The Ship of Fools

 “The powerlessness many will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist beliefs in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. The Christian right provides a haven for this magical thinking.” Chris Hedges

We were warned about climate change, provided with predictions of how it would unfold once the tipping point was reached, and of course moneyed interests and their political servants ignored the warnings altogether or used all their resources to discredit them. Parts of western Europe are withering, fires blaze across France, Spain, Portugal, and yet again there’s a destructive fire burning in my home state. Key water sources like the Colorado River are drying up before our eyes. Crop yields fall, the risk or reality of famine rises along with prices for basic foodstuffs. Most Americans grumble, yawn, and order Alexa to change the channel to something less disturbing and unsettling. 

It’s happening, the cataclysm I mean, and at a moment in this country when the political system is stymied by partisan battles for power and denial of reality is the order of the day. Greed is going to do us in, greed and stupidity. The shadow cast across America by the disgraced, treasonous former president looms over everything, obscuring whatever light we can muster. 

I take a walk up Garcia Road, along APS, and down Jimeno. I notice that several homes are for sale, while at least three are undergoing renovation. This is big money territory and I still can’t for the life of me understand how people crack the nut. Mortgage, insurance, upkeep, taxes -- how do they pull it off, where does their money come from? I recall that even as a child I distrusted wealthy people, never felt comfortable around them or their privileged offspring. My dad, who was working-class to his marrow, and leaned toward money making by gambling on cards, horses, football, and even for a time was a cog in a low-level bookmaking operation, told me once that money was the ticket to doing whatever you want, whenever you want. By the age of 57 he was dead, a casualty of alcohol and cigarettes; he left nothing but an old Oldsmobile and some clothes. I sometimes wonder what kind of grandfather he might have been. 

As I walk down the hill, the ocean moving in and out of my view, my thoughts return to the mysterious hold Donald J. Trump has over millions of Americans. The hold makes even less sense to me now than it did in 2015 because Trump proved to be incompetent in office, a stone criminal who disqualified himself from seeking and holding any position of public trust ever again. Something in this country is completely out of whack -- a sense of shame is missing. Any president who tried to mount a coup against the government should be forced by public condemnation into exile, never to be seen or heard from again, stripped of all privileges. But not here, not with Trump. What happened to us? Have we always been so dim-witted and cruel, such easy prey for a loud-mouthed con artist who can barely read? Is it any surprise that clowns like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have risen from the muck, all of them raised on reality television, Jersey Shore comes to Washington? Decorum, ethics, rule of law, when these ideals are eroded by a steady stream of corruption, what remains is the law of the jungle, of raw power, coercive and unjust and arbitrary. 

It’s somehow appropriate that one of the books I’m reading now is The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. “You flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools.”

Collision Course

 “As a result of climate change, as many as 200 million people may be driven from their homes by 2050.” Ursula Lindsey, New York Review, July 21, 2022

I’m at the saturation point when it comes to bad news and dark portents. Galloping Christian theocracy, endless gun violence, the radical and rogue Supreme Court, and the ongoing, interminable case of Donald J. Trump and his failed coup attempt. The content in my Twitter feed pisses me off, and the YouTube videos I view are too full of conjecture and hearsay to settle my uneasiness. It seems that the rusted and rickety wheels of American justice barely turn when it comes to white collar and political crime, and more than ever I’m convinced that when push comes to shove, Donald J. Trump will skate. The United States Department of Justice doesn’t need a congressional referral to indict Trump or any of his co-conspirators, and even if a referral is delivered to the DOJ on a golden platter, the agency is under no obligation to act upon it. Attorney General Merrick Garland would have tipped his hand by now if he had any intention of indicting Trump; we would have had some sign, a leaked memo or something, a clue. Garland has largely maintained radio silence regarding the disgraced former president as he, Garland, seems terrified of being tarred as politically motivated. Can’t set that precedent for the DOJ, though when Trump regains power he will corrupt the DOJ and use the agency for his own ends. My guess is that Garland will duck, dodge, delay, defer, and dither in the hope that January 6 simply vanishes from public consciousness. When he’s forced to announce his decision not to indict Trump, Garland will go to ridiculous and tortured lengths to justify and rationalize his inaction. 

Fear and cowardice are powerful things. 

I’m old enough to remember the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980’s, the televised hearings, the Tower Commission, and the Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh. Some of the miscreants in that sordid affair, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger among them, received presidential pardons from George H. W. Bush in 1992. Ronald Reagan was criticized but of course escaped punishment. It’s easy to imagine the same thing happening with Trump should he be indicted and convicted before the 2024 election. The next Republican president, like Ron DeSantis, will, with great fanfare, immediately pardon Trump and his entourage. The only people who will pay any price are the misguided slobs who stormed the capitol and spread their feces on the walls and maybe a few bit players a rung higher on the ladder. But none of the major conspirators will be inconvenienced; they will continue to appear on cable news gabfests, pen op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post, run for office, and write books. To expect another outcome is to believe in magic and make-believe. America is nothing if not entirely predictable. 

