Freedom to the Winds

“Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons?” Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

It hailed in Santa Barbara this week. My wife got some lovely photos of the courthouse lawn, green streaked with white, and a bed of succulents covered with ice. I can’t remember the last time it hailed here. As little rainfall as we get a hailstorm, no matter how brief, is notable. Lake Cachuma still looked pretty sad the last time we drove past on Highway 154, but our area isn’t in a severe drought. Not yet. The weather’s kind of unpredictable now, a result of our endless meddling in Mother Nature’s business. Do I think human beings are killing the planet? Yes. Will we adapt to it like we have adapted to Covid? Probably. And once we adapt, is there ever any going all the way back? Covid, or something like it, will be with us from now on. 

When I ruminate on our changing climate and the obscene disparities of wealth and power in most places, I figure the wealthy can buy many kinds of protection to give them the best chance of long term survival when the rule of law becomes the law of the jungle. Not hard to imagine a world where the wealthy hoard the resources needed to sustain life, and defend their control of those resources to the death. Grim. Has wisdom and justice ever prevailed in human history? Has decency and kindness ever ruled?  Not to my knowledge. Someone always winds up having more power over others than any human should. Life and death power. 

I received the single dose Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine in my left arm yesterday. This morning when I woke up I felt fine in every respect, but around ten o’clock I began to feel a little dull, a touch fatigued. It wore on as the hours in the office passed and I had to skip my usual Friday evening training session. It’s the one time each week when I feel like working in a higher gear, just because it’s Friday and I can recover the following day. I took a nap instead. My son came up from LA to file his taxes and is staying with us, and I could hear him and his sister sniping at each other in the next room. Non-stop insults, brutal sarcasm, obscene putdowns. The bickering hits a lull and then flares up. The problem is the lack of space, we’re crammed together, four adults now, much different from two adults and two children. I think we’re another month from moving. Our harried and haggard landlord continues his renovation project below us and in the backyard. Our “stuff” is scattered around, piled high, covered with concrete dust. Every day when I go downstairs my training gear has been moved; I stubbornly move it right back to where I can get to it easily. I try not to let the lack of control bug me but it does. We never amassed enough money to buy a house here in our hometown and likely never will. That vessel sailed long ago. This bothers me far less than it once did. I don’t see us becoming as rootless as the people in the film Nomadland, but nor can I see that we will ever own the roof over our heads, which means we will be subject to other people’s rules and bullshit. Money buys many kinds of freedom. 

Should we get used to the idea that we’re going to extinguish all life on this planet one day?That’s cynical and defeatist and hopeless, isn’t it? Yes it is. I’m trying to remember if I felt more hope before Covid hit and gave us a glimpse of the future than I do a year later, after 500,000 Americans have died and the lives of millions more have been forever altered. There are stories from the forgotten and the ignored that we don’t hear about. I’m lucky to have a speedily created vaccine in my arm that I paid nothing for directly. It’s not that I lack hopes and dreams and desires, I still have some. I definitely want to travel more, see places and people, watch a football match in Spain or Italy or England. I’d love to get back to Italy. I liked the vibe there. I’m cynical, yes, but perhaps not entirely faithless because I believe there are many people like me, neither rich or impoverished, who are very content to live and let live, who are opposed to violence as a national ethos, and who think justice is vital to insure long term peace. The big middle, that’s us. We’re rarely consulted about anything except what our money can buy. Money never excited me enough to chase it with all my heart. I read Henry Miller and other sages carefully and they spoke to me about life, what has value, what’s eternal and good in the human species. People go to incredible lengths to help one another survive. Covid has shown us the best and worst in ourselves. 

Joe Biden and the Democrats shepherded a Covid relief bill through Congress. No Republicans voted for the bill but many of their constituents stand to benefit from the legislation. Now Biden has to sell this accomplishment to the public, explaining and highlighting what it will do for working people, small business owners, and children. The Democrats cannot take for granted that the voting public will remember come 2022. Meanwhile, the GOP continues to bow to Trump, who is being hemmed in on all sides with lawsuits and investigations. America is much quieter now that Trump is off the main stage. The danger the Republic faces is still present, make no mistake about that, and what emerges from the investigation into the January 6th Insurrection will be important. How close to Trump will that probe get? How many of those charged will flip for leniency? What was Roger Stone’s role? Stone is a weird fucker, the kind of villian Made in America, something he shares in common with Donald Trump. 

Violated, Broken, and Maimed: The Acquittal of Donald J. Trump

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.” Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

The Senate’s acquittal of Trump was no surprise. The sham trial was no surprise, either. The idiotic defense offered up by Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz was as predictable as snow in Minot, North Dakota in January. Madison and Hamilton are rolling over in their tombs. “Don’t feel bad, men, your Constitution worked pretty well for over two centuries.” But not even in your darkest and most fearful imaginings could you have conjured Donald J. Trump, and an entire political party (save Mitt Romney) of cowards, hypocrites, and incompetents, who without batting an eye traded the rule of law, checks and balances, for the law of the jungle. 

