New Beginnings

 “The single-minded pursuit of happiness, with happiness equated with hedonism, wealth, and power, creates a population consumed by anxiety and self-loathing.” Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

Moving day nears. On my 62nd birthday I watch West Ham versus Chelsea and then start packing, focusing on bookshelves. We have a lot of knick-knacks, theater playbills, photo albums. The boxes of books are heavy. While we prepare to move down the street, our son is moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a new job at the SF Opera. He and a friend stop by on their way north, in a 10’ U-Haul truck. My wife hands our son a Trader Joe’s bag full of treats and drinks for the road. When my mother called to wish me a happy birthday she told me that she will also be moving in May. The building she lives in is getting a plumbing overhaul, so rather than deal with daily noise and water outages, she’s moving in with a friend for a month. Strange that we’re all moving. In our case it’s long overdue. One way to tell you’ve lived in the same place too long is by the shadows left on the walls when pictures and mirrors are removed. 

So, I’m now 62. This blog is 17. Why do I keep at it? Why do I toss my words into the endless anonymity of the Internet? Must be ego, or stupidity, maybe narcissism. On the other hand, everyone needs a hobby to keep them out of mischief. 

I’m reading a fine book by William Deresiewicz called The Death of the Artist. It’s about the changes technology has wrought for writers, visual artists, and musicians. From Napster to Netflix, from three major television networks to streaming services that serve very specific slices of the viewing public. TV by subscription, on-demand, available on every one of our magic devices. Like all new technologies, it has made a few people very, very wealthy, but landed many more in precarious financial circumstances. Writers giving work away, spending hours and hours promoting themselves on social media in order to make money. It’s fascinating, and somewhat a downer for me as both my kids want to work in the Arts. 

In the midst of the latest spate of police violence I stumbled across a website called KnockLA and started reading an investigative series about the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. It’s a serious piece tracking fifty years of egregious misconduct against citizens of color by sheriff gangs who went by names like The Vikings and Tasmanian Devils. Unique tattoos were common in these “law enforcement” gangs. They beat suspects mercilessly, shot and killed many, planted evidence, executed blatantly unlawful searches and seizures, and lied in court under oath. What I found more chilling was how gang members treated fellow deputies who refused to go along. I remember reading stories in the LA Times about Sheriff Sherman Block, and Lee Baca, but since LA county is a hundred-plus miles from Santa Barbara, the stories were abstract. Reading this series in light of what is happening between police and citizens of color all across this country feels more immediate. Over 30 years, LA County shelled out some 100 million taxpayer dollars in legal expenses and settlements. I don’t completely subscribe to the Defund the Police idea. I think money definitely needs to be diverted from the police to other public services. Law enforcement is in dire need of consistent standards. Some of the legal protections cops enjoy need to be removed. Not every dime should be shifted-- we need police -- but police trained to respect the laws they swear to uphold, and stripped of the majority of their military-grade hardware. Here’s a link to Knock LA: https://knock-la.com.

62. I stopped drinking last July 31, cut out beer, wine, gin, whisky. I thought alcohol was getting the best of me and that I was reaching for a beer too reflexively. It wasn’t hard to stop. I think I might have a wee drink of whisky this evening, raise a glass to new beginnings and good luck. 

Two Verdicts

 “The number of fans has multiplied, along with the number of potential customers of as many things as the image manipulators wish to sell.” Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow

How to rile up the football world? Have a cabal of wealthy team owners make an announcement that 15 of the biggest football clubs in Europe are breaking away from their respective leagues to start their own European Super League. I began writing about this on Monday, before the whole scheme unraveled with extraordinary speed. Supporters were not having it. Pundits were aghast. Former players reacted with anger. The word “greed” was tossed around in a way almost never heard in this country, where business titans are impervious to criticism. And then the dominoes fell, first Man City, then Chelsea, followed by Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Tottenham. The firestorm of criticism that erupted on social media and swept across the world was astonishing. The greedheads got rolled by a tsunami and lost control of their gambit. What seemed to the moguls a can’t-miss money-making bonanza -- a virtual monopoly over the highest quality football in the world -- ran headlong into the love of football fans for the game and their beloved clubs; ran headlong into traditions built over 100 years or more; ran headlong into the idea that football -- unlike other sports -- belongs to the supporters. The Americans, John Henry, the Glazer brothers, and Stan Kroenke, just found out what love and devotion and tradition really mean. 

