Alpha & Omega

 “Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories.” Rebecca Solnit

Why read the ramblings of an aging White American male, resident of Santa Barbara in the Once Great state of California? Fair question. Why write them? Better question. Everything is fair game at the minute. Excuse me while I empty the contents of my brain. Come along if you are inclined. We’ve been in our new digs for a month. It seems longer for some reason, like the physical movement of our household, be it only a block, had the effect of slowing time down. It was two and a half weeks before we had sorted the upheaval enough to be somewhat comfortable. Thinking back on those first couple of weeks, and my reaction to it, only reminded me of how fortunate I am at this moment. Millions of people on this damned planet do not have the luxury of being inconvenienced. We all saw that during the height of the pandemic. Many of us haven’t perceived the true damage wrought by Covid. Takes time, and a bit of distance to see clearly. (That’s my view, anyway, but maybe I put too much stock in the virtue of wisdom. Doesn’t naked ambition and blind greed run the table every time? Isn’t that what history tells us? Wisdom, that’s from the age of chivalrous knights, the warrior kings of old.) And fewer people would be inclined to walk away from a job that pays what mine does, but that is what I have decided to do at the end of June. It’s something I have thought about, off and on, for more than a year. The smart thing would be to suck it up and stay in harness; the right thing is to call it a career. Doing the right thing has most of the time served me well, led me to something else. It’s in no way a true retirement because I intend to continue working, just elsewhere, and in a different environment. I have worked almost my entire life, all kinds of jobs, and I still want and need to work, but what I don’t want is the daily pressure of dealing with other people’s issues, sitting through endless meetings, sorting annoying problems, always grinding, which is what I do at the moment. That, and much more, though I have been very well compensated for my efforts. I’ve never complained about the compensation; the battle for me was keeping boredom, frustration, and cynicism at bay. My career at the local school district has treated me well, and I’m leaving at the moment that feels right to me. But under no illusions, either. It’s going to be tight financially until I find something to do for money, and my wife finally moves on to better paying employment. She works hard and makes next to nothing at her job, exchanging low pay for flexible hours and the ability to work remotely. She’s ready for a change, too. I’ve got medical coverage until September, but then it’s off to anxiety land, buying health insurance through Covered California. My biggest peeve about this backassward nation is that we’re so weird about the commons. Every human being will need medical care sooner or later. It’s as fundamental as clean water and food. A civilized society should be able to agree on that, at the very minimum. Personally, I’d pay higher taxes for universal health care. Call me crazy. Most European nations make this arrangement work, it’s only in this country that rigid adherence to ideology makes it politically impossible. 

An end, and then I hope a new beginning, what I’m thinking of as the third phase of my life -- bring what it may. I’ve had incredible luck, good health, and a strong wife at my side. I’m forcing myself to stay in the present moment, not wander two months ahead and What If. I see it as taking a temporary step off the treadmill. What a luxury. It’s in considering how fortunate I am to have these options that my thoughts drift to places where survival is a perpetual struggle and decent choices are few. It’s a greedy world. America is a greedy nation. Always has been. Designed to be so. But I don’t think it speaks well of our country when there are people living in tents on the sides of our major freeways. It’s a sight that always jars me. Human lives shouldn’t be disposable. Seems like we often treat animals better than we treat people.

I’d rather not think about the political situation in America. It’s worse than it looks, of that I’m sure. One party is attempting -- and largely succeeding -- in choosing its own voters while excluding as many others from voting as possible. That’s part of it, but the GOP is also enshrining its powers relating to election law all over the country. That’s the more critical piece. First, prevent certain people from voting. Second, make sure their votes don’t count even if they manage to cast a ballot. A collision is coming. When a political party refuses to bow to the will of the voters and peacefully relinquish power according to the law, it has crossed over. The GOP is straddling the line, but by very little. After Trump, they understand that victory can be had by not conceding defeat. Don’t concede defeat, and you win. 

What a month this has been. I seem to be doing everything backwards. Moving into more expensive digs while at the same time walking away from my job. To top it off my beloved Chelsea Football Club won the Champions League title on Saturday, defeating Manchester City by one goal to nil. It still feels like a dream. The Blues put in a top performance against a City side that looked the favorite to lift the trophy. Big accomplishment for the club and manager Thomas Tuchel, who in less than a month beat Pep Guardiola three times. After a couple of poor late season performances -- against Arsenal in the Premier League, Leicester City in the FA Cup Final, and away at Aston Villa to close out the campaign -- Chelsea conspired to put together a complete performance, first minute to last. A very sweet victory, and some redemption for Kai Havertz, the young German who joined Chelsea for a record fee but started the season slowly. Havertz scored the match winning goal near the end of the first half. 

