Letter to my Brother

It’s August 28th, a sunny Sunday in Santa Barbara after a morning when the marine layer lay thick and heavy on the town. Five days ago we -- me, T, and M -- landed in Philadelphia, PA at 1:00 a.m. Twelve or so hours later, we were moving M’s belongings, the contents of four suitcases and a load of stuff we picked up from Bed, Bath & Beyond, into a dorm room at the University of the Arts. Room 401 at Furness Hall, which your niece was going to share with three other girls, is in an old building of dark brick, perhaps a factory or warehouse in the past. The weight of what we were doing hit me about now, the theoretical becoming material, when I imagined my 20-year-old daughter living in this space with two narrow beds and two wooden dressers, a couple of wooden chairs, and a large skylight overhead. No AC as we quickly discovered. It was a sunny, muggy afternoon in Philadelphia, and the air in the room was stuffy and warm. The AC unit was in the other room, which had already been claimed, occupied and furnished by a quiet Chinese girl and an African-American with her bleached hair in long, intricate braids. Not exactly an equitable division of space, but we did our best to keep the vibe as positive as we could. We unpacked, made our daughter’s bed, helped her put her clothes in the dresser. When we finished we went in search of lunch. One of the people working the orientation line told us to try 13th Street. We crossed Broad (also called the Avenue of the Arts) and walked a block or two until we found 13th. I was expecting some kind of restaurant row like in Mexico City, or even here on a smaller scale in Santa Barbara, but that wasn’t the case. A couple of places were closed. We walked on, thinking we’d find something further on, but didn’t even stumble across a coffee house or a Starbucks. The part of 13th we were on was dead. Off Broad Street we found a narrow cafe with only four stools. I saw some soccer paraphernalia on the walls and immediately got a good feeling in my chest. Tuscany, I think the place was called. The man and woman behind the counter were friendly. I talked football with the man. Over large, beautiful tuna salads our daughter was spilling large, anguished tears. The room situation had unnerved her and now she was sobbing. 

That’s elite white-collar crime for you, right there; it’s conducted as an endless back and forth between lawyers for the parties. The fact that the crime itself is negotiable is mind-boggling. 

The main lesson raising two children taught me was how insignificant my role in their development has been. I never imagined that either of my children was in my control; though I have always been involved in their lives, my role has mostly been that of a bystander. It’s more like I’m here in case they need me. My daughter needed us now to help her figure out what to do, who to talk to, and how to frame her request for another room. After we finished eating we walked back to the school. Orientation was almost over, but all the school staff were still sitting at long tables. Your niece went to talk to the man at the Housing table, and within half an hour we had keys to another room on the second floor, which until Thursday was vacant. We grabbed a large plastic cart like the ones they use in Post Offices and went to recover our daughter’s stuff from Room 401. I swear it felt like we were breaking out of prison. Old Furness Hall has some funky corners and odd hallway configurations, and after some fruitless wandering we had to ask directions to Room 212. Once inside, however, we knew this was going to be a major improvement. There were four large windows in the main room, three desks, a small kitchenette, a closet, and a bathroom. A wooded courtyard where students hang out was visible below the windows. We could see the laundry room across the courtyard and walls of dark brick. There were three beds in the bedroom, a large closet, and three dressers. One tall window with an AC unit, old, but still emitting cool air. Relief.

We found a CVS nearby and spent $200 on milk, water, canned soups, cleaning products, batteries, a shower curtain liner, paper plates and bowls. M has everything she needs, and when all the stuff her mother ordered on Amazon arrives, she’ll be set. Her name will be well known in the school mail room for a week or two. By the following day when we left, I felt a lot better about the situation, though tears flooded my eyes when I watched my daughter enter the building and disappear from view. 