Money was the driving motivator behind the ESL. Broadcast deals. Merchandising. Not the good of the game, expanding competition, sharing revenue, or strengthening the football pyramid, that is, all the second, third and fourth tier clubs. Football’s wider ecosystem, where players are developed, learn the game, and move up the ladder. No, the ESL was envisioned as a closed league, an elite league, with no chance of relegation for the 15 founding members. No bumping up against and rubbing elbows with lesser clubs. For the players, among other restrictions, no international duty and its potential for injury. The ESL owners would control their human assets, protect their money-making potential in the same way a racehorse is protected. The owners are interested in profits, first and foremost. An argument can be made that modern football is a business and the owners have every right to make money from their “assets.” But in most countries, football transcends money, and for many supporters the game is almost a mystical experience, as precious as life itself, with generations of fans having grown up supporting a particular club. In England, as elsewhere in Europe, football clubs have deep roots in cities and towns, club and place inextricably linked. Liverpool, for instance, where the relationship between the club and its supporters is long, intimate, intense, and unwavering. Following the fortunes of the club year in and year out gives texture and meaning to the lives of thousands of supporters. 

Do the American owners, in particular, understand the deep bond between supporters and their clubs? Do they care? My guess is no. American capitalists have a long track record of abandoning communities for more profitable pastures. Auto plants, steel mills, foundries, coal mines and factories that gave work and life to towns and cities were sacrificed to the “global” economy. Money has no loyalty except to its own multiplication. When I was a boy the Rams called Los Angeles home; years ago the team’s owner moved the whole shebang to Saint Louis; after the Raiders left working-class Oakland they tried Los Angeles and then settled in Las Vegas. The NBA’s Seattle Supersonics decamped the Emerald City for Oklahoma. There are still a few New Yorkers who remain angry about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. Team owners in America, almost all white and rich, often choose a new home based on the tax breaks they can extort, land they can corner for cheap, and a stadium or arena built for them with taxpayer money. 

I didn’t grow up watching soccer. Back then the sport wasn’t popular in the US, it was weird, foreign, too uneventful for American tastes. I came to the game late in life -- and fell in love. The skill of the players, the passion of the fans, the talk and camaraderie, the global nature of the game -- I fell hard for all of it, in a way I had never experienced. Football brings people together, it brings players from different countries together, it’s inclusive and beautiful and more than a commodity to be packaged and peddled. 

For now, football supporters have stopped the greedheads. 

///

I didn’t follow the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop who murdered George Floyd, because I felt certain he would get off. Despite the overwhelming video evidence, I assumed Chauvin would somehow be exonerated. I didn’t dare believe that Chauvin would be found guilty on any counts, let alone all three. I prepared for a bitter disappointment akin to what I felt when the cops who beat the hell out of Rodney King in Los Angeles walked. I thought of the video of George Floyd’s slow, agonizing death, the smug look on Chauvin’s face as he kneeled on Floyd’s black neck, and how his fellow cops did nothing. 

I would like to think the verdict will mark a turning point, that twenty years from now Americans will look back and see April 20, 2021 as the date the arc of the moral universe actually bent toward justice.

Justice Deferred, Denied & Withheld

 “Classic children’s literature is full of racial, ethnic, class, and gender stereotyping, and the outdated language that goes along with that. Some of that can’t be fixed with a few cuts.” Katha Pollitt, in The Nation

Another young unarmed black man is gunned down by a police officer; his name, Daunte Wright; the officer’s name, Kim Potter. He was 20-years-old. She’s a 26-year veteran, an experienced, trained officer who mistakenly pulled her pistol rather than her taser. To some this fact pattern is incredulous, Potter’s excuse as flimsy as tissue paper. I’ve read that the taser is holstered on the left side, for a right-handed officer, the pistol on the right. After carrying a weapon for 26 years you might assume Potter would instantly feel the difference between her pistol and a taser. The day after the killing, Potter, along with the police chief, resigned. She’s been charged with second-degree manslaughter and is free on bail. Was it premeditated? Hard to say. More likely a mistake in the emotion of the moment. Was it a mistake based on false assumptions? Did Potter assume Wright was armed, that he posed a deadly threat? Will we hear that Wright was “non-compliant,” whatever that means? What, I wonder, is going through Potter’s mind now, and what was going through it when she drew her weapon, pulled the trigger and ended Daunte Wright’s life? Incapacitating force versus deadly force; if Daunte Wright were a 20-year-old white kid would he be alive now? I can’t remember another shooting involving a female officer; it’s usually a male, not that it matters. Daunte Wright is dead. What’s it like to wake up the morning after you ended a human being’s life? A human being who hadn’t posed a threat to your life or committed a serious crime. What does that feel like? And what does it feel like to wake up in the morning and know your son is gone, his life snuffed out?

