Drag Queens

 “To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.” Barbara Ehrenreich

I read a headline that claimed that George Santos, probably the most notorious, outrageous, mind-boggling example of the gangrene in Trump’s GOP, once did drag, another small secret in his impressive resume of Bald Faced Lies & Total Fabrications. This boy’s got it all, the perfect advertisement for the GOP, and hapless Kevin McCarthy has to keep him or watch his majority shrink further. McCarthy is strapped to a rocket of political cruelty and stupidity. Serves him right. What kind of shit do you think lines the closet of a man like Kevin McCarthy? A man who for position and power repeatedly humiliates himself. In Public. Who makes backroom deals that he knows are pure madness? But the train is rolling now, unstoppable. Kevin’s going to have some very bad days in the months ahead. 

If Kevin McCarthy were a drag performer, what do you think his stage name would be? Ponder. Share ideas. Collaborate, as they say. 

Leave it to the state of Florida to choose ignorance over knowledge and academic tyranny over academic freedom. No AP course on African-American history will be offered to Florida’s high school students. Too many references to “Black Power” and “Reparations” and “Black Lives Matter.” Way to go Florida! Keep fighting the future! Stay stupid!  

Let’s change the subject to football. My Chelsea are going through a rough season, the first under new ownership. The Russian oligarch, Roman Ambramovic, owned the club for two decades and his money and belief played a huge part in Chelsea’s most glory-laden seasons. Lots of great players, now club legends, a tradition of excellence, many trophies. He invested lavishly in the club. He sacked managers for poor results, possibly for sport. He was mercurial, impatient for silverware. The fans loved him. 

Roman’s gone, chased out by the UK government in its crackdown on Russian oligarchs after Putin invaded Ukraine. Todd Boehly and a group of investors are now the owners, everything’s different. Boehly is splashing money around with verve, but 12 first team players or their immediate substitute is injured and out of action. They have a new manager, Graham Potter, who was snatched from Brighton Hove Albion where he had success in building a reliable mid-table team. Potter replaced the very popular Thomas Tuchel. I liked Tuchel, he didn’t deserve the sack after what he contributed to the club, but that’s how the business end of the game works. No loyalty.

The jury’s out on Potter, whether he’s the man to lead the regeneration of this team. Is he a good enough manager? Or is this stage too big for him at this point in his career? Brighton and Chelsea are very different. The expectation of the supporters is way, way different. Chelsea fans are anxious, and it’s not clear what kind of team is being assembled for what style of play. 

So, that’s Chelsea. In the meantime, cross-city rivals, Arsenal, are killing it, sitting atop the table with 50 points. Tremendous young team that is totally in sync and playing with daring and skill. I watched them defeat Manchester United 3-2 on Sunday. United have been resurgent of late and sit in fourth position. Under new manager Erik ten Hag, United is back from the wilderness, definitely in the title race when this match kicked-off, and even more so when they scored first through a brilliant Marcus Rashford laser from distance. I was very keen to see how Arsenal would react to going a goal behind in front of their home support. That’s always a tell. Arsenal didn’t blink. You could see them collectively dig in. They didn’t get wobbly when United equalized at 2-2, either. That informs me that this team is for real, a proper title contender. They’re a very direct team, always moving forward with organization and smarts. Thomas Partey was massive in the midfield for Arsenal, my man of the match. But that honor could just as easily be handed to Bakayo Saka who scored a highlight reel goal from distance, or Eddie Nketiah, who scored a brace, including the winner in the ninetieth minute. Dramatic stuff. Both teams were up for the contest, and the match was played with high intensity and tempo and skill. Ridiculous skill. 

I’m reading a book called The Big Myth, and George Saunders’s new collection of short stories. Liberation Day. Typical Saunders: strange, dark, funny, with unusual juxtapositions. I just finished writing a review of Personality and Power by the historian Ian Kershaw. The subtitle is Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe. 

Sweet and Sour Meanderings

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell
That’s the story of the Hurricane
But it won’t be over till they clear his name
And give him back the time he’s done

“Hurricane,” Bob Dylan

+ My daughter is going back to Philadelphia in a few days, back to university and student life. She’s feeling sad about leaving. Of course. She’s 21 and life here is comfortable and familiar and easier. But she needs to be back in school. She seems so young, much younger than her peers of the same age. The progress she made last year was hard-earned, with tears and daily thoughts of throwing in the towel. Homesickness. We thought she might quit. We encouraged her to see out the semester. She did. She also changed her living situation, from the dorm to sharing an apartment off-campus with a new friend. She’s working it out in the Big City. 

+ There wasn’t any flooding or damage in our immediate area from the recent rains. Crazy rains after years of drought. But that’s the history of this state, cycles of drought and flood. Water in the wrong places, far from the majority of the population, water that has to be moved north to south and east to west, through canals and dams and a massive aqueduct. Engineering marvels on one level, but on another destructive as hell. Fucking with nature, changing the course of rivers, streams, making lakes where no lake was meant to be. Displacing people. That’s part of the California story, too.  

+ The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday crept up on me this year. It’s usually a time of reflection, but this year it came and went. Dr. King. Frederick Douglass. W.E.B Du Bois. James Baldwin. My pantheon of great Americans. Each one a prophet. The radical King is largely unknown now, except to scholars and careful readers. With every passing year we get a watered-down, white-washed, sanitized King. I encourage folks to read or listen to King’s 1967 address, “A Time to Break Silence.” It’s all there. “There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.” The American war budget for this fiscal year is $858 billion. A fair chunk of that is earmarked for Ukraine, another war that might continue for some time. $858 billion while so many Americans are unhoused, hungry, without access to medical care or an education, in need of mental health care, and the wealthiest corporations and individuals have gamed the tax system. We saw Trump’s tax returns. They’re the returns of a lousy businessman and a cheat. No surprise, not really news. Not that uncommon in his circles, either. 

