” Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know

The other day I learned that my dentist died. I last saw him six months ago. His practice had slowed down due to the pandemic, but he was managing to keep two hygienists and his office manager employed. All three had been with him for years, decades in one case. Good people. The office had a friendly vibe, a treasure chest for children, family photos on the walls. This man cared for my teeth for thirty years. Two or three root canals, a couple of cracked teeth, crowns. He was five years my senior, but our children -- one boy, one girl apiece -- were about the same age. The news of his death hit hard because it wasn’t preceded by an accident or illness, his time was simply up, his existence claimed by natural causes.

The back end of life isn’t an easy victory lap. 

My dentist’s sudden death made me aware of the passage of time and the precariousness of all the things we think of as solid and lasting. I believe a reckoning is coming that will make the Covid pandemic look minor by comparison. Much of what’s coming I can do little about: shit’s going to happen to me and those I love, to my city and state, my country, the world. Some of it will be wrenching, of that I have no doubt. As I was skipping rope the other day this thought flitted across my mind: am I training for the apocalypse? Am I trying to be physically ready for whatever comes? Maybe. The training regimen I’ve created for myself has become a lifestyle. Funny how that happens. What we do consistently, we become some version of. The women from my mother’s side of the gene pool live a long time, several of them into their 90’s. My mother’s older brother, my last remaining uncle, is 87, still mentally sharp, a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan. With good fortune and smart choices I could live another twenty years, a thought more unnerving than exciting given the state of the world. I think of the film Nomadland and remember that in this soulless consumer Potemkin Village called the United States, it takes very little for people to lose their grip and freefall. Lose a job, health insurance, fall behind on the rent -- name a calamity -- and it could mean living on a rectangle of concrete under a freeway overpass. When I was a boy back in the 1960’s and 1970’s we thought of “hobos” in romantic terms, riding flatcars from state to state, heating Dinty Moore beef stew over an open fire, free to ride the breeze and laze around while others toiled. To my young eyes the world seemed more hospitable. Of course, it wasn’t hospitable then and isn’t now.  There’s nothing romantic about homelessness and poverty. 

Our politics is a cynical, empty circus of bullshit, and our citizens are easily duped by fools and charlatans. 

Every morning on my ride to the office I see the same three vans parked near the Armory. People live in these vehicles. They migrate around the block, at times parking on Nopal Street, other times on De La Guerra. It has to be hard living, cold at night when the temperature drops, cramped, and under constant threat from the authorities to move along. After watching the film Nomadland I can’t look at these vans the same way. They’re emblematic of a serious curse that afflicts working people across America -- a shortage of decent, affordable housing. The roots of this problem are long and run deep beneath the bedrock of our capitalism-gone-haywire era. In the words of Matthew Desmond, the author of Evicted, without adequate housing, lives fall to pieces. I think the same can be said of the absence of health care, which in America is a feature of our fealty to the Market God. We can’t have Medicare for All because the idea of a collective system provided by the government runs counter to our faith in Markets, and would brand us as Socialists, which might bring on a permanent eclipse of the sun and the end of the world.  In America our one and only choice is to sail under Capitalism’s black flag. Better to let people suffer and die without health care than to imitate the Europeans or Japanese. 

We live in serious times, but America isn’t a serious country. Our politics is a cynical, empty circus of bullshit, and our citizens are easily duped by fools and charlatans. We long ago stopped teaching civics. Americans don’t appreciate the effort that rule of the people requires, and those in power seek to keep it that way. A dumbed-down polity is easier to manipulate and control. So, facing a rabid movement of white supremacists who would rather burn it all down than share power with black and brown folks, we argue over Mr. Potatohead and Dr. Suess. America has been trapped in a downward spiral of dumbness for a long time. The pandemic exposed America’s crumbling facade, its utter hypocrisy and idiocy. Drink bleach. Fuck masks. Ignore science. 

What shall be done? The eternal human question. Either we renew our commitment to democracy or we accept authoritarianism, there’s no third way or middle ground. 

I will miss my dentist. He was a decent man who cared about others and used his skill to make their lives better. 