Trump’s followers are betting that the good times (meaning the tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, defense spending, low interest rates, oil and gas drilling) will keep going -- although it’s against the laws of nature that they do -- and their power grows and solidifies, and that Trump will not at some point become paranoid and turn on them, as Joseph Stalin was wont to do. Politicians of Stalin’s era feared a midnight knock at the door and a firing squad; members of today’s GOP wet themselves just thinking about being maligned by Trump on Twitter and Fox News.   

Afraid to stand up to the bully for fear of losing position and privilege. But not afraid to trash their oath of office and stomp on Madison and Hamilton’s best work.  

The imbecile bully who, after today, may as well be king. Mad king Donald. 

The American government is not a parliament of whores as P.J. O’Rourke once called it, it’s just a cheap whorehouse on the edge of a dying city, with leaky toilets and creaky beds, soiled sheets, and suspicious stains on the floor. 

Hey, Donald, we’re becoming a shithole country. Are you going to bomb us? 

Once again a minority triumphs over the majority.

In 2016 I didn’t think Trump had a chance of becoming president. I overestimated my countrymen’s ability to think logically; I underestimated their pain and fear. In 2020 I don’t see how Trump can lose. Incumbency is powerful in and of itself. Trump’s also sitting on a tower of cash that he can splash around the media landscape. But the real problem, for me, is lack of a Democratic candidate who can unite most of the party, build a large enough coalition, and energize the masses to vote. In the current field, only Bernie Sanders has the mojo to excite people, particularly the young, but the national Democratic Party despises Sanders. Why? For the same reason Republicans won’t cross Trump. Fear of losing power and privilege. Sanders might overturn the gravy train, he might build a movement, he might try to raise taxes on the wealthy and slow the growth of Pentagon spending. He might actually put some official weight behind a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. 

Establishment Democrats and their big money donors aren’t having it. That’s why they let Bloomberg buy his way into the game. That’s why MSNBC and CNN twist themselves into knots to avoid acknowledging that Sanders is a viable candidate. That’s why an unknown pipsqueak named Pete Buttegieg is still hanging around, as if he might stand a chance. It’s why Joe Biden is always described as the front runner. These are the safe guys, tried and true neoliberals and war enthusiasts, the kind of stand up people who would give Juan Guaido a standing ovation. 

I knew this day was coming, but it still leaves me low. What it portends for the future scares me. Intellectually I know that despair is not an option, and that all good and decent people have to keep their hope of a more just world alive; it’s just that today something feels violated, broken, maimed for all time. 

Waiting on the Ghost of Edward R. Murrow

“Capitalism is like poisoned honey. People swarm to it like bees.” Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Hypocrisy is lodged deep in the American character. We proclaimed that all men are created equal, but put millions of African men (and women and children, too) in bondage; we freak out over the possibility that Russia interfered in our election process, as dubious and corrupt as that money-drenched process is, when the US has for decades interfered in the elections of nations around the globe; we spend more money on the military and intelligence services and domestic security than any country on earth, and yet our president loses his shit over the possibility that a few hundred Central American refugees might “overwhelm” our border.

If you get your information about the world from the American corporate media, you might believe that the only major problems we face are high taxes (always too high), threats from Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, Putin, Robert Mueller, and Stormy Daniels. Poverty, racism, perverse and destructive income inequality, climate change, Fukushima, the murder of unarmed peaceful protesters by the Israeli army, not worth covering. It’s all spin and counterspin, PR flackery, truth-killing, obfuscating statements from nitwits like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and fawning servility from people who call themselves journalists. Superpower? The world’s most wonderful democracy? Land of the free, home of the brave?

The drums of war are beating again. Trump threatens to pull the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, while Bibi Netanyahu, the corrupt and murderous Israeli Prime Minister, makes a hyperbolic presentation suggesting that Iran is poised to seize control over the entire Middle East, and wipe Israel from the map. Never mind that Israel has a nuclear stockpile, plus the unequivocal support of the US military, Iran is the key threat to peace in the region. Forget the fact that the JCPOA appears to be working, and that Iran is said to be complying with its terms, Trump still wants to pull out and make Iran pay a terrible price, whatever that means. Trump obviously hasn’t troubled himself to read the JPCOA or have someone explain its basic terms to him with graphics. I doubt Trump could find Iran on a map.

Short Takes:

Trump is now apparently denying that he had sex with former adult film star “Stormy Daniels,” though the Orange Menace clings to his accusation that Daniels violated a non-disclosure agreement. If Trump and Stormy didn’t do the big nasty, why was an NDA required?

I came across this quote in Ibram X. Kendi’s brilliant history, Stamped from the Beginning: “Faced with an empty national treasury, erratic trade policies, international disrespect, and fears of the union falling apart…” this was America in 1787. Sounds familiar.

What became of all the furor over Trump’s tax returns? Is the IRS “audit” of his returns completed? If not, this must be the longest and most comprehensive audit in the history of the IRS.

Trump seems to have a very difficult time securing competent legal representation. On the other hand, what self-respecting lawyer would want anything to do with a man who lies about everything, all the time, and whose closet is stacked with skeletons?

Congratulations to our friend, Nomi Prins, on the official release of her new book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. Nomi is a wonder.