I don’t know what to think any more other than the pedestrian observation that this country is violent, cruel, and disdainful about the lives of black people and others of darker pigment.  I don’t know if Kim Potter is a racist, but it’s possible she is and has been her entire career. The usual rituals will be performed again: the grieving, distraught family, the protests, the speeches, the social media tributes, the bland official statements and easily forgotten promises of reform from elected officials.Then many Americans will switch over to Fox News and listen to Tucker Carlson riff about The Great Replacement being engineered before our very eyes by Democrats (as if modern Democrats could engineer anything successfully), who are inviting millions of non-white foreigners to become citizens and thereby swell the ranks of Democratic voters. Because, you see, Tucker’s theory is that all brown-skinned immigrants are bleeding heart liberals who will always and forever vote for Democrats. Carlson’s the sort of smug white asshole that makes America hospitable to white supremacy, and he gets plenty of aid from the Murdoch media empire. All those brown-skinned people desperate to cross the border are incapable of thinking for themselves, in Tucker’s estimation, so once safely inside with feet firmly planted on this fruited plain they will do exactly as Democrats say to the detriment of salt-of-the-earth, real, honest-to-Betsy-Ross white Americans. 

White supremacy is out in the open again, promoted by a social media megaphone rather than a politician’s racist dog whistle. The changing demographics of America doesn’t trouble my sleep, it’s disturbed by visions of violent right-wing extremists. Even if they don’t realize it, white folks have more consequential problems to worry about than perceived losses of status and power, like climate change, living-wage jobs, and grotesque, destabilizing wealth inequality. As an idea and organizing principle white supremacy makes no sense to me. My skin is lighter than yours therefore I’m smarter than you, more morally evolved, superior and more deserving. Crock of shit. Power is what it boils down to. 

White folks want black and brown people to stay in their lanes, in their ghettoes, emerging only to mow lawns, mop floors, fold laundry, empty bedpans, and fetch artisanal cocktails at trendy farm-to-table restaurants. 

How long can simple justice be deferred, denied, and withheld? 

FRESH OUT OF LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY

 

“Like all living organisms, trees die. But what is happening here is not normal. Large patches of trees are dying simultaneously, and saplings aren’t growing to take their place.”  Emily Ury, The Guardian

America, America, America, turning into an open air prison, building Walls, turning public space into private, patrolled space, installing cameras and motion sensors, armed security guards. Angry country, as evidenced by mass shootings and slow deaths of despair. We draw the boundary lines and designate what tribe controls what. Won’t be long before states with fresh water supplies fight against states in the grip of drought. Hard to imagine the next decade being anything but a major downer, a clusterfuck the likes of which we’ve not seen. One day some people will look back and say, You know, it wasn’t that bad, even with Covid and the takeover by Christian Fascists. We got along alright. We adapted. Of course some got along in more style and comfort than others, this is America, after all. Trust, but verify in the age of Fear; Hunter S. Thompson called it the Kingdom of Fear -- a decade and a half ago. Evidence of the losing streak we’re stuck on. Too many guns, too few people able to consistently cast a ballot, too much injustice and inequality, too many needy, hungry, and broken. What manner of madness have we created here, on this once fruited plain? Of course that’s not true, either. If ever it was fruited, it was only for some, not all; there was plenty, but little equality. Riches for some, subsistence or slavish struggle for many others. 

Accept and normalize. Democracy may die with a whimper. New doors have opened, new ways to suppress the vote of some, magnify that of others, new ways to deny the popular will. The Would Be Lord down in Mar-a-Lago pointed the way, showed how pliable institutions are, how corrupt and complicit, from the Florida congressional district that barfed up Matt Gaetz, to the waste of an elite education represented by Josh Hawley, to Trump’s idiot children, and that insufferable prick Jared Kushner, to Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio. What a fucking joke. Stephen Miller. All this performative politics, this grotesque American theater, the ineptitude we saw close-up and nationwide when Covid hit and key institutions failed, faltered, fabricated and fucked up, with almost all the death and fear and distrust down to Donald J. Trump and his loyal enablers in the Republican Party. 9/11, Katrina, Trump, Covid. Party over country, and power over principle, year after year, that’s the GOP’s bread and butter power. Trump accelerated our slide to the bottom, Biden’s trying to slow it down. John Boehner is out with a book longing for the good old days of the GOP, the Tea Party days, when the entire party wasn’t beholden to a moron. Boehner’s on the rehabilitation tour now, looking for broken pieces he can collect, use as collateral to wield some influence, maybe rake in a bit of coin in the process.

