The Wrong People Are In Charge

 “And there's a shadow on the faces/Of the men who send the guns/To the wars that are fought in places/Where their business interest runs”

Jackson Browne, “Lives in the Balance”

I finally got to run on the artificial turf in Peabody Stadium. For two years or more I watched the new stadium rise and contented myself with running on the front lawn of the high school, which due to the use of reclaimed water is green all year. Even when the stadium officially opened with a big groundbreaking ceremony attended by Santa Barbara High alumni and local political personalities, it was never open to the general public like the old stadium was. Pandemic restrictions kept the public at bay -- though I saw young guys hop the fence to use the new outdoor basketball courts all the time; something I didn’t feel right about doing while I was working for the school district. Because of the recent graduation ceremony, I found the gate wide open and walked down the hill and checked out the track and the turf field, the bronze plaques dedicated to people who coughed up matching funds. A lot of local history on this ground. I found both surfaces ideal for the kind of running I do, mostly intervals and agility work. Since I’m no longer employed by the district, I may join the youngsters in hopping the fence in the future.  

I wrote a review of The Cross and the Lynching Tree by the late theologian James H. Cone for California Review of Books. It’s linked here in case anyone is interested: https://calirb.com/the-cross-and-the-lynching-tree-by-james-h-cone/

It’s astonishing, and sobering, to think about the number of people who occupy positions of authority or leadership who have no business in such positions. Whether it’s the United States Senate, the Texas State Legislature, police departments in cities large and small, Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, or superintendents of school districts. The Peter Principle isn’t imaginary. In many organizations, public or private sector, rising has less to do with the ability to get things done, and far more to do with the ability to get along with people higher on the food chain. Say the right words, obtain the recognized credentials, and don’t make enemies. I worked with a fair number of stiffs during my career in public education, and a few zealots who honestly believed our work was changing the world, a claim of hubris that I couldn’t entirely buy -- particularly after experiencing the local schools through my own children. The day I met the last superintendent I worked under I knew she was in over her head. That was my instant gut feeling -- and time proved me right. Oh, she had all her boxes checked, but you cannot learn leadership from a textbook or a degree program or a week-long conference with other people who think like you do. 

I’m thinking of changing the subtitle of this blog from Notes of an Unarmed American to Notes of a Working-Class Intellectual. After 18 years it feels like it’s time for a change. I was reading some older posts the other day and it occurs to me that inequality and injustice are mainly what have preoccupied me for nearly two decades. My sense is that wealth inequality is one reason for the divisions in this society. Too few have too much, and too many either have too little or a very tenuous grip on just enough. I’ve written over and over again that American-style capitalism is cruel. This is why it must be regulated. My political platform isn’t complicated. It starts with universal healthcare and public education. Maternity and child care and care for the elderly. Housing. And an end to devoting half the federal budget to “defense.” It’s not defense, it’s offense, it’s empire, power projection and endless war and snuggling up with murderous regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel for the primary benefit of multinational energy extractors. I’m for gay marriage and a woman’s right to exercise total control over her own body. I’m against all forms of slavery. I’m for sensible gun laws. I’m for immediate recognition that climate change is happening faster than the majority of Americans understand. I’m not a communist. I suppose I’m best described as a social democrat. 

I marked two passages in Bad Mexicans by Kelly Lytle Hernandez that struck me as relevant to our own day. Granted, Praxedis Guerrero wrote that “Tyranny is the crime of collectivities that do not think for themselves, and it should be attacked as a social illness by means of revolution” in 1910, but millions of Americans have given up thinking for themselves and appear willing to turn the country over to Donald Trump, a failed single term and twice-impeached president, a serial business failure, tax cheat, and one of the true grifters in modern world history, along with what seem like hundreds of nutters who think a fascist America will be better. Perhaps Americans will soon have a better understanding of how close Trump came to igniting a political coup. People died on January 6. We cannot forget that. 

The other quote is this one from Ricardo Flores Magon, the man at the center of Bad Mexicans, and also penned in 1910: “Political liberty requires as an adjunct another liberty to be effective, and that is economic liberty.” If one is in debt, does one have economic liberty? In my mind economic liberty means freedom from want: food, clothing, medical care, education, and shelter. A baseline enough to sustain life. I imagine that when most Americans think of economic liberty -- if they think of such a question at all -- they equate it with choices: models, colors, sizes, varieties, specification, hipness or status. But how many choices in airlines do we have in the US now? Rental cars? Cell phone carriers? Internet service providers? Grocery stores? Medical insurance? How many different companies provide services in these different sectors? Is our freedom more an illusion of choice when in fact most of our consumption benefits a few dozen corporations? I always recall this line from a Greg Brown song: Sooner or later there’ll be one corporation selling one little box, it will give you what you want and take everything you got. 1910 and 2022 are not the same, obviously, and Mexico isn’t the United States. What is similar are the concentrations of wealth, power and influence, in Mexico in the person of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, and in the United States represented by oligarchs like Gates, Bezos, the Koch family, Musk -- the entire billionaire class and all the infrastructure, financial and legislative, that allows them to get over at the expense of individuals, families, and communities. The common folk. Power is the common thread, who has it, who doesn’t. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 12

“I am merely a passer-by, it was there, patiently enduring heat and cold, rain, wind and sun, now thriving, now starving, fastened like a limpet to this strip of land, sucking in life and yielding up its dead.” Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

The sky is that battleship gray color, a slight breeze is blowing, from which direction I can’t tell, and earlier a little rain fell. It’s Sunday, but there is no football from England, Italy or Spain. All the players are holed up, showing off their home training regimens on You Tube. Some dribble rolls of toilet paper, some have goals in their living room. Penning these athletes up is like confining the fastest horse that ever lived to a corral. The horse was born to run, and footballers have the same urge to gallop, race, leap, jump and twist. Hard to completely shut down a finely tuned athlete; the machine wants to work. 

