Food From Far Away

I read the labels on the cardboard boxes I toss in the baler at the Market. Beef from Yosemite Valley. Bison from the high plains. Tomatoes, avocados, asparagus, and bell peppers from Mexico. Apples and grapes from Chile. Bananas from Ecuador and Guatemala. Crab meat from Vietnam. Shrimp from Thailand. Fresh fruits and vegetables and seafood year round, a miracle of international trade and commerce for those who can afford it. But do we ever pause to consider the human and environmental cost? Where I live we buy vegetables and fruits and seafood at a relatively inexpensive cost because at the start of the chain of growers, middlemen, brokers, distributors, trucking companies and retail stores, stands a supply of cheap, pliable, exploitable labor. The invisible people who plant, harvest and pack tomatoes and mangoes and celery and whatnot, who perform hard manual labor for hours each day. People with families, stories, a past and maybe hope for a future. Immigrants from neighboring countries with few legal rights. Migrants escaping war ravaged countries. Climate refugees waiting for the wheels of the immigration system to turn. The people growing our food are in many instances living the most precarious lives. 

But we don’t want to see them, do we? Out of sight, out of mind, abstract as our own death. Not our fault, it’s globalization, NAFTA, capitalism, the way it is. I didn’t make the rules. It’s life. I can’t help it if I earn a lot of money. Everyone has to pull themselves by their own shoe laces, bootstraps, and Velcro. 

I read all the labels and ask why some of these products can’t be produced domestically. Perhaps they can, but we’d pay more and maybe have access to less, be forced to wait for the seasons to change and certain fruits and vegetables to become available. Would that be the end of the world? Not for me, personally, maybe, but the possibility of a desire being unavailable is unthinkable to many. We’re conditioned from Amazon to Uber to DoorDash to expect immediate fulfillment; it’s a God-inspired right for certain human beings.  

Capitalism fucked up American agriculture as surely as it created virtual monopolies in banking, insurance, technology, telecommunications, airlines, and grocery chains. What are the main cash crops in the American heartland, corn and soybeans? Duo culture. Bad for the soil over time. Uses a lot of scarce water and pesticides, fertilizer.  Big agriculture, large scale, thousands of acres. Corporate-food. 

Because of our peculiar way of seeing the world, it’s not always easy to recognize that climate change is happening. But don’t take my word for it, just pay attention to the number of stories in the media about weather and water, and the locales where never-in-my-lifetime events are happening. Climate and food and humans are intertwined, like lovers.  

The Ship of Fools

 “The powerlessness many will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist beliefs in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. The Christian right provides a haven for this magical thinking.” Chris Hedges

We were warned about climate change, provided with predictions of how it would unfold once the tipping point was reached, and of course moneyed interests and their political servants ignored the warnings altogether or used all their resources to discredit them. Parts of western Europe are withering, fires blaze across France, Spain, Portugal, and yet again there’s a destructive fire burning in my home state. Key water sources like the Colorado River are drying up before our eyes. Crop yields fall, the risk or reality of famine rises along with prices for basic foodstuffs. Most Americans grumble, yawn, and order Alexa to change the channel to something less disturbing and unsettling. 

It’s happening, the cataclysm I mean, and at a moment in this country when the political system is stymied by partisan battles for power and denial of reality is the order of the day. Greed is going to do us in, greed and stupidity. The shadow cast across America by the disgraced, treasonous former president looms over everything, obscuring whatever light we can muster. 

I take a walk up Garcia Road, along APS, and down Jimeno. I notice that several homes are for sale, while at least three are undergoing renovation. This is big money territory and I still can’t for the life of me understand how people crack the nut. Mortgage, insurance, upkeep, taxes -- how do they pull it off, where does their money come from? I recall that even as a child I distrusted wealthy people, never felt comfortable around them or their privileged offspring. My dad, who was working-class to his marrow, and leaned toward money making by gambling on cards, horses, football, and even for a time was a cog in a low-level bookmaking operation, told me once that money was the ticket to doing whatever you want, whenever you want. By the age of 57 he was dead, a casualty of alcohol and cigarettes; he left nothing but an old Oldsmobile and some clothes. I sometimes wonder what kind of grandfather he might have been. 