Meanwhile, we sit in our homes, apartments, cottages, penthouses, basements, suites, condos, duplexes, tippees, or tin-roofed shacks, if such are still around in this day and age. I suppose they exist, in other places, where the cost of land isn’t as dear, places far from the cooling ocean breeze and red-tile splendor of downtown, out in the arid hinterlands where the heat shimmers and dust storms erupt. If we’re among the lucky we sit and wait for GrubHub to deliver dinner. Material wants and needs satisfied with ease on our phones, through the almost instantaneous transfer of funds. That’s some impressive shit, when you stop and think about how quickly we can turn a want into reality. Dropped on our doorstep by a chunky brown-skinned man in a blue Amazon van. Amazon is where we get our food and medicines, our toilet paper, our tampons, our pots and pans, our slow cookers, our tablets, our dildoes and scented lubricants. Amazon for everything, even, sooner or later, XXX porn. Yes, one day King Bezos will figure out a way to make huge profits from porn, he will control the pipes that carry the images, movies, whatever you fancy and are willing to pay for. Any sensible person can figure out the problem with monopolies and the people who own them. It’s pretty simple. Too much ends up in too few hands, and by too much I mean the obscene wealth of men like Bezos, Gates, and Musk. Pick your favorite plutocrat. We can have such people, but we cannot have democracy, too. Even limited democracy is difficult when so few control so much. But I get the frustration with democracy, it’s a slow, time-consuming, at times enervating process, and building any kind of political consensus with staying power is long game work. Social movements that stay in the game, on mission and message, that are adaptable and relevant, that avoid internal corruption and external co-optation are hard to build. Autocracy, on the other hand, can be speedy and decisive -- and disastrously, murderously wrong. Pick your poison. 

Is it better to toil in the gig economy than to work the line at General Motors under the United Autoworkers banner? Unions help working people and that’s why the political right has waged war on unions since Reagan broke PATCO. Look it up, younger readers. That broke the dam. But unions have problems of their own, no matter how much they profess to be “member run” and “democratic.” Power does things to people. A guy starts out in the union battling the tight-assed owner in cover-alls and boots, and sometimes ends up looking like a mirror image of the hated boss, and not only in dress and manner and speech, but in the way he acts the closer he gets to the center of power. Power is corrosive and has to be checked. It’s a diabolically difficult balance. 

In a jam, back to the wall, and fresh out of lawyers, guns and money. What’s a man with no property to do? Whose flag does such a man rally around? Where does such a man find like-minded souls? Down at the Fool’s Cafe where the patrons recite poetry and throw knives, and chant to bring about the brotherhood of man. This world’s crazy. It’s upside down and inside out. Thinking too much about where we go from here could be hazardous to your health. 

Suitcase Full of Memories

 “We can, and must, tax the rich. But not because we can’t afford to do anything without them. We should tax billionaires to rebalance the distribution of wealth and income and to protect the health of our democracy”. Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth

Write utter gibberish I tell myself, howl at the moon, nobody cares and it will cause no harm. I call my friend G in Michigan who just turned 60 and is legally blind and learning how to live as a sightless person. Lost his sight suddenly and for no cause a pack of MD’s could determine. He tells me about a place called Blind University, where blind folks are taught to navigate in the kitchen and out in the world. We talk about once a week, exchange text messages in between, usually about what’s happening in the news, with Trump and the balless, soulless, witless assholes, male and female, who ride with the GOP. G lives in a town full of Trumpers, with several of his nearest neighbors included. They don’t talk politics. G owns a firearm and often schools me on the lethal power of today’s weapons. His son’s in the Army, based at Fort Hood in Texas.  His oldest child, a daughter, is in the process of becoming an MD.  We met thirty years ago here in California and have kept in touch, with just one gap of a decade or so, since. 