Freedom to the Winds

“Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons?” Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

It hailed in Santa Barbara this week. My wife got some lovely photos of the courthouse lawn, green streaked with white, and a bed of succulents covered with ice. I can’t remember the last time it hailed here. As little rainfall as we get a hailstorm, no matter how brief, is notable. Lake Cachuma still looked pretty sad the last time we drove past on Highway 154, but our area isn’t in a severe drought. Not yet. The weather’s kind of unpredictable now, a result of our endless meddling in Mother Nature’s business. Do I think human beings are killing the planet? Yes. Will we adapt to it like we have adapted to Covid? Probably. And once we adapt, is there ever any going all the way back? Covid, or something like it, will be with us from now on. 

When I ruminate on our changing climate and the obscene disparities of wealth and power in most places, I figure the wealthy can buy many kinds of protection to give them the best chance of long term survival when the rule of law becomes the law of the jungle. Not hard to imagine a world where the wealthy hoard the resources needed to sustain life, and defend their control of those resources to the death. Grim. Has wisdom and justice ever prevailed in human history? Has decency and kindness ever ruled?  Not to my knowledge. Someone always winds up having more power over others than any human should. Life and death power. 

I received the single dose Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine in my left arm yesterday. This morning when I woke up I felt fine in every respect, but around ten o’clock I began to feel a little dull, a touch fatigued. It wore on as the hours in the office passed and I had to skip my usual Friday evening training session. It’s the one time each week when I feel like working in a higher gear, just because it’s Friday and I can recover the following day. I took a nap instead. My son came up from LA to file his taxes and is staying with us, and I could hear him and his sister sniping at each other in the next room. Non-stop insults, brutal sarcasm, obscene putdowns. The bickering hits a lull and then flares up. The problem is the lack of space, we’re crammed together, four adults now, much different from two adults and two children. I think we’re another month from moving. Our harried and haggard landlord continues his renovation project below us and in the backyard. Our “stuff” is scattered around, piled high, covered with concrete dust. Every day when I go downstairs my training gear has been moved; I stubbornly move it right back to where I can get to it easily. I try not to let the lack of control bug me but it does. We never amassed enough money to buy a house here in our hometown and likely never will. That vessel sailed long ago. This bothers me far less than it once did. I don’t see us becoming as rootless as the people in the film Nomadland, but nor can I see that we will ever own the roof over our heads, which means we will be subject to other people’s rules and bullshit. Money buys many kinds of freedom. 

Should we get used to the idea that we’re going to extinguish all life on this planet one day?That’s cynical and defeatist and hopeless, isn’t it? Yes it is. I’m trying to remember if I felt more hope before Covid hit and gave us a glimpse of the future than I do a year later, after 500,000 Americans have died and the lives of millions more have been forever altered. There are stories from the forgotten and the ignored that we don’t hear about. I’m lucky to have a speedily created vaccine in my arm that I paid nothing for directly. It’s not that I lack hopes and dreams and desires, I still have some. I definitely want to travel more, see places and people, watch a football match in Spain or Italy or England. I’d love to get back to Italy. I liked the vibe there. I’m cynical, yes, but perhaps not entirely faithless because I believe there are many people like me, neither rich or impoverished, who are very content to live and let live, who are opposed to violence as a national ethos, and who think justice is vital to insure long term peace. The big middle, that’s us. We’re rarely consulted about anything except what our money can buy. Money never excited me enough to chase it with all my heart. I read Henry Miller and other sages carefully and they spoke to me about life, what has value, what’s eternal and good in the human species. People go to incredible lengths to help one another survive. Covid has shown us the best and worst in ourselves. 

Joe Biden and the Democrats shepherded a Covid relief bill through Congress. No Republicans voted for the bill but many of their constituents stand to benefit from the legislation. Now Biden has to sell this accomplishment to the public, explaining and highlighting what it will do for working people, small business owners, and children. The Democrats cannot take for granted that the voting public will remember come 2022. Meanwhile, the GOP continues to bow to Trump, who is being hemmed in on all sides with lawsuits and investigations. America is much quieter now that Trump is off the main stage. The danger the Republic faces is still present, make no mistake about that, and what emerges from the investigation into the January 6th Insurrection will be important. How close to Trump will that probe get? How many of those charged will flip for leniency? What was Roger Stone’s role? Stone is a weird fucker, the kind of villian Made in America, something he shares in common with Donald Trump. 