As I walk down the hill, the ocean moving in and out of my view, my thoughts return to the mysterious hold Donald J. Trump has over millions of Americans. The hold makes even less sense to me now than it did in 2015 because Trump proved to be incompetent in office, a stone criminal who disqualified himself from seeking and holding any position of public trust ever again. Something in this country is completely out of whack -- a sense of shame is missing. Any president who tried to mount a coup against the government should be forced by public condemnation into exile, never to be seen or heard from again, stripped of all privileges. But not here, not with Trump. What happened to us? Have we always been so dim-witted and cruel, such easy prey for a loud-mouthed con artist who can barely read? Is it any surprise that clowns like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have risen from the muck, all of them raised on reality television, Jersey Shore comes to Washington? Decorum, ethics, rule of law, when these ideals are eroded by a steady stream of corruption, what remains is the law of the jungle, of raw power, coercive and unjust and arbitrary. 

It’s somehow appropriate that one of the books I’m reading now is The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. “You flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools.”

Collision Course

 “As a result of climate change, as many as 200 million people may be driven from their homes by 2050.” Ursula Lindsey, New York Review, July 21, 2022

I’m at the saturation point when it comes to bad news and dark portents. Galloping Christian theocracy, endless gun violence, the radical and rogue Supreme Court, and the ongoing, interminable case of Donald J. Trump and his failed coup attempt. The content in my Twitter feed pisses me off, and the YouTube videos I view are too full of conjecture and hearsay to settle my uneasiness. It seems that the rusted and rickety wheels of American justice barely turn when it comes to white collar and political crime, and more than ever I’m convinced that when push comes to shove, Donald J. Trump will skate. The United States Department of Justice doesn’t need a congressional referral to indict Trump or any of his co-conspirators, and even if a referral is delivered to the DOJ on a golden platter, the agency is under no obligation to act upon it. Attorney General Merrick Garland would have tipped his hand by now if he had any intention of indicting Trump; we would have had some sign, a leaked memo or something, a clue. Garland has largely maintained radio silence regarding the disgraced former president as he, Garland, seems terrified of being tarred as politically motivated. Can’t set that precedent for the DOJ, though when Trump regains power he will corrupt the DOJ and use the agency for his own ends. My guess is that Garland will duck, dodge, delay, defer, and dither in the hope that January 6 simply vanishes from public consciousness. When he’s forced to announce his decision not to indict Trump, Garland will go to ridiculous and tortured lengths to justify and rationalize his inaction. 

Fear and cowardice are powerful things. 

I’m old enough to remember the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980’s, the televised hearings, the Tower Commission, and the Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh. Some of the miscreants in that sordid affair, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger among them, received presidential pardons from George H. W. Bush in 1992. Ronald Reagan was criticized but of course escaped punishment. It’s easy to imagine the same thing happening with Trump should he be indicted and convicted before the 2024 election. The next Republican president, like Ron DeSantis, will, with great fanfare, immediately pardon Trump and his entourage. The only people who will pay any price are the misguided slobs who stormed the capitol and spread their feces on the walls and maybe a few bit players a rung higher on the ladder. But none of the major conspirators will be inconvenienced; they will continue to appear on cable news gabfests, pen op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post, run for office, and write books. To expect another outcome is to believe in magic and make-believe. America is nothing if not entirely predictable. 

Trump is the current figurehead for American fascism, but what’s happening in the country is bigger than Trump and more insidious. The political and cultural and factual divide is real, and closer than we realize. If it’s not in your city, it may be in your county or state, in pockets and clusters. It’s a divide that cannot be bridged by appeals to facts, reason or logic, it’s emotional and tribal and as combustible as a gas leak in a match factory. Christian churches and Fox News and right-wing radio propaganda are heavily implicated in exacerbating the division, in drawing the lines and naming the enemies. Democrats bear responsibility, too. Fascism needs an enemy, and just about any enemy will do: Muslims after 9/11; immigrants; Antifa; Black Lives Matter; Critical Race Theory; transgender folk. The unholy alliance of evangelical Christians and the Republican Party, the Bible and the Stars & Stripes, the gun and the cross, is producing its angry fruit. Florida and Texas are fascist laboratories. Follow the bouncing ball of authoritarian ideology as it bounces around the red states; look at states like Wisconsin where Republicans control the legislature but the Governor’s mansion is inhabited by a Democrat. Democrats in Wisconsin represent more citizens and win more votes overall, but have less representational power because the GOP plays by the dark arts of gerrymandering and voter suppression, as well as stacking state courts with partisans, and capturing or neutering the regulatory apparatus. The party has had plenty of help from the Supreme Court led by John Roberts. The Citizens United decision, which allows dark money to flood the political system, and the gutting of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby case in 2012, has paid major dividends to the religious/political right in its quest to prop up white supremacy and take the country backward. The GOP controls 60% of state legislatures, more than enough, with a little help from the Court in regards to election law, to own all three branches of government for a decade or longer. One party rule is America’s destination. Next term, just in time to be useful in the 2024 election, the Court will hear a case out of North Carolina called Moore v. Harper, which revolves around the authority of state legislatures in regards to federal elections. If the Court rules as many expect it will, a GOP-controlled state legislature could use all manner of tactics to overrule the will of voters. It would play something like this: Biden wins the popular vote, but the Legislature awards the state’s electors to Donald Trump. No legal challenge is allowed by law. Done deal.