I remember feeling homesick for Santa Barbara when I joined the Air Force at 18 and was posted to Japan. Feels like a century ago, a strange time, decades before the Internet, social media, Facetime, YouTube, Amazon, UBER, and the iPhone. We wrote letters in those days, and waited expectantly for letters in return. I missed the mountains and the ocean, the view from the Riviera, but once I began my job I was too occupied for homesickness to linger for long. You just get on with it. I hope your niece will find that her courses and social life will do the same for her. She’s a sensitive girl, but she’s got strength in her, more than she knows. She’s all out of her comfort zone at the moment, off balance, far from everything and everyone she knows. She calls frequently, we Facetime, text. She cries, we offer encouragement, and try to reframe the conversation as part of the normal course of leaving home for the first time. All we can do now is encourage her to stay in the moment, breathe, and try to enjoy the experience. She’s in a hurry to be done because she can’t at the present see how she can be there for the next few years. I joke that she’s not serving a prison sentence. She sends me a sad emoji. 

Humbling, man. 

I’m trying and mostly succeeding in limiting my exposure to social media, primarily Twitter and YouTube, endless political news, in particular about the latest Trump doings, all the unfolding drama and laughable excuses being offered to explain Trump’s leaving Washington with thousands of official records, many of them classified, and some highly classified. People seem surprised by this; I never was. When the news broke around 18 months ago it made perfect sense to me. Of course Trump took state secrets with him. Think of a career thief sitting in a room with bundles of American dollars. No guard. The thief is loyal only to himself and a select few around him, he has no sense of a higher duty to the United States, so why wouldn’t he take a few bundles on his way out the door? That’s Trump. Information is valuable, useful for business, blackmail, currency for favors. The “noise” on social media is all about the tedious mechanics of the law, Trump’s reaction, speculation about Trump’s legal strategy, and running prognostications about Trump being indicted or the DOJ giving in to fear and precedent and letting him off the hook. Trump should be arrested for what was already recovered since he wasn’t authorized or entitled to any of it, but American justice, at least in the case of financial and political crime, works differently, when it works at all. I’m not optimistic. Imagine the back channel dealings between Trump’s lawyers, such as they are, and lawyers for the DOJ. That’s elite white-collar crime for you, right there; it’s conducted as an endless back and forth between lawyers for the parties. The fact that the crime itself is negotiable is mind-boggling. 

Other than that, we are well. Water runs as normal, the power stays on all day and night; we have plenty to eat and drink; no shortage of distractions; war isn’t raging around us and the streets aren’t filled with murderous zombies. Bicycle thieves, yes, but no Zombies, yet. An acquaintance of mine rode a Specialized for 20 years, to and from her job downtown, to the store, everywhere she needed to go as she doesn’t own a car. She went into the main branch of a bank on Carrillo Street and when she came out less than five minutes later her bike, lock, panniers, were gone. A painful reminder to me of the December night when my Diamond Back was stolen from our downstairs storage unit. Bike thieves are like horse thieves in the old days, lowest of the low. You steal a bicycle and you steal a person’s way to get around, to a job or school. 

I’ll see you soon for our annual get together. 

Is Trump on the Ropes?

 “It was the same set of tactics that the KGB recommended to agents under investigation: admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.” John Lanchester, London Review of Books, 4 August 2022

I was not the least surprised when the news broke more than a year ago that Donald J. Trump had fled Washington with several boxes of official documents, some of them known to be classified. After nearly six years of Trump, considering all his crimes, misdemeanors, lies, and blustery incompetence, why can’t people understand that there was no possibility that Trump was leaving DC without something he could leverage or sell, including our nation’s most sensitive intelligence from our most secret and delicate sources. Hell yeah, Trump is selling that, are you kidding? That stuff is worth big money to any number of parties, but particularly the Russians, Chinese, or the ruler of Saudi Arabia. Trump wouldn’t think twice. Understand his sociopathic mind: he’s in the game for himself and no one else. Collateral damage doesn’t matter; only loyalty to Trump matters. As the Trump edifice begins to tremble, as the first cracks appear, Trump will become ever more paranoid and distrustful, and more obsessed with loyalty; he’ll start purging anyone who isn’t 100% on his side no matter what he does or how idiotic the stuff of his pronouncements. You can take it to your bank that if Trump slips the noose again and somehow regains the presidency, he will reconfigure the Department of Justice to his aims and against whoever he tells it to target or harass.  

If you doubt that Donald Trump would sell America out for money, you simply do not understand the essence of the man. 