King said that America has a “proneness to adjust to injustice.” How right he was. We have adjusted to being ruled by the magic of the Market and every inequity that it brings, as well as conditioned to accept permanent war as normal. I’m not a communist; when it comes to economic matters I’m more of a social democrat. The infallible “logic” of the free market has failed for too many and succeeded for too few. People created the Market, it wasn’t handed down by the Christian God. It’s not free, and rarely has been in this country. King knew that unregulated capitalism produced rough and ragged edges, which led to other maladies, social, political, racial. Read or listen to the address. It seems to me that we’ve never been most distant from King’s vision.

+ Democracy isn’t perfect, not close, but it’s better than most alternatives. We’ve neglected ours, assuming, I suppose, that it’s carved in stone and will last forever. Neither is true, Trump and his accomplices proved that. The legal guardrails were challenged. Innocent people died. Trump and Meadows and Flynn and Giuliani and Stone are free, all  of them. Kevin McCarthy is Speaker of the House. America is in trouble. Remember what Hagrid said to Harry Potter: “Dark times, Harry, dark times.”

+ Our natural gas bill rose from something like $75 to $220 in the space of a month. Our little house is 90 years old, drafty and poorly insulated. We have to run the heater. 

+ Two minutes on Twitter is enough to convince me that America has lost its collective mind. Fortunately, Twitter doesn’t present the entire picture. 

The Maddening Double Standard

 “Once factual truth is no defense in politics, all that remains is spectacle and force.” Timothy Snyder

Does the arc of the moral universe bend toward justice? Perhaps a better question might be: is there a moral universe at all? 

It’s comforting to believe that truth wins out, that justice matters, and that those who commit misdeeds, who lie, cheat and steal their way through this life get punished, but the evidence is scant and spotty. Truth is a leaky rubber raft floating on a choppy sea in a post-truth era like ours, always on the verge of being submerged. 

Donald Trump remains a free man two years to the day after inciting a mob to storm the US Capitol, and having carted off a trove of documents, some highly classified, that belonged to the government. Lesser mortals caught with government secrets have paid harsh penalties, including prison time. For lesser mortals, unauthorized possession of classified stuff brought swift and heavy consequences, unlike the deferential way Trump has been treated. In Trump’s case the wheels of justice are barely turning, as if too encrusted with mud, weeds and rust to turn, with no certainty, even if the wheels do begin to move, that the rule of law will prevail against him or his co-conspirators. We can be reasonably sure that deals will be cut, immunity granted, indictments deferred, perhaps pardons issued. Trump has never been held to account, which is why he treats the law with contempt, as something others are required to follow but from which he is immune and exempt. Like the proverbial playground bully, he’s daring someone in authority to bring the fire and fury. No takers thus far, though there’s plenty of speculation, analysis, opinion and guesswork. I’ll believe it when I see an indictment. From what jurisdiction it emerges I don’t really care. 

Why can’t Trump be exiled to a barren island that is being inundated by the rising sea?

It’s the double-standard that makes it all so maddening. Only rich and powerful people can defer accountability or evade it entirely; most of us have minimal defenses, and some of us have none. 

Will Vladimir Putin ever be held to account or pay any personal cost for his decision to invade Ukraine? Not likely any time soon. Justice for the victims of his aggression -- and it is Putin’s aggression, Putin’s atrocities, Putin’s death and destruction and suffering -- must wait. And wait. Did Stalin suffer any punishment during his lifetime for the millions of his own people that he caused to die? 

What penalty will George Santos pay for lying about every aspect of his professional resume? Santos rode his lies to a seat in Congress. What does that say about his voters, and soon, constituents? I don’t think I’d want to be represented in Congress but a complete phony; the representative I have is not a phony, but he is a politician. Some might argue that it’s the same thing. 

What about Trump’s last Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, will he ever feel the heavy hand of the law for his role in Trump’s attempted coup?

Perhaps the only form of justice we can reasonably expect is the poetic kind. Or the neatly packaged kind found in books and movies and reality TV shows. However, watching Kevin McCarthy, one of the most spineless, craven, mendacious, arrogant, power-hungry, shameless and nakedly ambitious political performers, repeatedly humiliated by members of his own party is deeply satisfying and poetic and deserved. McCarthy mortgaged his soul long ago, trusting it would lead to his being awarded the Speaker’s gavel, which must be the thing in the world he most craves given how much humiliation he’s willing to endure to get it, like Golum and the ring, but his extremist colleagues have other ideas. Probably because he’s burned them so many times before, promising one thing to their face, doing another behind their back, they relish thwarting him and watching him grovel and debase himself; time and again they thrust the knife in McCarthy’s side and giggle as he bleeds. To make the torment stop he will concede away most of his own authority and power. Instead of expanding the prestige of the Speaker’s Chair, McCarthy will shrink and neuter it. He’s no Nancy Pelosi, is he? 

Maybe all the arc of the moral universe does is double back on itself, traveling endlessly but without ever reaching its destination, seeking but never landing on justice. 

Justice in human affairs, like progress, isn’t inevitable. Organized people and institutions bring it about. But what do we do when people corrupt institutions? What have people always done? Protest, riot, wage war? Negotiate? How have human beings settled their differences throughout history? Is it a silly dream that people can solve their mutual problems without violence? A liberal fantasy? The result of smoking too much weed? 

Can there be a moral universe without facts? 

It’s the second anniversary of Trump’s failed coup attempt. The people are still waiting for accountability.