Here’s another thing that is happening that exacerbates the American divide: the balance of power, propelled by the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, is shifting to the States at the same time the power and legitimacy of the federal government is declining. 

Despair and contentment sit side-by-side on the same shelf. For me optimism is fleeting and hope is almost always out of reach. The world is fucked, and yet there is beauty and peace in it that seems contradictory. California is drying up yet all day long hummingbirds swoop across our patio to drink from the feeder. Babies are born, weddings happen, young men play pick-up soccer in Ortega Park, children run into the surf at East Beach, fully immersed in the here and now, shielded by their innocence. Families go out for ice cream. Young lovers stroll hand-in-hand thinking their love is unique and fixed forevermore, locked in time, as bright as the new moon and capable of enduring whatever comes. Have I become cynical about love, too? Maybe. I cannot seem to stop myself from looking to the shelf where despair and contentment sit side-by-side. I must find the balance point between the two, but some days, when the black dog of depression follows close on my heels, I can’t find that point to save my ass. I feel powerless and insignificant, impotent and invisible, with too few resources to hand. It was in this state of mind I came across an essay by Albert Camus that contains this: “Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything.”

That made me feel better. Temporarily. 

"Legitimate Political Discourse"

 “If fossil fuel corporations are allowed to continue heating the planet, mounting food and water scarcity could well induce civilizational decline.” Daniel Sherrell, The Nation

Another week in the open-air asylum that is America. The Republican Party censored two of its members, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, for doing their sworn duty and upholding their oath of office. Pause and allow that to sink in. The Republican National Committee then, believe it or not, called the riot of January 6 “legitimate political discourse.” Sit with that for a moment as well. This is the stuff of which authoritarian regimes are made. Absolutely fidelity to the Great Leader, and belief in fantasy. Is it legitimate discourse when five people die, hundreds of law enforcement personnel are injured, and the seat of our democracy is damaged and desecrated? Is this what the Party of Lincoln calls “legitimate political discourse”? If Dwight Eisenhower was on the scene today, he’d be booted from the GOP. Hell, back in the 1950’s the John Birch Society claimed that Ike was a communist. The nutty fringe is now firmly in the mainstream. Thank you Koch family. Thank you Roger Ailes. Thank you Rupert Murdoch. Thank you United States Supreme Court. 

Stop the presses, Mike Pence said publicly that Donald Trump is wrong! The ultimate blasphemy. Pence was one of Trump’s most subservient lap dogs, who believed as many evangelical Christians did that Trump was the second coming of their beloved lord and savior. Whatever Trump says, spews, or barks is gospel, no matter how witless, idiotic, illegal, or insane. That’s the public belief system that must be expressed at every opportunity, the Party line. Pence was already a pariah in the GOP, the man Trump’s addled foot soldiers sought to hang on January 6, on the gallows they hastily erected, so stating the obvious won’t cost him. Mikey wants to be President almost as much as he wishes to sit at the right hand of the father, but his chance is gone. But let’s not anoint Pence as a courageous man for doing his duty under the law. That’s the bare minimum we should expect from any person in public office. No accolades or praise is necessary. 

Trump’s endless whining about fraud and corruption in the electoral machinery might backfire, and I bet many in the GOP know it. They wouldn’t be disappointed if Trump was struck by lighting and rendered mute. Trump’s unfounded claims could dampen Republican turnout in November. If the whole process is as bankrupt as Trump claims, why bother to vote? Stay home MAGA people, wave your big Trump flag in protest, torch Nancy Pelosi in effigy, stick needles in your Adam Kinzinger voodoo doll. Listen to your false idol, the Fairy King of Mar-A-Lago. 

