Study the Dust

 “Alas, it’s very hard to pass a prodemocratic measure in an antidemocratic system.” Jeet Heer, The Nation

The obstructionist GOP has done it again, this time blocking passage of significant election reforms pushed by Democrats. That these reforms are very popular with the voting public matters not at all. Nor does it matter that reforms are desperately needed to prevent a coup by a well-organized political minority. Democrats Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi vow to continue the fight, but the institutional barriers standing in their way are formidable. Where’s Biden? He didn’t throw much of his weight behind the legislation, despite telling Congress in April that American democracy is suffering an existential crisis. 

Mitch McConnell remains the most powerful and unaccountable politician in the nation. By sheer numbers, McConnell and his GOP represent fewer Americans than Democrats, but this doesn’t hinder their ability to block any legislation they dislike, which is almost everything the Democrats put forward. The GOP obstructs, period. Long gone are the days when politics was a method for mediating our differences and finding compromise. Now it’s just about amassing and wielding power. How is a two-party representative democracy supposed to work when one of the parties refuses to compromise? It can’t, which is why I think America is headed for authoritarian rule. 

Meanwhile, the western US is in the grips of a heatwave. I read more and more reports of falling water levels, at Lake Mead in Nevada which provides water to three states and parts of Mexico, and in California, where more than forty of the state’s fifty-eight counties are in severe drought; the Edward Hyatt Power Plant at Lake Oroville may be forced to shut down for the first time in a half a century. The lake is at 38 percent capacity. Farmers in southern Oregon skirmish with state and federal agencies over diminishing water supplies. We’re only at the summer solstice. The warnings climatologists have been issuing for decades are happening. Hotter and drier weather, bigger storms, massive wildfires, the consequence of human hubris and greed.  Like the California farmers and cattle ranchers and citrus growers I’ve been reading about in a brilliant book by Mark Arax called The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, greed is baked into our society and the imperative is to get bigger, richer, more powerful. In California water and land have made or cost fortunes from the beginning. The ability of people to build massive dams, aqueducts, reservoirs, levees and canals, to divert rivers and use hydraulic power to mine for gold, irrigate some of the best farmland in the world, and allow the building of millions of homes is an awesome feat of vision, sweat, money, labor, and political influence. It’s why the State Water Project and the California Aqueduct were built: to capture water where it was abundant and transport it to where it was scarce. Tremendous public expense, huge private profits. Once that water started flowing, fortunes were made in cotton and cattle, grapes, mandarins, raisins, almonds, pistachios. Sole owners like Henry Miller and J.G. Boswell controlled hundreds of thousands of acres of land, some of it with water rights, some without. They and others ran company towns. As it always does, size matters, makes a difference in influence with bankers and politicians. Californians have always fought over water, north versus south, east versus west. Rivers were essentially stolen, bent to private use or controlled by the state or the Feds to the consternation of the locals. For decades, Central Valley farmers have dug deeper and deeper wells, in more and more places, and pumped the aquifer dry. In some places the land has sunk, the result of a falling water table. 

Our country should be having a serious conversation about climate change, but we are too self-absorbed and short-sighted to see the storm bearing down. If we cared to, we could learn a few things from the Covid pandemic, primarily that it makes sense to have adequately funded public agencies equipped and prepared to provide services when necessary. Our goal should be to reduce or alleviate human suffering, but our policies are created to protect property and the possessors of wealth. As in many places in the world, the poor pay the highest price, live the hardest lives, and die the earliest deaths. We could learn, as well, a few handy lessons from history, yet many influential people in positions of power would have us stop when the reality of who we are and what we have done grows darker, and crueler. 

We should ask ourselves if a political system as frail as ours can deliver the things millions of us will need to survive when the next disaster strikes. I’m not confident. The problem with our species is that we see ourselves as masters rather than caretakers. 

