Undercurrents

Making up the blues
Holding back schools
Lot of greed, lot of temptation
Proof of one thing, we're a hell of a nation

Willie Wright, "Right on For The Darkness"

Time feels slightly disorienting, even though I’m doing my best to slow down and enjoy it like I should. Perhaps it’s because I perceive the sense of looming cataclysm, political, financial, geopolitical, or all three simultaneously. Who can say with any certainty that Putin won’t go nuclear in Ukraine? That’s one of those more distant worries, sort of like the fate of the ancient and decrepit nuclear reactors in Hanford, Washington, where material for the first atomic bomb we dropped on the civilian population of Japan was produced. Evidence of poor maintenance, leaks, and shoddy oversight by the US Department of Energy, all covered in a new book by Joshua Frank called Atomic Days. That’s closer to home, but closer still is the 23% decline in the value of our IRA. The US federal reserve seems to only have one single blunt tool at hand, raising interest rates to suffocate inflation. Many unseen hands in this one, bankers, hedge fund managers, huge pension funds like Cal-PERS (my pension fund), all beyond my control. Climate change, the availability of water, is a constant undercurrent to our lives, though often easy to ignore. 

In many ways it seems a cataclysm of Stupidity and Greed and Cruelty, dating back to the 2000 election, an election that was actually stolen, thanks to GOP judicial operatives like John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, and culminating today, with the former president acting everything but disgraced by two impeachments and the incitement of an armed attack on the seat of the legislative branch, an attempt at government by thuggery, as he continues to push his election lies, grift his gullible supporters, feed his durable base a torrent of lies and nonsense fables, and shop the state secrets he stole from the legitimate government to interested parties, possibly including Vladimir Putin. The possibilities are boggling, but again, far beyond my tiny sphere of influence. Purity tests took hold in the GOP under Newt Gingrich in the 1990’s, when Gingrich figured out how to weaponize obstinance and unyielding partisan opposition to actual governing. Party over country, raw power the sole objective. Rigid party discipline was built over the decades, and with the advent of the social disease that is social media (yes, I’m aware of the irony of a blogger who uses social media criticizing that very medium), but it has changed the game of politics, and not in a good way, putting performance over sense-making, the more batshit and outrageous and insulting the better. Get it trending and on FOX News. Repetition, like water on stone, will eventually make the truth give way. What’s true today? What’s a fact? 

The ire and outrage and sense of entitlement represented by extremists on the political right ring with echoes of the 1850’s, when this country was squaring off for separation and divorce, bitterness and hatred flowing fast, reason taking an elbow from emotion, fear on the rise, violence in the rhetoric of politicians and talking heads. Trump was the ultimate loyalty test, and he bluffed and bullied the GOP into submission. His Word had to be echoed without criticism, defended with personal attacks, invective and counter-accusations. Trump is a master of this authoritarian technique, he does it like judo, by muscle memory. I despise the man, but credit where it is warranted. 

Among the books on my tables these days is American Midnight by the historian Adam Hochschild. His canvas is World War I, with a primary focus on what America’s entry into the war meant on the domestic front at a time of widespread labor strife and violence, agitation from unions, socialists and anarchists for more fairness in a highly unequal economic arrangement. This is the authoritarian era the modern GOP wishes to return to, with everything it values -- racial animosity, vigilante groups, citizens spying on each other, cruelty against immigrants, women fighting for full citizenship, and intolerance of dissent -- in play.  This was the era that birthed the Espionage Act (still in force today) and the Volstead Act, which ushered in the nutty idea of Prohibition. Dumb ideas have the unfortunate habit of also being cruel, and they tend to proliferate. Ban books, forbid the teaching of history, demand that public schools emphasis “patriotic” education, outlaw abortion, slam the border shut. Another similarity -- it was an age with a global pandemic, then, the misleadingly named Spanish Flu, and today, Covid. Deliberate misinformation about both was disseminated widely to the public. 

Speaking of dumb ideas, look at what’s happening in the UK, post-Brexit. The people of Britain were sold a phony bill of goods that harkened back to the glory years of the empire, when Britain was a major global power. The Conservative party in the UK is as devoid of ideas as the GOP in this country.