Not Quite Home Sweet Home

 ”At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.” Mike Davis, City of Quartz

We keep asking one another, “does it feel like home?” The answer for me is yes, our new digs strike a homey vibe with me, even though we are not fully situated and have at least a dozen boxes left to empty, artwork to hang, stuff to put away. Our familiarity and comfort level grows, routines develop, but we still carry the muscle memory of the little apartment we lived in for so long.  I set up my gym in the carport, heavy bag, double-end bag, suspension trainer, and can do all the modes of training I did up the block, with the benefit here of being able to leave the heavy bag up all the time. My wife still feels unsettled, in part because she’s been distracted by her mother’s physical condition after hip replacement surgery, and the prospect of rotator cuff surgery in July. Two surgeries in less than a year for an 80-year-old woman who wasn’t in the best of health to begin with. Like millions of Americans, we have elder care responsibilities. My sister-in-law says worry is the weight; she’s right, it’s the worry of what might happen next. 

My son takes after me in several respects (poor boy), and one of those ways is that he hates meetings, corporate-speak, and bullshit. When he worked at the LA Philharmonic there were too many meetings that meandered around and accomplished nothing, and now he’s experiencing similar nonsense at the San Francisco Opera. “This is definitely my last non-profit arts gig,” he tells me, exasperated by all the hours he considers wasted. He complains but on the other hand he’s lucky as hell and knows it, with a tolerable job in the city he wants to be in, health insurance, a measure of predictability, and less than $20K in student loan debt for the year and a half he was in college, first at Southern Oregon University and then Pacific Northwest College of Art. I don’t know if he’ll ever go back to school. But whether he does or not, my son is an artist in his soul, and nothing can change that. The kid is 24 and already has figured out that the world into which he was born is fucked. 

While I was cleaning out a bin I found a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center titled, The Year in Hate and Extremism. It was from 2019, a year before the January 6 Trump-goaded insurrection. Skimming through the Executive Summary I came across this passage: “It is time to move beyond the illusion that hate violence and extremism is merely a criminal crisis in America. It is also a political crisis.” What most of us saw with our own eyes on January 6 was a manifestation of that political crisis -- the refusal by the loser to accept the results of an election. We watched the storming of the Capitol happen in real time. Then we watched the same scenes replayed over and over. For the first time in American history, the transfer of political power was marred by violence. The folks who breached the Capitol under the Trump flags were not peaceful, law-abiding tourists as some in the GOP would have us believe. They were not victims, they were perpetrators. Five people were killed. The Vice President was a target of the mob. Those are facts. The rewrite of history by the Trump wing of the GOP -- and that’s most of the party -- is well underway. Lie big, lie often, and never let the lie die. Tell me, someone, can a two-party system function when one of the parties is insane? Surely the answer is, not for long. It’s the old notion of a house divided against itself, as true now as it was in 1861. The American experiment in self-government is fraying, and the hard reality is that we might see, four years from now, a GOP-controlled Congress refuse to certify the results of an election if the outcome doesn’t favor its candidate. And then what happens? If you think this is farfetched, you had better think again. The GOP as currently incarnated cares about one thing, and one only: power. Kevin “Tiny Balls” McCarthy and Mitch “Cowardly Lion” McConnell flip-flop like bass in the bottom of a boat. Although it’s critically important for American democracy that the events of January 6 be fully investigated, such an inquiry is the last thing the GOP wants as it’s likely to expose complicit party members. Some sort of watered-down, toothless investigation may still happen, but if it’s not a bipartisan effort, it will have very little legitimacy. Corruption in Washington D.C. is a stubborn thing, like a bloodstain on a white shirt. 

Speaking of...I have to have some blood work done and a colonoscopy. The prep for the colonoscopy is worse than the procedure itself. My personal history of colonic polyps. 

It appears that the legal noose is dangling closer to Trump’s fat neck. The Attorney General of New York is looking at potential criminal liability, not only civil liability. Trump’s long-time money man, Allen Weisselberg, is being squeezed. When it comes down to saving Trump’s bacon or his own, what will Weisselberg do? Stay tuned. Trump trampled just about every norm we’ve come to expect an American president to adhere to, and I won’t be surprised if he’s our first criminally indicted former president. 