To watch this country descend into such madness and stupidity, to watch millions of Americans embrace a man as ridiculous as Donald Trump, to watch an entire political party fall to its knees and declare loyalty to Trump rather than loyalty to this country’s institutions and laws, is mind boggling. How can so many people be so gullible? How can so many be so terrified of examining our history, accepting and coming to terms with it? “Real” Americans see liberals as wimps, soft, mush-brained, as Rush Limbaugh told them daily for nearly thirty years. Turns out that Limbaugh’s people, the ones with all the guns and ammo, are a pack of wusses, scared shitless by ideas and historical facts. All this activity around the nation to ban books from school libraries, and etch into law a requirement that teachers not present ideas or concepts that might upset pale-skinned Jack, or high-strung Caitlyn; we can’t run the risk of upsetting the delicate sensibilities of white children. Might harm them for life. Throw those terrible and frightening books on the fire. 

Joe Rogan and Marjorie Taylor Greene are America’s new prom King & Queen.

Remind me, how is the GOP any different from the Taliban?

I’m almost finished with Alfred W. McCoy’s fine book, To Govern the Globe. The world order stitched together by the United States after World War II, which included the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Europe, the creation of NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and mutual security pacts with Japan, South Korea and Australia, is unraveling. While there was plenty of hypocrisy in Washington’s order (professing democratic ideals and human rights while simultaneously toppling duly-elected governments it disagreed with, climbing into bed with dictators, and so forth) it has managed to maintain relative stability and prosperity for 70 years. What comes next we can only guess at. McCoy theorizes that China has the economic and military potential to supplant the Washington order as early as 2030. If trends continue, the US, with a declining share of the world economy under its control, will be unable to maintain its massive global military presence, and in particular its hegemony over the Pacific Ocean. Climate change is the wild card. McCoy writes, “Through its ever-increasing intensity, global warming will have a destructive impact on world orders for the rest of the twenty-first century and beyond.” What McCoy shows in this book are the circumstances -- political, industrial, diplomatic, social, and military -- that cause empires to fall and world orders to shift. The US is a hollow lion, losing its global edge a little more each year. Trump hastened our slide by stupidly attacking NATO, the WHO, and settled international agreements like the Paris Climate Accords. The framework erected during the American world order, global symbols for order, cooperation, and the rule of law, were either weakened or eliminated under Trump’s reign of error. This country is in for a great reckoning. 

I may not see it, but my children surely will, and that is why I am constantly in a state of anxiety, because time is not on our side and collectively we have failed to take climate change seriously. Baby Boomers, like me, will die in an era we may hardly recognize. 

Escape from Banjo Land

 

 “It’s rush hour now, on the wheel and the plow/and they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” Bob Dylan, Ring Them Bells

I picked the wrong time for my annual trip to visit my brother in Tillamook, Oregon, and the wrong means of transportation. Uncomfortable about flying due to the risks of Covid-19, I decided to pack the 2008 CRV and do my version of a Sam Shepard/Bruce Springsteen/Hunter S. Thompson road trip, driving a long distance alone, with 9 hours of music on a Spotify playlist I created to keep me company, GPS for navigation, and some snacks to munch on. I knew when I made this decision that California was in the grip of the Summer of Fire, a gruesome preview of what is coming if we do not stop pretending that the devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods happening all over this planet are caused by some force other than human activity. Climate activists, scientists, and indigineous people have sounded the alarm for decades, to deaf ears and blind eyes. The climate crisis is happening right now, before our eyes, and we are ill-prepared for the shocks to come, the consequences of our actions. Our obsession with bigger, newer, shinier, cheaper, faster, and more profitable is threatening our ability to live. 

Not in play at the moment of my decision was what would happen in Southern Oregon only a few days after I arrived in Tillamook. 

The drive to Oregon was mostly uneventful. It was warm and sunny the Sunday I started north on the 101 freeway. From San Jose to the California border the sky was smokey and the sun the hue of a ripe peach . When I reached Redding in the late afternoon it was 111 degrees. At six the next morning when I headed out it was already 71. When I pulled into my brother’s driveway in Tillamook, just after noon on Monday, it was an astonishing 85 degrees, cloudless blue sky overhead, and windless. When I called my wife to let her know I had arrived safely she told me it was over 100 in Santa Barbara. 

By three a.m. on Tuesday morning a hot wind was howling with gusts up to 70 mph. When I went outside in the morning the CRV was covered with dust, trash cans lay on their sides, and drifts of leaves had collected against the fence surrounding my brother’s yard. The leaves were green, torn from the trees a month before they would have fallen on their own. In other parts of Tillamook the wind uprooted trees and downed power lines, forcing road closures. My brother moved to Tillamook in 2006 and has seen all kinds of weather, but never before had he experienced a freak windstorm that pushed an overheated wind like a California Santa Ana. 

