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.