Is this the third Covid Sunday or the second? It’s the first week of April. We’re in the self-isolation rhythm. My wife and I haven’t worn down each others’ nerves yet. We are fortunate to have a large outdoor deck and a fenced yard. We can get a little distance from one another when needed. Many people are isolated in smaller, grimmer, less comfortable spaces. It’s just three of us. My daughter’s emotions have swung like an out-of-control wrecking ball, from immature 18-year-old who can only consider how this pandemic affects her, or her and her boyfriend, and blames us, her parents, for the social distancing prohibitions, to sulking for hours behind the closed door of her room. We hear her on Face Time with friends, so she’s not at all like a prisoner in solitary confinement. She’s too young at this point to turn inward for perspective and solace. She’s eighteen and in love for the first time, it’s Spring time, and she can’t see, touch, or smell her boyfriend. Every hour apart is like a week. It’s unbearable, and terribly unfair. That’s her world. The pandemic is out to get her, and only her. 

Miranda acts that way until we snap her out of it with a snarky remark about her intelligence, or she pulls out of the funk on her own. It’s relatively chill for a day or two, and then the wrecking ball swings the other direction. Duck and cover time. 

My wife is holding up really well. She’s even-keeled, never too high or low. We do the things we need to do, a few things we want to do, and pass as best we can these uncertain, strange, foreboding days. We change clothes regularly -- no lounging around in sweatpants and a bathrobe reeking of tequila and sweat; I’d say we are getting enough sleep. Eating with good moderation, and not much differently than we normally do. What’s different is that we’re not eating out. We typically eat out a few times a month, nothing fancy, Joe’s Cafe, Cajun Kitchen, Los Arroyos, Saigon, Empty Bowls. We watched Real Time with Bill Maher last night, and followed that with The Wife, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Price. We’re waiting for the next episode of The Plot Against America on HBO.

Today was the first day in three weeks that I didn’t train with a 10 pound steel mace. I worked on a handstand instead. 

We drove past Trader Joe’s on Milpas this morning but the line was long, so we got on the freeway headed north to the Vons on Turnpike. Traffic was light. No line of people waiting to enter the store. The floor by the check-out stations was marked in the now expected six foot intervals. The paper goods aisle was barren, sad, but by pure luck we found an off brand 4-pack of TP on the shelf in the soda aisle. Bonus. It’s the little things in a pandemic. The routine becomes miraculous. For the next two weeks or so, with conscientious use, we can defecate with confidence. We got some wheat bread, orange juice, squash, asparagus, crackers, eggs (white only). Reusable bags from outside are not allowed. Customers can have, for free, plastic or paper. We didn’t see anyone we knew. 

Another month or two of self-isolation will crack some people, and they may decide that enough is enough and test the authorities by trying to gather in public, without gloves or mask or bandana. People will become exhausted, stir-crazy, anxious as hell about the rent, the car payment, food, and all the rest. My wife filed for unemployment, joining ten million other Americans who, suddenly, find themselves out of work. Before the pandemic, the Orange Menace routinely boasted about the economy, calling it, with no basis in reality, the greatest of all time. Yes, unemployment was low by historic measures, but what the Menace and his wealthy pals don’t understand is how drastically “employment” has changed. The tragedy of this economy is today as it has been for a long time, that a person can be fully employed and still too poor to afford the rent. Working-class people can’t compete with the titans of real estate and hedge fund vultures when the central bank of the United States creates another giant real estate asset bubble. I’d guess there are many more renters in America today than there were before the housing market tanked in 2008-09. Rents have gone ever higher, ever out of reach. 

All the Orange Menace’s self-congratulatory boasting about the stock market and the unemployment rate have proven (surprise, surprise) to be hollow; it’s not the greatest economy ever when millions of working Americans are in dire straits after missing one or two paychecks. The politicians, of both parties, and the corporate lobbyists that fund them, have talked about economic recovery for a dozen years, and how good things have been. As proof, they point to the New York Stock Exchange, as if the stock market has anything to do with the real economy where most Americans work and live. What politicians of both parties left out of their happy talk, was that things were good -- in some cases better than good -- only if you happened to be wealthy. If you were working-class, you likely noticed a strange phenomenon: you were swimming hard but only treading water. You weren’t working to get ahead; you were working not to fall further behind. 

We, the working-class, are reaping a bitter harvest we didn’t sow.

What do you do when your bootstrap is too short to pull on? Why does “moral hazard” only apply to the poor? 

It’s a strange country that always rescues its wealthy first; that would never think of telling its billionaires to stop taking more than their share, but has not a second thought about telling the poor to take even less. 

We are here, in this moment. The wind has picked up.