Do we have nothing in common? Do we disagree on everything? When did we become so distrustful of one another? When did we lose our confidence as a nation and become so fearful of the world? 

We left Tillamook on Wednesday morning, headed for Westport, on the south side of Grays Harbor in Washington. It was warm and the sky was hazy with rust-colored smoke. We loaded bikes on my brother’s Jeep Cherokee and started out. Before we got out of town we saw the plume of smoke rising from the forest behind the golf course. For more than twenty years my brother worked on Hot Shot fire crews in the Los Padres National Forest and northern Arizona. “We normally get about 90 inches of rain a year,” he said. “This year it’s down to 60 inches. It’s dry back in there. If that fire  spreads fast it could be a big problem for local firefighters. They don’t have much experience with wildfires.” The 101 northbound was open so we headed on, crossing the Columbia River on the Astoria Bridge into Washington about four hours later. I noticed at least a dozen dead birds on the bridge. 

My brother sarcastically refers to Tillamook and other small towns in Oregon and Washington as Banjo Land, meaning Hicksville, populated with rednecks and narrow-minded folks, a generalization he knows is too sweeping to be true. But when you are Santa Barbara born and raised it’s hard not to make comparisons -- and find nearly every other place wanting. It’s rare in Santa Barbara to see the front yard of a house littered with the hulks of old cars, refrigerators, tires, and junk. It’s equally rare to see Trump 2020 yard signs. But like the rangeland around Yreka in northern California where I saw signs that read, FARMERS FOR TRUMP and SAVE BABIES, VOTE TRUMP, the rural towns we drove through looked like Trump country. I saw many American flags and a dozen Trump 2020 signs. As the scenery passed I thought about these small towns, and how they contribute their sons and daughters to fight America’s wars. Proud and self-reliant, these people don’t like being told what to believe or how to live their lives by people of my bent or the federal government. They vote Republican. God, America, guns, freedom to own a big gas-guzzling truck. I think the honest ones know that climate change is caused by human activity. They may not have liberal-style sophistication, but they’re not stupid. From what I saw, they are practical, capable people making their way through life, raising families, working the fields or the rivers and sea. I’m not willing to write these people off, even though I assume we would disagree on many subjects. I want to know why they see Trump so differently than I do. If nothing else, we’re still Americans. That meant something before the working-class got hammered by big money titans on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and divided from each other by racial animosity, religion, guns, immigration, depictions in the popular culture. Do we have nothing in common? Do we disagree on everything? When did we become so distrustful of one another? When did we lose our confidence as a nation and become so fearful of the world? 

We rode the bikes around Westport, checked out the boats in the harbor, followed a bike trail to the beach where many surfers and stand-up paddle boarders were enjoying the gorgeous afternoon.  A few hours later I stood on the jetty and watched the sun dissolve into a nearly horizontal line. There was a cool breeze, the sound of the waves, an uncommonly lovely moment that I wished I could share with my wife and kids. Peace is very hard to come by these days. I closed my eyes and breathed in the sea air. 

Back in Tillamook on Thursday, the sky was hazy with smoke and very fine ash.  My brother cleaned the Jeep while I read. We smoked some weed and listened to Mojo Nixon’s Outlaw Country show on Sirius XM. We watched the Weather Channel. We talked about our parents. 

My plan on Friday was to drive down the 101 to Eureka, spend the night, and then continue on my way home. I’ve never driven the 101 from north-to-south, and I thought it might be cool to hug the coast. I felt some apprehension about the fires, but the 101 was open when I started out at six a.m. My Road Trip playlist was on as was my GPS, and I was feeling fine until I saw the flashing red and blue lights up ahead, and then the orange letters of a sign announcing that the 101 southbound was closed. The GPS tried to re-route me down a country road but that road was also closed. The next route the GPS suggested was blocked as well. I was starting to feel trapped. Eureka wasn’t happening. To get home I would have to return the way I came, on Highway 22, then 18, then I5 through Medford and Ashland. I pulled into a rest stop to cancel my hotel reservation in Eureka and call my wife. By now it was 7:30 and the sun was behind a dense dome of smoke. My phone was down to 10% battery power. What the fuck? The charging adaptor wasn’t working. I switched it out for a spare and that adaptor also failed. Neither adapter worked in either port. No phone. No GPS. No paper map. I had had no problem charging my phone on the way to Oregon, but now, when I needed it most, it was useless. After a couple of wrong turns I found my way back to highway 22 heading east. The smoke was still thick and visibility poor. 

