The Cartoon Kingpin

 “The cohort aged between thirty and forty was shocked into a strangely hapless political sentience by the September 11 attacks and the fraudulent war of aggression fought by the Republican administration against Iraq. Even as this cohort recognizes the immense civic and representational value of Barack Obama’s presidency, it has little experience of the Democratic Party implementing a Democratic agenda.” Joseph O’Neill, New York Review of Books

I caught short takes of the Democratic Party’s virtual convention -- clips of Michelle Obama’s speech, Kamala Harris’s acceptance, Barack’s indictment of Trump -- and large parts of Biden’s speech. The bar has fallen so far in the Age of Trump that Biden was given high marks for getting through his speech without committing any major gaffes. When Biden said, at the close of his speech, “May God protect our troops” I was reminded of the role he has played for nearly twenty years at the top echelons of our government, a time when our country has been continuously engaged in armed conflict with someone, somewhere on the planet; a time when our government stalled, deferred and ignored the accelerating climate crisis; a time when our capitalist-centered government legislated massive transfers of wealth from the many to the few.  

Biden closed with that for many reasons -- to reassure people that he won’t become soft on national security or that he has any intention of seriously challenging the military-intelligence-surveillance complex -- but also because ours is a country trapped and stunted by our addiction to war. 

The power brokers in the Democratic Party still refuse to acknowledge that the future lies on the left, not the right. Until Bill and Hillary Clinton are dead and buried, they will be rolled out every four years to dispense wisdom and remind us of the glory years. Barack and Michelle will play similar roles, defending the center-right and assisting in silencing, or dismissing, voices of people who have a different vision for the party, like AOC and Ilhan Omar. The old guard never relinquishes power without a struggle. Not Pelosi. Not McConnell. 

A  few questions rolled around my brain this week, such as, will the GOP go the way of the Whigs? How does the country learn from the colossal failure, ineptitude and corruption of Donald J. Trump and the criminal hordes who surround him? Why did the Democrats feel it necessary to give Michael Bloomberg a place in their virtual convention? 

Will the indictment of Steve Bannon for fraud end with his long overdue comeuppance? Doubtful. But it was somehow reassuring to see Bannon under arrest, and I hope to see similar scenes repeated with William Barr, Jared Kushner, Ivanka, Mike Pompeo, and the cartoon kingpin himself, Donald J. Trump.

Has it ever been more clear that the stock market and the real economy have almost nothing in common? 

Consider this amazing feat: the intellectually and morally bankrupt GOP has succeeded in repudiating both Lincoln and Reagan. 

Last I checked more than 500 wildfires were burning in California, multiple small blazes, and three or four big ones that are burning thousands of acres, destroying homes, and forcing residents to flee. Here in Santa Barbara it has been oppressively hot for the past few days, 90 degrees as I write this, and the sky is hazy from fires burning to the north and southeast. I can’t help but think we’re witnessing a glimpse of our future, an endless series of climate calamities. 

The Champions League final between Bayern Munich and Paris St. Germain should be epic. Bayern is a ruthless and relentless bunch, a steamroller of a side, while PSG relies on the creativity and flamboyance of Mbappe and Neymar. I think PSG can trouble Bayern, but I think the German club will lift the trophy. 

Israel is bombing Gaza again. The world yawns, as usual. How much of the equipment and ordnance landing on Gaza was made in America or funded by American taxpayers in the form of military aid? Israel can only get away with its war against the Palestinians because it enjoys the unequivocal support of the United States. 

 

We're Outta' Here

“As soon as we believe that we cannot be citizens of the world, we lose the world of which we might have been citizens.” Andrew Solomon

My wife and I haven’t been abroad since 1998, when Bill Clinton was president, the dot-com bubble hadn’t burst, and the Twin Towers in New York were still standing, representing American power, not an American tragedy, and my father-in-law, Guero, was alive. In the big scheme of things twenty years isn’t a long time, but America -- and most of the world -- is a different place now. Very different. Much more on the surface, tilting toward raw, racist, cruel, crass, and deadly. Twenty years ago climate change was far in the future, a whispered warning among scientists, a problem we had time to deal with. We could deny it, push it to the back burner, go on extracting and burning fossil fuels, polluting the oceans, rivers and lakes, pretend that endless consumer consumption was sustainable. Today there are those, like Donald J. Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, who continue to deny the evidence in front of them, the massive hurricanes, floods, wildfires, sinkholes, and warming of the oceans, but the rest of the world understands that catastrophic climate change is real, and it’s happening right now. Trump, as stupid and incoherent as ever, surveys the devastation caused by the Camp Fire in California and declares that we will have “great climate,” as if the climate is a product that can be bottled and sold on the cheap at Target. Meanwhile, his lawless administration does everything it can to hasten our demise.