Back in November or December of 2016, soon after the horrifying idea of Donald Trump becoming President of the United States fully sunk into my brain, I wrote on my blog, Shouts from the Balcony, the following: “Frankly, I’m afraid of the damage the Trump gang might do, at home primarily, but also abroad;” I just assumed that Trump would lay a hurt of the country that would require years to recover from, like a devastating natural disaster, and he never disappointed; in that sense, and only that sense, he was consistent and reliable. No matter the situation, the law, or the norms and agreements followed by American presidents, of either party since at least the 20th century, Trump invariably snubbed, ignored, trampled, disobeyed, mocked, or violated them.

What has surprised me, pleasantly, I might add, during the last week is confirmation that the US Department of Justice is indeed deep into a multi-pronged investigation of Donald Trump. I was one of the many people on the left becoming very discouraged at what appeared a lack of action on the part of Merrick Garland and federal law enforcement with regard to Trump’s failed coup attempt, as well as his other crimes, including those related to his mishandling and misuse of classified information that had no legitimate reason for being in his possession at Mar-A-Lago. I’m delighted that Garland has proved me to be overly pessimistic and cynical. I never doubted that a case against Trump would take time to assemble and validate, I only wanted some reassurance that a case was underway -- because, to my mind at least, time is of the essence. 

In the excellent book, Surviving Autocracy, journalist Masha Gessen writes, “In the United States, proximity to political power is certainly not the only way to become rich. But political power does translate into wealth, and vice versa, and this is the feature of the system most salient to Trump and Trumpism.” 

If you doubt that Donald Trump would sell America out for money, you simply do not understand the essence of the man. 

In boxing parlance, the last four of five rounds have hurt Trump, hurt him badly; he’ll keep coming off his corner stool, but his punches will be wild and weak, easily avoided and countered. The Menace of Mar-A-Lago is ripe for a knockout. 

Shameless and Lost

MAGA world is outraged about the FBI’s search of Mar-A-Lago, Donald J. Trump’s Florida home. The usual blowhards and cretins are calling it a raid, insisting that the FBI planted incriminating evidence, and that Joe Biden’s aging hands are behind it all. In less than 24 hours, the entire right-wing media apparatus is whistling the same tune, doing everything it can to discredit the FBI and DOJ, and distract from the issue at hand: that the FBI doesn’t just decide to search the residence of a former president without lawful cause and a legal warrant signed by a federal judge. The bar for a search is high to begin with, the evidence must be solid and compelling, but imagine how sure the DOJ, FBI, and the judge had to be that crimes had been, or were about to be, committed by Trump. The Feds wouldn’t go after a former president unless they had iron-clad confidence in their evidence. 

 Trump could dispel the mystery by releasing the search warrant to the press, but that would torpedo its propaganda value as well as its usefulness in duping the gullible out of hard-earned cash. Isn’t it odd that Trump, who loves to boast about his wealth, is always begging people for money? Within hours of the lawful search, supervised by one of Trump’s lawyers, and known to the former president, his Secret Service detail and others in advance, Trump was blasting email solicitations for cash. 

Like the lies, the grift never ends. 

Trump left the White House nearly twenty months ago, after his coup attempt failed. Soon after, the story broke that Trump had taken fifteen boxes of official documents, some of them containing classified information, on his way out the door, in violation of law, practice, protocol and routine. The National Archives asked for the documents to be returned in the usual manner, by having its lawyers “negotiate” the return with Trump’s legal team. This is typically how elite white-collar crime is conducted, by lawyers going back and forth and quibbling over small details and obscure points of law. All very civilized. In response Trump did as he always does, by delaying and dragging his feet, objecting, and claiming non-existent authority and privilege. Defying authority, and the law in other words, because, as any sensible person can see, Trump believes that no law, rule, regulation or edict applies to him; he alone stands above it all.  

Remember how the GOP soiled itself trying to nail Hillary Clinton for using a private email server for official business, and how it painted what happened in Benghazi, Libya as the Crime of the Century? Frothing, fulminating, bellowing, and caterwauling for months on end, wasting millions of tax dollars on pointless and fruitless investigations that proved nothing, all of which they’ve forgotten in a tidal wave of hypocrisy. Trump owns them, and they know it, so McCarthy and Rubio and even Mike Pence attempt to defend the indefensible and stand behind their Dear Leader, who is currently under investigation in New York, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. 