Killer Instinct (Lack Of)

 “The result is a metastisizing corruption at the heart of the polity. About the Capitol coup there is no shared reality.” Mark Danner, New York Review

I understand some of the political calculations being made by Democrats. If they move too zealously to punish Trump for his myriad abuses of power, they risk inflaming Trump’s diehard base, many of whom are armed and waiting for a provocation. But if Democrats don’t act to hold Trump and his enablers accountable, and soon, they run a real risk of legitimizing Trump’s abuses. 

If the tables were turned and a crazed horde of armed Black Lives Matter supporters had stormed the Capitol on January 6, the Republicans would have spent the last six months holding Benghazi-style hearings to the exclusion of any legislative activity. The rabid right-wing media universe would throb and buzz with dire predictions of an incipient attack on God-fearing white people. That’s just how the GOP rolls. By comparison the Democrats seem tame and phlegmatic, totally lacking in killer instinct; they are like a soccer club that always sits deep and defends, with only the faintest hope of hitting their opponent on the counter attack. The GOP plays to win, the Dems are content with a draw. 

While Democrats make their political calculations in wood-paneled corridors, the GOP is doing everything it can to cement minority rule. Writing in the New York Review, Mark Danner notes, “If in close elections Republicans can place the effective power to award a state’s electoral votes in the state legislature, they will have gone far toward establishing a permanent grip on the White House.” This certainly appears to be the operating strategy. Accepting Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen election is the first step, putting in place the mechanisms (blatant voter suppression and nullification measures) to prevent future elections from being “stolen” is what logically follows. 

As I wrote here after he won the election, Biden will do what he can to return the country to a state resembling normal (meaning, I suppose, a less over-the-top level of deceit and corruption than we experienced during Trump’s misbegotten reign), and steady the institutions Trump tipped over, but I can’t help but think he’s the proverbial boy with his finger in the dike. Opposing him is a political party in thrall to a con artist along with millions of people willing to practice magical thinking. Even if Trump is indicted by any one of the agencies on his trail, his supporters will not abandon him. I can’t see the moment when the fever breaks and the reality of who Trump really is becomes crystal clear. As Hunter S. Thompson might say, we are well and truly fucked. A country in which nearly half the population believes in idiotic conspiracy theories and “alternative” facts is doomed. 

What does the reality-based half of the country do, where do we turn, and how can we stop this unholy onslaught? That sound in the distance is the drumbeat of minority rule. January 6 was a skirmish in the war. Under American flag and Christian cross, the aggrieved have begun to march. 

Mob Boss

 “A hideous farce against a backdrop of sweat and misery.” Henry Miller

I enjoy walking in our yard in the evening, when the sun reflects from the windows and the air feels soft, the sky clear overhead. We have two small lemon trees, a jacaranda, and an old olive tree. Fuchsia bougainvillea, many varieties of cactus. Cars whiz past on Milpas, but with part of the yard shielded by a seven-foot hedge, the noise is muted. It’s a gift to have some turf to move around in. I give the compost bin a spin. My good fortune astonishes me. After 22 years working for the same employer, in the same building, I’m moving into a new phase of my life. It feels right, so I’m going with the feeling, see where it leads. For the first time in years, I feel comfortable in my skin, I’m not envious or jealous of others as I might have been in the past, and I’m treating myself with more kindness. 

When I go back in the house my wife is on the phone with her sister who lives in Santa Maria and is nearly blind and plagued with other serious health issues. Her little dog escaped from the yard again and was found strolling down the street. They talk about In The Heights, the movie that was released this week to Oprah-style hype. Underwhelming, says my wife. She’s more of a purest, Broadway is her passion, and she didn’t think the female leads had the voices for the roles. 