At a gas station mini-mart I bought a new adaptor, two cans of Red Bull, and a cup of coffee. Fortunately, the new adaptor worked. I called my wife and asked her to cancel my hotel reservation in Eureka, and then I settled in for some serious driving into what looked like the apocalypse. Passing through Medford I saw the destruction, like a bomb had been dropped. Buildings leveled, metal twisted, cars burned out, a chimney here and there. It reminded me of the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara more than a decade ago. All in all it was seven hours before I crossed into California, and another ten before I reached Santa Barbara at 11:30 p.m. I only stopped to pee and get gas. When I crawled into bed, my comfortable, familiar bed, I still felt as if I was moving, driving fast on highway 41 in the pitch black night, the smell of smoke in my nostrils, and Bob Dylan whispering in my ear. 

Burning In The Dark

“The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain.” Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Parts of California are burning again, and here on the coast it’s nearly 90 degrees at the tail end of October. A few days ago local residents were advised to prepare to be without power for 24 to 48 hours as Southern California Edison planned to shut down its transmission lines to prevent potential fire danger, much as beleaguered Pacific Gas and Electric had already done up north. Both utilities are desperate to avoid further liability. Stock up on batteries, bottled water, canned food, fill the gas tank in the car. As I write this, half a million people in Sonoma County are without power. 

SCE and PG&E are loathe, as is most of corporate America, to connect the dots between climate change, prolonged drought and deadly wildfires, but their silence can’t change the reality that climate change is already impacting our lives, and most thinking people know this is just the beginning. California is drier and wildfires burn hotter and longer. I don’t know if shutting down power lines is useful except as a way of limiting corporate liability. 

I’m reading American War by Omar El Akkad, a novel that imagines an America at war with itself in the year 2075, when most of Louisiana is submerged by water, and the capital of the north has relocated from storm-battered Washington D.C to Columbus, Ohio. Mexico has reclaimed most of the territory it lost to the United States in the 19th century. A few southern states have banded together, not because of slavery this time, but because they refuse to stop using fossil fuels. The entire state of South Carolina is under quarantine, completely walled off due to a virus so virulent it killed 110 million people. The world’s superpowers are now China and a conglomeration of former Middle Eastern countries called the Bouazizi empire, who provide basic material aid to war-torn America. Mighty no more is America, either militarily or economically, hopelessly divided against itself, and dependent on the generosity of other countries.   

American War is a depressing read because, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it feels plausible, particularly at the speed we are moving toward climate catastrophe. I’ve never been able to re-read The Road; once was enough. The novel terrified me, probably because when I read it my son was five or six years old. In the years since, we’ve moved nearer to McCarthy’s dark vision. When the imbecile who occupies the White House isn’t stoking the fires of division and hatred, he’s doing everything he can to make life easier for fossil fuel extractors and polluters. The very wealthy in this country seem to believe they can sidestep the climate bullet. Perhaps they will, for a while, but even if they buy a little time, the degradation of our air, soil, water, and infrastructure will ensnare them eventually. 

Meanwhile, the Kincade Fire has scorched 20,000 acres. Here in Santa Barbara the air outside feels reminiscent of fires past -- the Tea, Gap and Thomas. I keep waiting for a plume of smoke to rise from behind our mountains. It’s not windy now, but later in the afternoon the wind will likely pick up, adding to the danger. 

Jet Fuel on a Bonfire

“For the past few weeks I’ve felt an aching in my chest; an angst I cannot escape. The darkening skies of an ever besieged biosphere aside, the specter of rising fascism undoubtedly looms large now, and war, a global war, now seems inevitable.” Kenn Orphan

Feel like I have been underground the past few days. The sun is trying to give the marine layer the slip for the first time in three days. June Gloom in Santa Barbara town. To the north of our apartment, to the south and the east, new buildings rise up above their neighbors, large multi-family projects that fill the entire lot. The palace on the slope near the Bowl is nearly completed. There are workmen on that one seven days a week. The old California Cleaners plant on Canon Perdido, near Milpas, is gone, the building leveled and its remains hauled away. Now a huge excavator pulls the soil into a small hill. Next to the building where I work, it’s the same story, down comes one building, from roof to foundation, and then the excavator man starts digging, two feet, three feet, six feet. A parade of trucks hauls the debris and dirt away. The street where the trucks exit becomes muddy. Something like 23 units will appear on the lot in a year or so. Will any of the places being crammed into every available space be affordable for working people and their families? How much of the family’s income will be gobbled up by rent? 50%? 65%? Doesn’t leave much for everything else, food, kids toys, retirement savings, car payment, credit cards, clothing, medical care, all the rest. The end of the month has no pity.