We signed the lease on the house a block south from where we live now. Money will soon change hands, and that will seal it tight. Have also given my landlord notice. My family is excited about this move,  as am I, but I also find myself thinking of all the major moments we’ve had in this space, birthday parties, graduations, Thanksgivings, Christmas mornings, then too the screaming fights, slammed doors, arguments, the time I wanted to strangle my son for locking us out of the house, and all the sweet everyday moments. Many nights I felt very lucky to tuck my children into clean beds with a roof overhead and none of us hungry or sick. Too many people take this luxury for granted. I happen to believe that the walls of houses, especially old houses, hold memories, stories, mysteries and miseries; certain spaces just speak to us, give us an immediate sense of familiarity and safety or a shiver of disquiet. I find what I’m feeling surprising, unexpected, because on the one hand we are ready to go, but on the other, I feel a certain reluctance. We had a great run here, and for many years we paid the rent on time and the landlord let us be. Only in the past few years has he become Mr. Grumpy, hunched and haggard-looking, a man carrying a weight he can never unload. 

Time to pack our memories away. 

I finished reading Dalva by Jim Harrison. The main character is a tough, resilient, physically attractive and intelligent woman, independent and confident of her own judgment. She’s the kind of woman who will see a man she wants to sleep with and go after him through the front gate. A woman of many lovers but few loves. Her father was killed in the Korean War. She had a baby with her half-brother. A major thread of the novel is about the American West and the many ways white people ousted the native tribes. There were fortunes to be made on the frontier (and nothing mattered more than that), towns to found and consecrate, railroads to build, and Indians to dislodge. It’s an ugly, brutal story. Millions starved during the harsh winters. The native people fell victim to the white man’s diseases, and succumbed by the thousands. I remember watching westerns on black & white TV when I was very young, the Indians always portrayed as one-dimensional caricatures, murderous barbarians speaking in strange dialects. Americans forced them off the lands they had roamed and survived on for millenia. The native people, far more sophisticated than white people gave them credit for, took what they needed from the land to survive, but they don’t appear to have devoted their lives to squeezing the Earth of everything it had to give. Americans drove the indigenous off, stole the land, rivers, creeks, and streams out from under them, and the American government never made a solemn treaty it didn’t later break. Killed the buffalo herds. Hunted down and Killed Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and all the rest. Americans treated all the tribes as one monolith rather than many distinct groups, a mistake America has since made in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. We didn’t see the native people as being worthy of a share -- and still don’t. There’s a swath of American history I don’t know as well as I’d like, specifically the period from the Louisiana Purchase, around 1804, to 1920. That was a consequential period, great fortunes were made harvesting timber, gold, iron ore, silver, and water. Canals and railroads were built, commerce expanded. The US Congress was corrupt. Manifest Destiny and all that imperial thinking took hold of the American imagination. 

I’m also reading a quirky, wonderful history of Los Angeles by Mike Davis called City of Quartz. I have never understood how Los Angeles became the jumble it is today. LA has always seemed to me a city without a center -- or perhaps too many centers, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Echo Park, Century City and Hollywood. I knew little about LA history, and the few times I went to LA as a child felt more menacing than enthralling. LA was where I was sworn into the United States Air Force. Davis gets under the surface, exposes the major players, the money, the movers & shakers, the politics and the racism against the non-white population. LA was imagined, then sold, as a sunny American Dream, a city safe for white people. 

Poor Matt Gaetz, GOP congressman from Florida, big hair, media whore, rich family, great ally and ass-kisser of Donald J. Trump, a born used car salesman if ever there was one. But wait, there’s more, and it’s salacious and the media is eating it like cake. Gaetz is going down on the spike that has dynamited many a man, many a career, many a marriage, many a reputation: the taste for young flesh. 17-years-old if media reporting is accurate. Gaetz splashed the cash on his underage queen, or queens, (who knows what details will emerge), and now the media glare is hot and uncomfortable. Many Republicans are having a ball watching this punk squirm, and it will be absolutely delicious if he is indicted for transporting underage females across state lines. Live by the prick, die by the prick. I’m astonished whenever I consider how some of the so-called prestige schools in America -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton -- have given us nitwits like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton. I don’t know where Gaetz went to school, though I imagine he never fretted the cost or worried about how he was going to afford tuition and food. Matt strikes me as one of the pampered, a fuck-up with a gilded safety net beneath him. Makes it easy for him to spout horseshit about self-reliance, hard work, and the Christian God who smiles on the wealthy and spits on the poor. At least Gaetz has Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene in his camp. 

Anyone surprised about Republican-led efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters? What happened in Georgia will be used as a template. The Republicans can only win elections if they cheat, it’s that simple. I wonder if John Roberts still stands by his decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. The root cause of these shenanigans is Fear, unfounded fear, of the dark-skinned Others who lurk in the shadows, waiting to rape white virgins. America is a fearful nation, armed to the teeth and frightened of the dark.