A Year of Covid

 “The other wing of the neoliberal establishment, the one represented by the Democratic party leadership, fears that exposing capitalism in this way – making explicit its inherently brutal, wrist-slitting tendencies – will awaken the masses, that over time it will risk turning them into revolutionaries.” Jonathan Cook

As we near one year of life in a pandemic I think of The Plague by Camus which I re-read last Spring. I remember the first lockdown, when the streets of Santa Barbara were deserted, eerily silent, except for the sound of the breeze in the trees; I remember walking to the grocery store with my wife, standing anxiously in a long line to pick-up some basic foodstuffs, hoping to find eggs, milk, beans, and toilet paper; I remember a Saturday morning at Smart & Final, staring in near disbelief at empty shelves, like I was in a tale from the old Soviet Union. It all looked and felt so strange, like the end of the world. 

Last March and April I felt certain the pandemic would get worse before it got better, and sure enough, primarily because of the criminally negligent response of the Trump gang, the death toll from Covid-19 rose steadily. When it surpassed 100,000 I was stunned. How could this happen in the United States? It was a question easily answered: a broken political establishment headed by Trump, a cruel ideology hostile to knowledge, science, common sense, and expertise. Trump treated it like a PR opportunity. Day after day he stood before the people and lied out of his ass. I started a series of reflections titled, The Isolation Diaries, which became, after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police, The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries. 

The rebellion for racial justice was short lived, as Charles M. Blow notes in his latest book, The Devil You Know. Blow writes, “And in the end, however protest is performed, for what motivations, it will eventually wane. Outrage is an expensive emotion. It consumes energy like a blaze. At some point, inevitably, the fuel is exhausted.” Our collective attention moved on even as other black men were murdered by trigger-happy police officers. 

I don’t know what being “woke” really means. I was awake to the reality of race in America long ago, by virtue of reading and reflection, and I recognized my unearned white privilege for just that, a privilege, a passport to move about freely without a thought of being targeted by law enforcement, or regarded by society as an existential threat. With very little effort I could live in peaceful anonymity. This privilege fell to me by virtue of my birth. By my whiteness I could enjoy first and second chances. I got this white ticket by sheer blind luck, by being born to my French-Canadian parents. I didn’t earn the privilege, it was handed to me. Do I fully understand what it’s like to be an Other? No. Can I imagine what it’s like? Yes. If you sit long enough with the truth, you can get to that place. 

My mind is a contradiction, full and empty at the same moment, fatigued but antsy. I wonder if the Democrats will compromise away their chances of expanding their slim majorities in 2022. If the past is prologue, it’s almost guaranteed they will. Angry, frustrated voters will take it out on Democrats in 2022. To make sure they win, the GOP will depress turnout using all their anti-democracy tricks; if the GOP retakes one of the chambers, or both, I don’t see how the nation remains “united” in anything but name. At that point, faced with permanent minority rule, the so-called Blue states should secede. Sounds crazy, but is it any crazier than a handful of white, male senators from sparsely populated states blocking any and all legislation that might better the lives of the majority? Is denying majority rule not a form of craziness? Too many elected officials believe democracy is a nuisance and the oath they swear little more than a mild admonition, completely optional. As we careen from crisis to crisis we need a functioning federal government. Why? Because no other entity can manage a crisis on a nationwide scale. No other entity has the resources. No other entity can do what needs to be done to keep climate catastrophe, of which pandemics are part, at bay. Sorry, Texas, you proved the case for the regulation of core common resources, which include electricity and water. 

I worry for my children’s future, especially my daughter. Does she have enough grit? Have we coddled her too much, let too many things slide and been too easy on her? The near future will see climate refugees as parts of the planet sink under rising oceans, food production becomes impossible, and entire regions burn. I don’t imagine life will be easy, especially for the masses of people in the Have Not camp. As life is constantly upended, made inconvenient and then uncomfortable, our fears of one another will grow. If our laws are not fairly executed by honest people, if there is no accountability for the wealthy and powerful, if a new appreciation for the commons that we all depend on isn’t nurtured and supported by the people, another Trump-like figure will rise. 

It’s a crazy world, as beautiful as it is horrid. People fly in private jets over concrete bridges under which people live. The chosen and the rest. The royal family. The cardinal and the pope. The landed gentry and the golden aristocracy. The plutocrats. The oligarchs. The Supreme Leader. The Czar. The Fuhrer. The President for Life. The General. The emperor. Who rules? Who says how the pie is to be divided and among whom? How can you live free if you’re burdened with debt, suffer a chronic illness and have no medical care, and work two or three crappy soul-killing jobs to make what one job once paid? Who has the money and power? How do they get it, hold it, expand it? 

A year of Covid, a changed landscape. The outdoor eating areas on State Street look fancier and more permanent all the time.