Jeffrey St. Clair writes on the Counterpunch website, “The Palestinians are a stubborn impediment to the inexorable growth of the Israeli state. They are an obstacle that must be removed. But removal is not enough. Their cultural identity and history must be erased, all traces of their existence as a people wiped away.” 

For a brief time Israeli bombs and artillery shells will cease raining down on Gaza, but the apartheid regime and the gross imbalance of power between Jews and Palestinians will remain. There’s no victory lap to be taken by anyone. It’s a human tragedy, a miscarriage of justice, and a grotesque, ongoing violation of human rights. 

 

Target Practice

“More death and destruction will undoubtedly follow as Israeli forces prepare for a land invasion, children will die, the tragic numbers in Israel will be dwarfed by the magnitude of horrifying death in Gaza. Mothers and fathers will weep and young men will vow vengeance. We know this story.” Alice Rothchild, Counterpunch 

Gaza is being bombed, again. 2008. 2012. 2014. How many times can one 350 square mile sliver of land be pounded by advanced weaponry, and how much longer will the State of Israel be allowed to kill Palestinians with impunity? If my memory serves, the UN issued a report in 2014 that concluded that Gaza might be uninhabitable by 2020. As always, the United States pledges its support for Israel’s right to “defend itself.” No mention made of the right of the Palestinian people to simply live. Do the majority of the Israeli people support what their government is doing in their name? Aren’t the Jews doing to the Palestinians what was done to Jews in Russia, Poland, and Germany for generations? Ethnic cleansing. Wholesale theft of land, water, homes. 

The conflict is always depicted in the American media as one waged between equals, which is laughable. The US doesn’t gift the Palestinians millions of dollars worth of military hardware every year, nor does it promote the Palestinian cause in the United Nations at every opportunity as it does Israel. The leader of the Palestianian Authority isn’t invited to address a joint session of Congress as Bibi Netanyahu was a few years ago. 

Why do I care? What does it have to do with me and the price of bread or cheese? What has it to do with the work my wife and I need to do on our new digs? Maybe nothing, but as a citizen of the US, it pisses me off to no end that my government consistently and unquestioningly backs Israel. The journalist Chris Hedges wrote this week, “I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. “ Children are being killed. In the West Bank news reports say mobs of angry Jews roam the avenues looking for Arab targets. Do they want to murder them all? This conflict began years before I was born. I was 8-years-old during the 1967 war that saw Israel take control and occupy Palestinian land in violation of international law. When public health lockdowns went into effect across the US in 2020, many Americans reacted as if all their civil liberties had been permanently stripped away. Well, imagine living under siege and the threat of bombardment the way the people of Gaza do every day. Imagine being forcibly evicted from the house your family has lived in for half a century. Imagine watching Jewish settlers set fire to your olive trees. In this long conflict there have been casualties on both sides, though disproportionately on the Palestinian side. They seem to stand all alone, invisible to the world. A good number of countries are critical of Israel, but as long as Israel is backed by US economic and military power, nothing changes. The State of Israel has been emboldened to take more, and more, expanding ever further. 

What did Martin Luther King Jr. say about injustice? The exact quote slips my memory but the gist of it was that people should push back against injustice wherever they encounter it, because sooner or later injustice comes calling. Wherever one human life is devalued compared to another, deemed less important, less worthy of dignified treatment. Collective punishment of a civilian population is illegal under international law, but of course Israel isn’t deterred by that. By providing cover for Israel to do whatever it pleases my government is complicit in these crimes. 

Too Much Stuff

 

“Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain.” Bob Dylan

= I came across a quote by Thomas Mann that seems to sum up the age we are living in here in the barely united United States.  Mann wrote, “Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.” The batshit antics of the Trump-owned GOP, from the surreal ballot recount in Arizona, which may be ruled illegal if it gets any nuttier, to Trump urging all his sycophants to run Liz Cheney out of her leadership position, to the hundreds of anti-democracy voting bills introduced in Republican-controlled state legislatures. The assault on Liz Cheney, who sits third in the House hierarchy, behind the power-mad Kevin McCarthy and Trump bootlicker Steve Scalise, is an example of the GOP eating its own. Cheney’s transgression? Refusing to carry water for Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, which, let’s not forget, he lost. I haven’t forgotten that Cheney is the spawn of Uncle Dick Cheney, one of the most devious VP’s in recent history; she’s a hard-right Conservative about whom the only positive thing I can say is that at least what she believes is tethered to reality. If it appears that Cheney is standing alone against the Forces of Trump it’s only because the bar for integrity in the GOP is an inch from the surface of the cesspool. McCarthy, McConnell, Hawley, Cruz, Rubio -- this bumper crop of political miscreants -- who daily trade their honor for power, are going to destroy the GOP as a viable political party. Since the Reagan Revolution conservatives have run the table, as dominant as the best Manchester United teams under Sir Alex Ferguson, but they have lost the magic and must be relegated. They’re out of ideas, other than obstruction and destruction. They’re deathly afraid of Donald J. Trump, who sits on his fat behind down in Mar-A-Lago and whines about election fraud, and SAVING OUR GREAT COUNTRY to small crowds of devoted fans and asskissers like Kevin McCarthy. America might benefit from more than two political parties, but at the very least two are necessary, and they must do more than obstruct, undercut, and sabotage each other. We’re headed for a bad patch, of this I am sure. The GOP is too far out to sea to rescue itself. Thanks to Trump, the man incapable of accepting defeat, every election from here out will be doubted, contested, and denounced for impropriety. Democracy runs on faith in shared norms, and rules written and unwritten. Trump always thought, and still does, that no law applies to him. 

=One week in our new digs. First time we’ve ever lived in a house. Still surrounded by boxes in need of unpacking, but we’ve made good progress in a week. Got the cable and the WiFi connected -- after I dashed down to Office Max and bought a new cable modem. Washed our first loads of laundry, ironically the last in our 15-year-old GE washing machine. Blew the bearings the first time we used it in our new home. We bought a refurbished Kenmore for $450 from a man with a side yard full of appliances of every description. Commercial grade stoves, a huge gas range circa1949, refrigerators, cannibalized washers and dryers, hoses and motors. It was like an amusement park of appliances. 

We have real windows. By that I mean double-windows which slide up and down. Of the many things I loathed about our apartment, the casement windows were at the top of the list. I’ve always wanted a front porch wide enough for a bench or chairs, and now we have one, with a little bistro set my wife purchased from Wayfair or such. (Inexpensive stuff, made in China by human beings who earn very little money, a fact not lost on me.) We have a solid front door. We have nooks and crannies, a kitchen you can actually move around in without bumping into something or someone. We even have a fireplace. Yet this first week we have struggled to adapt to the space, our minds and muscles trained over two decades to a very different configuration of light switches and cupboards and drawers. Waking up one night to pee, I was momentarily lost, not sure where the bathroom was. Long way to go yet, but this is going to be a wonderful house to live in, though I suspect it will be cold in the winter months. Another month, possibly two, before we’re dialed in. 

The move has also been difficult because clutter and disorder unsettles me. I can handle a certain amount of both, but when I reach my limit I get cranky as hell, a problem for my wife and daughter, both of whom tend to hoard. Over twenty years we had simply accumulated too much stuff, a lot of it useless. I counted six upright fans, a big box of board games no one has played for at least five years, a bolt of muslin that I’ve wanted to toss for a quarter century, a broken telescope that belonged to my wife’s father. To me moving day felt like drowning. We loaded box after box into the U-Haul and still there were more. For the first couple of days we climbed over and around boxes and hunted for toothbrushes and Q-Tips and prescription medications. It kind of made me snap, I just lost my shit over the futility of moving all this stuff from one place to another, only this time without a large storage space to put it in. Six plastic storage boxes full of Christmas ornaments, enough to decorate three trees. Rolls of wrapping paper, some sealed, most open, loose, torn. Boxes of shoes. Stuff, everywhere. I’m still looking for a black belt. 

=My beloved Chelsea Football Club booked a place in the Champions League Final later this month, brushing aside a struggling Real Madrid team. This is a stunning achievement for a team that six months ago looked to be going absolutely nowhere. Frank Lampard’s team was bereft of identity and solidity, and some players, like centerback Antonio Rudiger, and wingback Marcos Alonso, had been shunted aside like surplus parts. When Lampard got sacked and the German Thomas Tuchel took over,  it was a reclamation project of the highest order. But Tuchel has been more than up to the task. The hallmark of successful football managers is their ability to make good players great players. Tuchel has a good football mind and very high standards for his team.