Trump is the current figurehead for American fascism, but what’s happening in the country is bigger than Trump and more insidious. The political and cultural and factual divide is real, and closer than we realize. If it’s not in your city, it may be in your county or state, in pockets and clusters. It’s a divide that cannot be bridged by appeals to facts, reason or logic, it’s emotional and tribal and as combustible as a gas leak in a match factory. Christian churches and Fox News and right-wing radio propaganda are heavily implicated in exacerbating the division, in drawing the lines and naming the enemies. Democrats bear responsibility, too. Fascism needs an enemy, and just about any enemy will do: Muslims after 9/11; immigrants; Antifa; Black Lives Matter; Critical Race Theory; transgender folk. The unholy alliance of evangelical Christians and the Republican Party, the Bible and the Stars & Stripes, the gun and the cross, is producing its angry fruit. Florida and Texas are fascist laboratories. Follow the bouncing ball of authoritarian ideology as it bounces around the red states; look at states like Wisconsin where Republicans control the legislature but the Governor’s mansion is inhabited by a Democrat. Democrats in Wisconsin represent more citizens and win more votes overall, but have less representational power because the GOP plays by the dark arts of gerrymandering and voter suppression, as well as stacking state courts with partisans, and capturing or neutering the regulatory apparatus. The party has had plenty of help from the Supreme Court led by John Roberts. The Citizens United decision, which allows dark money to flood the political system, and the gutting of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby case in 2012, has paid major dividends to the religious/political right in its quest to prop up white supremacy and take the country backward. The GOP controls 60% of state legislatures, more than enough, with a little help from the Court in regards to election law, to own all three branches of government for a decade or longer. One party rule is America’s destination. Next term, just in time to be useful in the 2024 election, the Court will hear a case out of North Carolina called Moore v. Harper, which revolves around the authority of state legislatures in regards to federal elections. If the Court rules as many expect it will, a GOP-controlled state legislature could use all manner of tactics to overrule the will of voters. It would play something like this: Biden wins the popular vote, but the Legislature awards the state’s electors to Donald Trump. No legal challenge is allowed by law. Done deal.

Here’s another thing that is happening that exacerbates the American divide: the balance of power, propelled by the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, is shifting to the States at the same time the power and legitimacy of the federal government is declining. 

Despair and contentment sit side-by-side on the same shelf. For me optimism is fleeting and hope is almost always out of reach. The world is fucked, and yet there is beauty and peace in it that seems contradictory. California is drying up yet all day long hummingbirds swoop across our patio to drink from the feeder. Babies are born, weddings happen, young men play pick-up soccer in Ortega Park, children run into the surf at East Beach, fully immersed in the here and now, shielded by their innocence. Families go out for ice cream. Young lovers stroll hand-in-hand thinking their love is unique and fixed forevermore, locked in time, as bright as the new moon and capable of enduring whatever comes. Have I become cynical about love, too? Maybe. I cannot seem to stop myself from looking to the shelf where despair and contentment sit side-by-side. I must find the balance point between the two, but some days, when the black dog of depression follows close on my heels, I can’t find that point to save my ass. I feel powerless and insignificant, impotent and invisible, with too few resources to hand. It was in this state of mind I came across an essay by Albert Camus that contains this: “Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything.”

That made me feel better. Temporarily. 

Spare Me: 4th of July 2022

Spare me your red, white and blue claptrap

I don’t want to hear it this year

not in 2022,

when theocrats in dusky judicial robes

strip our rights away

by twisting the law to impose their 18th century notions

on the rest of us;

Spare me myths of wise Founding Fathers, 

George Washington was a greedy land speculator,

and the sage of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, had a yen

for Negro flesh and spread his pale seed among the people

he owned,

never once believing that 

all men are created equal;

Spare me tales of divinely inspired destiny,

wave your blood-soaked stars & stripes someplace else,

because no moral God could condone centuries of chattel slavery,

Black men, women, and children bought, sold, traded, 

insured, mortgaged, beaten, whipped, 

raped,

burned alive and lynched at will;

atone for that and we can speak of Liberty

and Justice for all; atone 

for genocide on the plains, for the Trail of Tears and

Wounded Knee, 

for the invasion of Haiti

Mexico

the Philippines and 

Guatemala

for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for Afghanistan and

Iraq;

Spare me your fireworks until Donald Trump 

is held to account for attempting a coup;

every minute the sociopathic former president 

and his traitorous retinue walk free

they mock the rule of law

and make the Department of Justice a euphemism;

Spare me your patriotic speeches and odes to democracy

as long as Mitch McConnell

runs the U.S. Senate like his personal kingdom;

Spare me your 4th of July sales, deals, discounts

I’m not buying;

Spare me your backyard BBQ’s and all-American BS

as long as white Christian fascists

care more for the unborn than they do for the living,

and venerate their guns more than their wives,

sisters and

daughters;

Spare me, America, until you muster

the moral courage to look in the mirror

and not flinch at the 

reflection

that makes you so

uncomfortable and afraid.