But somebody is getting their share, somebody is collecting the rent. 

No missile strikes have been traded, yet, but the US is at war with Iran. Saudi Arabia and Israel must be delighted. The only thing restraining Trump is the impact attacking Iran now might do to his re-election chances; if he gives the greenlight, he might look like a tough, decisive guy, but there’s also a chance of backfire. I can’t imagine Trump weighs it out any differently. All Trump cares about is Trump. To sunder the JCPOA arrangement negotiated by the Obama Administration and five other nations without any backup plan, was always to invite growing tension with Iran. Then, like a middleweight working the body, the US went in with harsher economic sanctions, blocking trade, the flow of currency, oil, and punishments for any nation with the temerity to continue doing business with Iran. If that’s not a form of warfare, I don’t know what is. We will make you kneel before us, by any means necessary.

Imagine if China had military bases in Mexico. Imagine if from these bases China flew unmanned surveillance drones over San Diego or Los Angeles. The US power structure would freak out, and then lash out, and line up claims about the violation of international law, the UN Charter. But the US grants itself the right to violate sovereign airspace all over the world, and could give a shit if the target nation complains, to the UN, or anybody else. The irony escapes us. 

Record heat across Europe. Flooding in the US midwest. Major cities in India are running out of potable water because the monsoon rains do not come with the same regularity. Climate change is here, right now, but the American ruling class, along with oligarchs around the world, plod on, promising that climate change is manageable, promising economic growth in spite of dwindling resources, promising a great long run of business as usual, based on relatively cheap fossil fuel. Trump raves about his “great economy” and I suppose some voters will buy it, and as long as the stock market remains steady and money is kept cheap by the Fed, the whole rotten structure should remain standing, fooling our leaders into thinking that climate change is overrated and still off in the future, less of a threat to the interests of the United States than Cuba.

Of all Trump’s misdeeds -- and there are too many to tally -- the hostility of his administration to facts, logic, and science, the burying of climate information and research, wiping it from Federal government websites, his complete failure on climate issues will be his legacy, no matter what. He will be remembered as the madman who poured jet fuel on a bonfire, laughing all the while. 

I just finished reading Exit West by Moshin Hamid. It’s a harrowing novel about migrants, people forced to leave their homes because of war, violence, or because life in their homelands is not sustainable. The choice to flee is never easy, and the consequences can be fatal. “All over the world people were slipping away from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields…” 

I think about our southern border and the innocent children surrounded by chain-link fencing, border guards, sleeping on concrete floors, nothing to do but wait. When all we see in the world is danger and threat, it’s easier to become callous and cruel.

Liar, Liar, Earth on Fire

“The Republican Party stands alone, in terms of rich countries, in its blatant denial of climate change. This is why Noam Chomsky correctly calls them the most dangerous organization in human history. The Democratic Party, their hapless and willing enablers, are a close second.” Nick Pemberton, writing in Counterpunch.

Fires in Northern California. Fires in Southern California. Fires in Greece. Fires in the Arctic Circle.

The grass in Hyde Park in London is brown.

Floods in Japan. Floods in the Northeast of the U.S.

“Extreme weather” say the talking heads on Corporate TV. Rarely do their masters allow them to utter the forbidden words, “climate change.”

If Mother Earth could bring a legal case against the Trump Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, every last one of them would be found guilty of criminal stupidity and gross negligence. At a time when the earth is sending us a clear and unequivocal message, giving us a taste of what is to come, our government ignores and denies the obvious evidence and in fact makes everything worse. Much worse. The weather around the world isn’t just extreme, it’s deadly.

It’s too late. The oceans will rise, fires will burn, millions will flee. We haven’t seen anything yet. We will pay, dearly, for our hubris, our greed, our venality.

The Democrats would rather talk about Russia. Day and night, through fire and flood, Russia, Russia, Russia; evil Russia, diabolical Russia, cyber-attacking Russia. Russia at dusk, Russia at dawn, Putin this and Putin that. The Russian threat to our glorious democracy, which is hardly a democracy at all. It’s as if Russian troops were massed near the US-Canada border, a daily provocation, rather than the truth: NATO forces have squeezed up to Russia’s borders for years, another broken promise. Who threatens whom?

