Coal Man

“What a completely wild idea, that leadership -- absent any chest pounding -- could also include a thoughtful discussion of humility and not be seen as somehow weak or trivial.” Alexis Grenell, The Nation

Well, as anticipated, Joe Manchin killed Joe Biden’s Build Back Better program. Manchin went to great pains to portray himself as having wrestled his conscience and his core political beliefs as far as he could, before telling Biden it was no go. Manchin played his role very well, he had a big hand in whittling BBB down, throwing objections around like daggers, until the bill’s ambitions were just a fraction of what was initially proposed. Manchin carried water for energy extractors and wealthy donors, as he always does. Manchin is firm in his corruption. He voted against a bill that could have provided real help to some of the neediest citizens in his own state. He stood with his backers. And then, at the end of the calendar year, Manchin lowers the boom. Happy Christmas, Biden. I’m still a coal man! 

Manchin is also a wealthy man, owns a yacht and a very fancy automobile, has a daughter who hit gold in the pharmaceutical industry, and family ties to the coal industry, which should have died a needed death thirty or forty years ago. (That death might have been phased in over the course of a generation to give those dependent on coal for their daily bread time to transition to something else. No, not in America. It has never worked that way. We live and die by profit! Someone’s profit.) Manchin’s not even a Democrat, but the Dems couldn’t afford to push him too hard lest he jump ship and Mitch McConnell resume his job as Majority Leader. That made it much easier for Manchin to play his spoiler role. Bravo Mr. Coal Mine, you just prevented your “constituents” from having to cough up more in taxes to pay for all those goodies to all those undeserving, lazy people. You did it! Your prize will no doubt be great. May I suggest a second yacht or a fleet of gleaming black Tesla’s equipped with bullet-proof glass. 

I watch this faux drama play out, try not to get cynical and angry, fail, as usual, and come back for more. The Dems are not as futile as they appear, their task on even minor issues is hard because of the numbers, and the filibuster, and FOX News with its 24/7 disinformation campaign. And Zuckerberg over at Facebook. The injustices we see almost every day, the slow pace of reform attempts, the drowning of damn near everything in money. It’s fucking nuts, and enormously frustrating. We have two major parties, itself an impediment to doing anything to meet the legitimate, universal needs of its citizens, and one of them attempted to overturn an election that their standard bearer, their great king, their icon -- Donald J. Trump -- lost. By a wide margin in both popular votes and the Electoral College. The coup was a multi-pronged and coordinated effort, no question about it. Despite the obstacles in its path, the January 6 House Committee has done a good job of amassing evidence that will prove what most people assume: that Trump, with the help of others, tried to steal the election. He told us he would a year in advance, but at that point people were numb, depleted by Covid and the tidal wave of lies Trump spewed every day he was in office. Trump told us, not in these exact words, but with the same intent: If I win, it was fair; if I lose, it was rigged. 

I think the one thing Donald Trump fears more than anything else is the humiliation of being outed as who and what he is: A business disaster. A conman. A fraud and a coward. Daddy Trump warped Donald, twisted his psyche like a pretzel, put him on a path to being loutish, cruel, corrupt, lazy, mean-spirited, petty, vain, spoiled and hopelessly narcissistic.  Trump is the greatest con man in American history, no doubt about it. Bernie Madoff conned hundreds, maybe thousands of people into giving him money, Trump conned almost half the citizens of this insane country,  and damn near succeeded in taking it over. All while making the shit up as he went along. 

Little Blessings

“While whites sought to extract uncompensated labor from Blacks, their principal concern in relation to Indigenous people was to secure ownership of their lands.” A Field Guide to White Supremacy, Kathleen Bellew and Ramon A. Gutierrez, Editors

It’s December and I feel a bustle. Many of the houses in our block and nearby blocks are brightly lit with Christmas lights. Ours are up, courtesy of my wife and daughter. They have outdone themselves this year. After several years with an artificial pre-strung tree from Sears, we have a live Doug fir this year. It smells great. When my wife brought it home from Home Depot and we stood it up and fluffed it out, I thought of the managed forests my brother and I drive through on our way into Washington each September. It sucks a fair amount of water each day. Needles on the hardwood floor. We have some inside lights, too, and the kids’ stockings hanging from an actual mantle. We’re in a new place this year and it feels good, a comfortable harbor against the strangeness of this period in time. Are we balanced between one way and another? Is that what is happening, is the world turning toward authoritarianism because we cannot agree on more fair and equitable means? The slogans are simpler, that’s for sure. Freedom! Liberty! Soil! The question is always freedom and liberty and soil for whom? Based on what, money or force, or both? 

Here’s some irony for you. On Friday the normal political world, not MAGA Faux Outrage & White Fear world, stopped to pay tribute to Bob Dole, war hero, Senate titan (during the good old days when the Reagan gang sold arms to the Iranians in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua), and GOP standard bearer in the 1980’s. Today, the Trump GOP would run the great and noble Bob Dole out of the party. Today, Trump would make fun of Dole’s war disability and belittle his legislative achievements, and then for good measure insult his wife, Elizabeth Today, would Bob Dole stand up to Trump or allow himself to be cowed along with a majority of his confederates? Would Dole turn a blind eye to Trump’s unprecedented corruptness? How corruptible was Bob Dole? As much as Mitch McConnell? Kevin McCarthy? That punk senator from Missouri? Ted Cruz?