The US has been a belligerent military power for more than twenty years, but in the post-9/11 hysteria the belligerence was given a double dose of steroids by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. The US invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly to hunt down Osama bin Laden and make it untenable for terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base, then the mission changed to rooting out the Taliban, building infrastructure and democratic processes, all of which have been spectacular failures. The Afghan people have suffered for 17 years, their country, not stable to begin with after years of war with the Soviet Union, is even worse off -- and the US remains, unable to win or find a plausible way to withdraw. I have lost count of the number of times I have asked my elected representatives to explain why we are still in Afghanistan. The responses are pathetic.

Then, based on a mountain of lies and false evidence, and with most of the world against them, Cheney and Bush invaded Iraq and set the Middle East reeling. The promised cakewalk didn’t happen, nor did Iraqi citizens line the boulevards and toss flowers at the feet of American soldiers. Iraq was torn apart, sundered by sectarian violence, corruption, and rampant death. It remains the greatest military blunder in American history, and as if that were not bad enough, the invasion and occupation also proved to the world that America wasn’t any better than other countries who murder, torture and destroy. Killed the myth, except in the US, where every last soldier, sailor, marine, and Air Force desk jockey was treated as a conquering hero. The full-US-PR monty, football stadiums, airports, everywhere, support the troops. Don’t ask what they’re doing or where, just support them, no matter what. Naturally, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and all the rest of the perpetrators have walked away, written books, made money as media pundits, or, in Bush’s case, painted portraits and had his reputation rehabilitated. Fifteen years later, the US remains in Iraq, in neighboring Syria, and Libya, and other places in North Africa, and, let's not forget, our role in Yemen.

Nearly two decades of non-stop warfare has had domestic consequences, not in rejuvenating the anti-war movement, but in nurturing hyper-militarism and hyper-masculinity, the dangerous notion that all problems can be solved by state violence, against unarmed black people, Mexican immigrants and innocent children. Hate groups are ascendant, fueled by the rhetoric of Donald J. Trump and the grifters on Fox News. Absurd conspiracy theories flourish, like the idea that immigrants and people of color are waging genocide on white people. America is now a place where facts come to die. The president makes up his own reality in which he is always the biggest winner, the strongest man, the tough guy, the guy who knows stuff because of his very large brain.

For fourteen of the past twenty years I have written about all this stuff, and more, on this blog, now more than 700 posts. Shouts from the Balcony was my wife’s idea; ironically, she never reads this blog. Neither do my kids, which is amusing because they were the main reason I wanted to record some aspect of our times, so they would know, one day, what their father was thinking about and doing to exercise some agency in the world, to raise his voice, no matter how faint or ineffectual, against injustice. Think, I tell them, about all the people in this world, today, as we speak, who have almost no say over any aspect of their lives. Every massive wildfire, every hurricane-induced flood, every report of melting glaciers, I worry for their future. As many countries in the world, desperately trying to cope with climate change and income inequality and refugees and aggrieved citizens -- all of which can be traced back to the death machine that is unfettered capitalism -- turn to authoritarian figures for solutions, I worry for their future. As I look at the economy, knowing that its fundamentals are all wrong and completely unsustainable, I know a reckoning is approaching and I worry some more.

And over it all, my entire life, the threat of nuclear annihilation.

But in the short run there is a trip to Italy to make, the trip we were supposed to make in 1991, before we started raising a family, when we were much younger and I had more hair and a dark beard rather than a gray one. I am so looking forward to being outside the US for a couple of weeks, away from the non-stop insanity and stupidity, the rampant ignorance and poisoned atmosphere. Who knows, I may come back with a story or two to tell.

The Art of Hypocrisy

“The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.” Chris Hedges

The mendacious Orange Menace and his GOP sycophants lose their shit every week over the Mueller investigation and how long it is taking, when, by the standard of how complex investigations go before any conclusion is reached, it’s moving along fairly fast. All politicians are hypocrites, when you come down to it -- lambasting others for doing the same crap they do -- but Republicans have made hypocrisy into something of an art form. When the GOP devoted endless hearings into the Benghazi affair, time wasn’t a problem at all, nor was plowing over the same patch of ground again and again. Whatever it took to paint Hillary Clinton in a negative hue.

Newt Gingrich is one of the great political hypocrites of all time. Back when Newt was laying his Contract with America on America, the Congress he bossed launched an investigation into a land deal in Arkansas, Whitewater, involving Bill and Hillary Clinton. That little exercise in political vindictiveness went on for nearly 6 years, damn near the entirety of Clinton’s presidency. Talk about a “witch hunt,” and all over a failed real estate deal. Gingrich was certain that Whitewater was the Crime of the Century. It wasn’t, any more than Clinton lying about a blow-job. So, calm down motherfuckers. Muller’s investigation seems a tad more important, and it’s obvious that Trump is worried about it because he has intensified his Twitter attacks on Muller and the press.

