The Wrong People Are In Charge

 “And there's a shadow on the faces/Of the men who send the guns/To the wars that are fought in places/Where their business interest runs”

Jackson Browne, “Lives in the Balance”

I finally got to run on the artificial turf in Peabody Stadium. For two years or more I watched the new stadium rise and contented myself with running on the front lawn of the high school, which due to the use of reclaimed water is green all year. Even when the stadium officially opened with a big groundbreaking ceremony attended by Santa Barbara High alumni and local political personalities, it was never open to the general public like the old stadium was. Pandemic restrictions kept the public at bay -- though I saw young guys hop the fence to use the new outdoor basketball courts all the time; something I didn’t feel right about doing while I was working for the school district. Because of the recent graduation ceremony, I found the gate wide open and walked down the hill and checked out the track and the turf field, the bronze plaques dedicated to people who coughed up matching funds. A lot of local history on this ground. I found both surfaces ideal for the kind of running I do, mostly intervals and agility work. Since I’m no longer employed by the district, I may join the youngsters in hopping the fence in the future.  

I wrote a review of The Cross and the Lynching Tree by the late theologian James H. Cone for California Review of Books. It’s linked here in case anyone is interested: https://calirb.com/the-cross-and-the-lynching-tree-by-james-h-cone/

It’s astonishing, and sobering, to think about the number of people who occupy positions of authority or leadership who have no business in such positions. Whether it’s the United States Senate, the Texas State Legislature, police departments in cities large and small, Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, or superintendents of school districts. The Peter Principle isn’t imaginary. In many organizations, public or private sector, rising has less to do with the ability to get things done, and far more to do with the ability to get along with people higher on the food chain. Say the right words, obtain the recognized credentials, and don’t make enemies. I worked with a fair number of stiffs during my career in public education, and a few zealots who honestly believed our work was changing the world, a claim of hubris that I couldn’t entirely buy -- particularly after experiencing the local schools through my own children. The day I met the last superintendent I worked under I knew she was in over her head. That was my instant gut feeling -- and time proved me right. Oh, she had all her boxes checked, but you cannot learn leadership from a textbook or a degree program or a week-long conference with other people who think like you do. 

I’m thinking of changing the subtitle of this blog from Notes of an Unarmed American to Notes of a Working-Class Intellectual. After 18 years it feels like it’s time for a change. I was reading some older posts the other day and it occurs to me that inequality and injustice are mainly what have preoccupied me for nearly two decades. My sense is that wealth inequality is one reason for the divisions in this society. Too few have too much, and too many either have too little or a very tenuous grip on just enough. I’ve written over and over again that American-style capitalism is cruel. This is why it must be regulated. My political platform isn’t complicated. It starts with universal healthcare and public education. Maternity and child care and care for the elderly. Housing. And an end to devoting half the federal budget to “defense.” It’s not defense, it’s offense, it’s empire, power projection and endless war and snuggling up with murderous regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel for the primary benefit of multinational energy extractors. I’m for gay marriage and a woman’s right to exercise total control over her own body. I’m against all forms of slavery. I’m for sensible gun laws. I’m for immediate recognition that climate change is happening faster than the majority of Americans understand. I’m not a communist. I suppose I’m best described as a social democrat. 

I marked two passages in Bad Mexicans by Kelly Lytle Hernandez that struck me as relevant to our own day. Granted, Praxedis Guerrero wrote that “Tyranny is the crime of collectivities that do not think for themselves, and it should be attacked as a social illness by means of revolution” in 1910, but millions of Americans have given up thinking for themselves and appear willing to turn the country over to Donald Trump, a failed single term and twice-impeached president, a serial business failure, tax cheat, and one of the true grifters in modern world history, along with what seem like hundreds of nutters who think a fascist America will be better. Perhaps Americans will soon have a better understanding of how close Trump came to igniting a political coup. People died on January 6. We cannot forget that. 

The other quote is this one from Ricardo Flores Magon, the man at the center of Bad Mexicans, and also penned in 1910: “Political liberty requires as an adjunct another liberty to be effective, and that is economic liberty.” If one is in debt, does one have economic liberty? In my mind economic liberty means freedom from want: food, clothing, medical care, education, and shelter. A baseline enough to sustain life. I imagine that when most Americans think of economic liberty -- if they think of such a question at all -- they equate it with choices: models, colors, sizes, varieties, specification, hipness or status. But how many choices in airlines do we have in the US now? Rental cars? Cell phone carriers? Internet service providers? Grocery stores? Medical insurance? How many different companies provide services in these different sectors? Is our freedom more an illusion of choice when in fact most of our consumption benefits a few dozen corporations? I always recall this line from a Greg Brown song: Sooner or later there’ll be one corporation selling one little box, it will give you what you want and take everything you got. 1910 and 2022 are not the same, obviously, and Mexico isn’t the United States. What is similar are the concentrations of wealth, power and influence, in Mexico in the person of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, and in the United States represented by oligarchs like Gates, Bezos, the Koch family, Musk -- the entire billionaire class and all the infrastructure, financial and legislative, that allows them to get over at the expense of individuals, families, and communities. The common folk. Power is the common thread, who has it, who doesn’t.