Let’s turn to another depressing subject, the fate of Julian Assange, who a UK Court just ruled can be extradited to the United States to be executed or jailed under the Espionage Act, or whatever other statutes the American government can bury him under. Assange is a journalist, and he’s not an American. How does the United States even have jurisdiction? To me Assange is a historic figure. And what was his crime? Journalism. He collected information by as many means as he could, including sources, and published his findings. Isn’t that what journalism is supposed to do, the way it provides a check on the powerful? Yes, but when a journalist completely outs the Empire, exposes its crimes and hypocrisies in exhaustive detail, her, or she, will pay. And Assange has. With years of house arrest in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and a long spell in Belmarsh Prison, which isn’t known to be hospitable. There are probably many people in London and Washington D.C. who wish Assange would die or hang himself. The US will go all out to mete out a maximum punishment for Julian Assange. Too bad our government can’t direct such righteous fervor against those involved in the attack on the US Capitol, starting with Donald J. Trump. Assange will pay, Trump will not. There’s the unfairness of this world. The powerful have too many tools. 

On a different note altogether. I did a long training session this afternoon, mostly slow and cautious because my left shoulder/biceps is still wonky. I see a specialist in January. I may have done too much today. I have a decent range of motion and improved internal rotation, but it’s not pain free. Not that the pain is overwhelming, but it is constant. Every day I run through several rehabilitation exercises, and I do a lot of stretching on my breaks when I work at the store. I am sleeping better than I was. Now I wake up with a stiff lower back. It’s one ache then another. 

My Chelsea football club isn’t well these days. I think the manager, Thomas Tuchel has done a very good job, but injuries have sidelined too many key players for too long, primarily N’golo Kante and Mateo Kovacic. Christian Pulisic missed a number of games. Ben Chilwell is out for an unknown period. Romelu Lukaku has just returned after a multi-match absence. Jorginho, the important pivot point in midfield, has also been injured. Trevor Chalobah, a young player emerging as a critical member of our back three, is out injured. We drew with a Manchester United side we should have beaten, escaped Watford with a win, but lost to West Ham on a late wonder goal. Our recent Champions League match in St. Petersburg saw us fail to hold a lead in the last minutes of the match. A defense based on amnesia. We drew, and consequently Juventas topped the group. We play Leeds United in the premier league next. Although we’ll be at Stamford Bridge, I expect this to be a tough match. Leeds play with a quick tempo and they face a Chelsea team that is tired, depleted, and in a ragged run of form. 

I’m writing a review of a new book by Brian Klaas, Corruptible, for the California Review of Books, and reading A Field Guide to White Supremacy. Not exactly light, year-end reading. For that I’ve turned to True North by Jim Harrison, a novel I first read some years ago. I have since read nearly all the fiction Harrison produced. Definitely one of my favorite writers. 

We’re almost to 2022. I’m still wondering, and unable to understand why so few journalists or writers are not doing the same, what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin talked about for ninety minutes in Helsinki in 2017. I don’t imagine the needs of the people of their respective countries came up much. So what did these two kleptocrats talk about? 

Waiting for the Last Shopping Cart

 “Much of the world is dominated by systems that attract and promote corruptible people.” Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power And How It Changes Us

She came into the store at 8:30 p.m. I saw her in the whole body section, reading the label of a hair care product. She had a small cart with no more than half a dozen items in it. Her own hair is dirty blonde, tucked under a beige wool cap. She’s dressed as she was the last time I saw her, also a Thursday night, in a bulky sweater, leggings, heavy wool socks and hiking boots. I remembered her because that night she didn’t check out until after 10:00, and I had to wait for her before I could lock up the carts for the night. I helped her load two bags into the cluttered back seat of a Lexus SUV. When she drove off the Lexus made a horrific screeching sound. Good, I thought as I passed on my way to the back of the store, she’s got a head start. 

I went about my rounds, cleaned out the floor drain by the olive bar, another in the cheese section, and three behind the bakery counter. On my last inspection of the evening, at 9:45, just as the closing announcement came over the intercom, the woman was still in whole body, in the same spot, reading labels as if she had all the time in the world. She had the same few items in her cart. I swore silently, knowing that I was going to be standing outside with the cable and lock, waiting for her to check out. Maybe shopping is her hobby I thought, or perhaps she suffers from insomnia. She could be lonely. I’m not great at guessing ages, but she looks to be in her late sixties. She could be widowed, with children living far away. All these thoughts ran through my head. I see all kinds of people in the store, from the obviously affluent to those who haven’t bathed in weeks. Though I haven’t seen it myself, I’m told that shoplifters are common, repeat offenders even, despite all the surveillance cameras. A few nights ago, during a final inspection of the women’s restroom, there was a woman sitting in one of the stalls eating an orange. Before I saw two filthy feet in rubber beach sandals beneath the partition, I caught the scent of citrus; after she left I found peels in the sanitary napkin receptacle. 

The woman came out at 10:05. Her Lexus was the last car in the parking lot. I wondered if she had tended to the screeching sound. She took her time loading two bags into the back seat. I didn’t help her this time. It had been a long shift and I was tired. I wanted to lock the back gate, collect my gear, punch out, and bicycle home. The woman finished loading her bags and came toward me with her cart. “Can I roll it to you?” she asked. “Sure,” I said. I was only six feet from her. She gave the cart a push and it came toward me, curving slightly on the slope of the parking lot and into my waiting hand. I then made the mistake of saying, “Hey, that was like a golfer playing the break.” When she said “You know,” and began walking toward me I knew I was in trouble. “I played golf when I was very young. My dad taught me and I used to beat all his friends. I could drive the ball 160 yards with a 5-iron. I should take it up again. I did it all wrong, starting so early. Have you ever played golf? It’s a wonderful game.”

I pushed her cart into place and locked the padlock. I began moving away, telling her that she should take up golf again. For a moment I was afraid she might follow me. “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” I said with a wave. When she drove off there was no screeching sound from her Lexus.