Short Takes:

-I saw the film Blindspotting last weekend. Written by Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame, and Rafael Casal, Blindspotting is a hip, funny, moving, and sometimes violent story of two friends, one white, one black, trying to survive in Oakland, California, which is being invaded and gentrified by pale hipsters with money. A complication is that Colin, the character played by Diggs, is serving his final three days of probation in a halfway house and he can’t afford to make a single misstep. Left to his own devices, Colin could pass the three days fairly easily, but with a volatile friend like Miles, played to perfection by Casal, it’s like walking on a hire-wire, which only gets worse when Colin witnesses a police officer shoot an unarmed black man late one night. We don’t learn the crime that put Colin in jail until well into the film, but it was violent and involved Miles, and Colin bore his friend’s weight, a fact which cost Colin, not only his liberty but also his relationship with his girlfriend, Valerie. I found Blindspotting to be fresh, different, real and timely.

-Isn’t it odd that Donald J. Trump, thrice-married, serial adulterer, habitual liar, draft dodger, tax evader and general degenerate lowlife is the darling of the religious right? It’s another con, of course, based in Trump’s white nationalism and embodied by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, who is freaked out that white Christians will be prevented from discriminating against gays, LGTBQ people, and people of various shades of brown in the name of religion, than he is of these historically marginalized groups gaining any kind of foothold in our society.

-When I drove into the parking lot where my doctor’s office is located the attendant, a white male of middle-age, was listening to Rush Limbaugh, and I heard Trump’s voice, talking about “our movement” and at first I wondered what movement The Orange Menace was referring to, but then I realized he meant the white supremacy, put-people-of-color-back-in-their-places, blame-all-our-problems-on-immigrants movement. The Make America White Again movement.

-The annual Fiesta has begun here in parched, hot, Fat City, also known as Santa Barbara, five days of revelry, Flamenco dancing, parades, tequila and Corona, cascarones, tacos, tortas, and churros, the most blatant, commercial kitsch; as always, the differences between Spain and Mexico will be deliberately blurred. Five of us strolled along a few blocks of State Street last night, on sidewalks crowded with tables laden with crates of cascarones, sellers sprawled on folding chairs; the sidewalks and gutters were already heavy with multi-colored confetti. The City had positioned generator-powered lighting towers in the middle of two different blocks, to keep the homeless from sleeping on the sidewalks or to make tourists feel safer, I wasn’t sure which, and the light cast was harsh and obnoxious. We went to Joe’s for a drink and something to eat. The bar was packed and a few minutes after we sat down a mariachi band arrived and played a few songs. Some of the patrons sang along.

Doing Time in My Mind

“Trump embodies the decayed soul of America. He, like many of those who support him, has a childish yearning to be as omnipotent as the gods. This impossibility, as the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote, leads to a dark alternative: destroying like the gods.” Chris Hedges

My children were born one day apart, September 3 and 4, five years apart. My son is now 21, my daughter 16. The United States has been at war in Afghanistan my daughter’s entire life. My son was born during the Clinton administration, which, politically, seems a very long time ago. When my son was two or so, the Lewinsky scandal broke and the GOP controlled Congress went after Bill Clinton with a vengeance. The Puritanical streak lodged in the American psyche kicked in and day after day the news was full of lurid speculation about semen stains on a blue GAP dress and Bill Clinton’s insatiable libido. For telling fibs about a blowjob, Clinton was impeached. Today a ridiculous man who fibs spectacularly all the time about damn near everything sits in the Oval Office.  

We have to live in the present but cannot forget the past. Around my children’s birthdays I always think about the passage of time. I think about markers, significant events like birthday parties, graduation ceremonies, Christmases. I think about who I was and who I am, and I wonder if time is my nemesis or my friend. In my day to day life time feels like a weight I haul around. I’m at an age where there is likely more of life behind than ahead. I despair a little when I think of all the books I will never read, the places I may never see. Instead of expanding, my viewpoint seems to wither and shrink. I wonder if something is wrong with me. To look back at one’s life with regret -- and ahead with trepidation -- can’t be healthy. I also think about people I’ve known who have died, and as the years pass the number grows. I see the effects of time on people all around me, in Trader Joe’s on Sunday afternoon, in line at the movie theater: arthritic fingers, swollen feet and ankles, bent backs, mottled skin, gray hair. Evidence of Time’s merciless toll is everywhere. Every human will suffer. Such is the nature of existence. For the most part, we receive no instruction in dealing with the nature of our existence.