We need our bogeymen to keep the war profiteers content. Russia. Iran. North Korea. And if we can’t find an enemy, we’ll just create one. Watch out for Venezuela, they have it in for us.

Sane voices are drowned out in the daily cacophony of idiocy and spectacle. We’re going down, days numbered, nights finite. We had our chances to amend our ways, but ignored and shunned the prophets and silenced the scientists. Nobody but ourselves to blame.

Fire and flood. Run to higher ground and all you will find is a mountain of ash.

Smash, Grab, and Don't Look Back: A Looting on Pennsylvania Avenue

“Nobody can know the full consequences of their actions, and history is full of small acts that changed the world in surprising ways.” Rebecca Solnit

You’re going to hear this a lot over the next year or two from Trump and his handlers and enablers: The tax reform we passed in 2017 is the single greatest piece of legislation in American history! It returns more money to the middle class than any tax cut ever has, and it insures that small businesses and family farmers will not lose everything they’ve built when they die.

And blah, blah, blah, and many other lies, too. If there is any good economic news to be had -- not to fear, it won’t be news of real jobs being created, industries returning to the Ohio River valley, or wage growth, it will likely be the rising stock market, fueled by corporate purchases of their own stock (with the money they are not paying in taxes) -- the GOP will say that the tax cuts are the reason. And if the economy runs off the rails, the talking points are already written: Obama’s fault, naturally, the black guy who wasn’t even a real American left the country in a mess. (In any case, Obama’s two terms are being erased, goodbye ACA, the Iran Nuclear arrangement, the Paris Climate Accord, rules to protect the environment, regulate the banks, etc.)

Trump will undoubtedly begin comparing himself to FDR and LBJ, claim that his tax cuts are as great an achievement as the major parts of the New Deal, and way better than the Civil Rights Act, and that it was all done to help the little guy.

No mention will be made that the GOP-controlled House and Senate rammed these bills through the legislative process like thieves during a blackout: backroom, closed door meetings, favors exchanged, promises made, no public hearings, shoddy analysis, lines of corporate bagmen lined up in the halls for their share of the spoils, flat out lies in the press. The GOP wins because it cheats -- it cheats to get elected through gerrymandering and voter suppression, and it cheats when it controls the levers of power.

Has fucking the American people over ever been so easy?

When the Democrats controlled both houses during the first Obama term the Republicans contorted themselves to block, delay, derail, and undermine Obama’s legislative agenda -- tepid as it was -- even though Obama had what Donald J. Trump will never have, a legitimate mandate from the electorate. All’s fair in love and politics. Shoe now on the other foot and as these disgraceful bills moved I heard nary a peep from the Democrats about the corrupt process.

Oh yeah, for a year or two the propaganda is going to come thick and heavy, laced with deadly, mind-numbing, truth-obfuscating BS. The attacks on Social Security and Medicare will come, the huge burden of these “entitlement” programs (paid for by worker contributions, so technically not entitlement programs at all) will be blamed for bankrupting the nation, ruining our credit standing in the world, our competitiveness, the deficit! Only one possible solution -- strict austerity for the slovenly poor and wage earning class. Cut, cut, cut. The war machine, energy extractors, lords of finance, and the wealthy in general will be exempt from the austerity blues, of course, walked around the velvet rope and right into the VIP section, bitching about the profligate ways of the unwashed masses as they go. Gilded, baby, gilded everything.

The people knew this was coming. Destruction is all Trump and his mafia can do. They cannot build, erect, create, or imagine anything but violence and destruction. They are pirates loose in port, drunk, crazed, rabid, horny, and mean; they’ve got the keys to the armory, the courts, and the treasury, no one to answer to, nothing to slow their roll. In the time it takes to pour a flagon of rum half the town will be in flames.

History says Trump and the GOP will overreach, go too far, grab too much, and the pendulum will swing back toward the safe center, where capitalism, militarism, and imperialism reign. We can change the hands on the levers, a good, necessary step, but until enough Americans realize that we must change the game if we are going to have any chance of surviving climate change and every ill this man-made threat brings in its wake, just changing the party in charge won’t get it done.

A society is reasonably just if its people don’t have to die for access to health care, decent housing, meaningful jobs at living wages, courts that act independently of politics and ideology, education, food, assistance when disaster strikes, and a fair opportunity to address their legitimate grievances.  

Get ready, people, hard times are coming.

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.