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.