Do you honestly think Trump would hesitate to sell state secrets to the highest bidder? For the right price, Trump would sell Ivanka or one of his idiot sons. If he could turn a tidy profit on Melania he’d ditch her in a heartbeat. 

On his program, Background Briefing, journalist Ian Masters speculated that transcripts of Trump’s conversations with Vladimir Putin might be among the documents Trump was trying to prevent the National Archives from getting its hands on. I don’t know about this, but it sure is amusing to watch the Cult of Law & Order rise to the defense of the most vile, corrupt and criminal person to ever occupy the White House. If hypocrisy were a chicken bone, the GOP would choke to death. 

Use the Damn Word

 “An unimagined catastrophe now characterizes how American education is being shaped by far-right Republican Party politicians.” Henry Giroux, Counterpunch

A large truck rushes down Milpas Street, gears grinding. Breaks my chill. It’s sunny and warm in Santa Barbara, the second day of the annual Fiesta celebration. My wife and I are both SB natives and have seen numerous Fiestas come and go, and like a lot of old-time locals we stay away until all that remains is confetti from cascarones. When our kids were small we always took them to the parade, and one year, Gabriel’s preschool was in it. But it’s been a long, long time since we drank our way down State Street, and rubbed behinds in the tourist circus. 

The word I want more Americans to study and use is fascism. I cannot remember seeing and hearing so many political voices uttering, amplifying, and repeating authoritarian language or proposing, and in many cases during the past few years, passing into law, more and more extreme measures designed to make it even more difficult for people to reason for themselves. The rights of women to control their bodies, to make their own decisions about giving birth, exercising that autonomy, naturally garners a lot of attention. I’ve no beef with that. What I’m watching is what despicable motherfuckers like Ron DeSantis in Florida, and Greg Abbott of Texas, are doing to transform public education into party-approved doctrine and dogma. This goes way beyond telling little fibs and huge lies about the causes of the Civil War and its aftermath, and protecting the delicate sensibilities of white children from the facts of their country’s history. I’m talking Nazi Party levels, people, or if that analogy bothers you, the Soviet communist party under Stalin. Ever heard of Stalin’s purges? If you didn’t toe the Party line you got a bullet in the back of the head. The Republican Party at this moment is functioning in much the same way, but using ostracism instead of bullets. Cowards are still afraid to cross Big Daddy Trump, so they slip their resolute masks on and fulminate about election fraud and call into question Biden’s legitimacy, even as evidence mounts and mounts that Trump attempted to overthrow the US government. People who watch too much Fox News or too much MSNBC are equally deluded. We’re watching a power grab, an authoritarian one. Get it straight: Trump’s desire, his fixation, is to become the American state, as Putin is the Russian state. Trump loves putting his name on things. Why not an entire country?

Authoritarianism is a potent aphrodisiac in a time of drastic change and social upheaval, of endless war and extreme wealth inequality, of suffering and privation for the many and opulence for the few, and of nostalgia for a golden age that never was. Nationalism. Even better, Christian Nationalism. Us against them, good versus evil, all nice and simple, little individual thought required. If it takes wiping the historic record clean, burning all the books, arresting those who disagree to maintain purity of the group, party, race, so be it.

This is scary shit, political monkeypox, and a virulent strain, so don’t sugarcoat it or refuse to call it out by name; fascism has gradations, shades and degrees, like most things in life. And one more thing, never underestimate the role that unregulated capitalism plays in causing the tremors that shake us to our skeletons. What happens when capitalism refuses to address the needs of the masses for basic necessities? Authoritarianism, social control, crackdowns to maintain order, and more and more extreme tests of loyalty to the Great Leader or the Party, which is usually one and the same. It doesn’t happen overnight, like flicking a light switch, it happens more gradually.

Authoritarians appeal to people who are scared of losing their privilege or place. The Gospel of Bigotry and Resentment plays well in times of uncertainty, and there is no shortage of messengers appealing to the aggrieved. We need to chill and think, but our little digital devices demand constant attention. We fucking killed silence and made contemplation a dirty word.