Funny how the certainty of youth, the clarity of right and wrong, just and unjust, becomes the doubt of middle age. My son is far less of a fool than I was at his age. At 21 I was serving my third year in the Air Force, in Japan, and because I could sustain myself I felt like a grown-up when in reality I was still an immature, hot-headed boy. In my mind the memory of that time is sepia and dim. I spent hours riding trains, and when I wasn’t riding I was walking, from the train station to my tiny apartment, from the station to the front gate of Yokota Air Base. How many miles? I have journals from that time that I have carted from Japan to Honolulu, and from Honolulu to Seattle, to Irvine in Orange County, and then back home to Santa Barbara, that I refuse to read for fear of embarrassment. I should pile them in the backyard and set them on fire, and one day, perhaps I will. When you’re a hot-headed, foolish young man as I was, you do things that hurt yourself, but also others.

My children will make their way in a world radically different from the one in which I made mine. I fear for them. First, because they are already casualties of a failed economic system. Second, and intimately linked to the first, because of the real prospect of catastrophic climate change. And third, because of the invasive power of the US surveillance state. The balance of power between the government and the governed has never been so out of kilter, and unaccountable power is terrifying. But even more I fear for my children because of the strong undercurrent of cruelty that is loose in our land. As the US has become more fearful of losing its hegemony around the world, compassion for its own citizens has atrophied. Instead of a helping hand, more often than not only a clenched fist is offered.

I feel sad for the people of Bangladesh, Houston, and parts of the Caribbean, who have been severely harmed by natural disasters exacerbated by climate change. It pains me that my country has for so long been so two-faced and craven about our environment, fixated on economic gain and geopolitical advantage to the exclusion of human life.

Black Bill

So, Obama isn’t a Democrat after all.

The signs have been evident for a long time, starting with Obama’s reluctance to prosecute criminal bankers, to make good on his promise to shut down the colossal embarrassment that is Guantanamo prison, and his willingness to abandon a public health care option before debate even began.

Obama drifted further from his base by expanding drone warfare in Pakistan, cracking down on whistleblowers at home, and waffling on his support for real action on climate change. He talked about “clean” coal when he knew full well that no such thing exists; he expanded oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico -- after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Obama is the black reincarnation of Bill Clinton, a Democrat ever willing to abandon the party’s long standing principles in favor of a slick deal with his political opponents and campaign contributors. Let’s not forget that Obama surrounded himself with Clintonites in his first cabinet, including alumni like Lawrence Summers, Rahm Emanuel and Hilary Clinton herself. Like the consummate snake oil salesman that he is, Obama used soaring rhetoric about hope and change to get people – particularly young voters -- excited enough to elect him, and then, once in office, he methodically abandoned every one of his rhetorical positions in favor of “bipartisanship,” which means, of course, terrible proposals and awful legislation, or, more often than not, no legislation at all.

Obama has now made a budget proposal that offers to reduce Social Security benefits -- long a goal of political conservatives who abhor any government initiative that actually works as it was designed to -- in exchange for GOP concessions on tax hikes on the wealthy. Is this a savvy ploy to gain political advantage, the equivalent of a jujitsu move? Is Obama a master pragmatist? Or does he really believe the only way to save Social Security in the long run is to castrate it in the short run?

I don’t know.

What remains of the political left is angry with Obama, but we are an impotent, disorganized lot easily ignored or discredited by the corporate media. John Boehner and his little henchman, Eric Cantor, are probably giddy at the prospect of finally starting the process of dismantling Social Security as we know it, and even more ecstatic that a Democratic president opened the door. Wall Street bankers and money managers are salivating at the thought of the millions in fees they stand to rake in if Social Security is changed from a public trust to a semi-private one.

I’m not surprised that Obama bends his base over a chair and sodomizes it; he’s a stooge of Wall Street, as are most Democrats and almost all Republicans. Politicians of whatever stripe pay lip service to the will of the “American people,” and then proceed to do exactly what their masters tell them to do.  My own congressional representative, Lois Capps, who I believe is a decent person, nearly always votes with the president. I start every letter or e-mail I send to her like this: “You don’t represent me or my interests, and I know you never will, but you’re the only game in town…”

Our political duopoly is rotten, rotten from within, corrupted by money and influence peddling. The Obama campaign spent billions of dollars in 2012 to convince voters of how different he was from Mitt Romney, and of course Obama is different, but the differences are not as stark as his spin-machine wanted us to believe. Obama lives comfortably on the center-right of the political spectrum, rubbing ideological shoulders with financiers and bankers, playing golf at the country club with neoliberals and oil company oligarchs.

Obama is Black Bill, Clinton’s brother of another color.