My news feed is full of reports about Trump’s corrupt Department of Justice, and how the DOJ, first under the reign of Jeff Sessions, and then The Dirty Doughboy, AKA William Barr, subpoenaed the digital records of at least two members of Congress, both Democrats, as well as reporters from the New York Times and CNN. Apple was also subpoenaed. We’re finding out about this now because the gag orders issued by federal judges have expired. The House members, Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, were harsh critics of Trump, in particular Schiff who prosecuted the first impeachment trial. It reads like a reboot of the old Nixon Enemies List. What’s interesting to me is the tone of surprise from the talking heads on MSNBC and CNN, as if they can’t believe these revelations. I’m not surprised at all. Trump is as corrupt as the United States is unequal. The true extent of the damage Trump caused won’t be clear for at least another decade, but the essential point is that you can’t hand the levers of political power to a person as corrupt as Trump without being certain that he will use that power corruptly, for his own ends and the ends of his friends and people useful to him. To understand Trump think only of The Godfather, the book by Mario Puzo, the films by Francis Ford Coppola. Trump desperately wants to be a Mob Boss in the style of Don Corleone, feared and respected, but he is doomed to play Fredo. Trump’s understanding of power isn’t sophisticated, it comes from the mob idea, that’s why he treated federal agencies as if they worked for him. Like a mob boss, Trump prizes loyalty to him above nearly all else, and punishing the disloyal is reflexive. I have long wondered what Trump and Putin talked about for an hour and a half in Helsinki a few years ago, but I’d wager that not only did Vlad have plenty of advice to offer Trump, but that Trump was receptive because he respects the power and fortune Putin has amassed. Look at Trump’s pardons of Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and the noxious Roger Stone for further evidence of straight payback. Trump plays the game out in the open. How will the sycophants and boot-lickers in the GOP spin these latest developments? We will hear cries of “Witch Hunt” and “this is all politically motivated by the Democrats.” Those ruses are reliable ways to deflect and distract, clog up the news cycle and social media, and confuse people about what it all means. What it means is that we had better invest some effort into reforming the Department of Justice, Trump-proofing it while there is time. A house won’t stand for long on a cracked foundation. 

For The People

 “The purity and strength of Americanism are always threatened by contamination from outside and betrayal from within. The narrative of Real America is white Christian nationalism.” George Packer, The Atlantic, “The Four Americas.”

We won’t miss our democracy until it’s gone, and it appears to me that we’re well on the way to that eventuality. When it happens, and the reality of what’s been lost sets in, it will seem as if it happened suddenly rather than gradually. To me it feels like we are watching a theft in progress, a steady drip, drip, drip of statements, legislation, polls, stunts (the Arizona recount, for instance) appointments to key posts in the state bureaucracies that operate our elections, and Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP. Blocking a bipartisan investigation of the January 6 insurrection attempt and the events that led up to it is one way to fashion truth from lies. Don’t dig. Don’t corroborate. Blame Antifa thugs masquerading as MAGA members for all the damage and death; those agitators from the godless coasts who rode into DC on the wings of giant black bats with twelve foot wingspans and fire shooting from their talons. In Q-World, nothing is too outlandish. 

Trump lost, but his Big Lie lives. The bloated con man from Florida may very well succeed in creating history completely from a stew of lies and crackpot theories concocted in mildewy basements then propagated across the Internet and echoed by the FOX News/Sinclair Broadcasting/OAN universe. People who are either gullible or otherwise starved of factual information make easier marks. Ignorance is a tough, persistent opponent that doesn’t go down easily. 

Joe Manchin of West Virginia has leverage over his fellow Democrats. He can sputter incoherently about his love of democracy and bipartisanship while blocking his party’s efforts to defang the filibuster and expand and protect voting rights. If Democrats push him too hard Joe might slide across the aisle and join the GOP, giving Mitch McConnell his majority again. Joe’s not up for reelection until 2024 and has little to fear from West Virginia voters even if he were to switch parties. It’s not like West Virginia is a safe haven for Democrats. Trump carried the state by a whopping margin. Manchin can enjoy this turn as a Big Time DC Power Broker with virtual impunity. 

For The People. Sounds nice. Sounds aspirational, even inspiring, just follow the wisdom of the common American, who can be counted on to be magnanimous, decent, fair, and just. Sure. If only it worked that way. The last thing the Gilded Class and its political babysitters want is more democracy; the fewer people that vote the better for them. Maintaining minority rule requires a lot of hubris and a fair amount of engineering. Control over who can cast a ballot is good; control over how votes are tabulated and certified is better.