Seeing the Contours

“The color is innocent enough, but things with which it is coupled make it hated. Slavery, ignorance, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn.” Frederick Douglass

One

I compost kitchen scraps and leaves and clippings in a medium capacity plastic composter in our backyard. One of those drum composters, with two compartments and rollers that allow it to be spun. I’ve composted in our narrow backyard for years, in bare piles and homemade bins fashioned with scrap wood and chicken wire and, until it fell apart, a plastic bin from Smith and Hawken that was my mother-in-law’s. The drum is the best composter yet, even though the aperture is a bit small. I like the idea of turning waste into fertilizer. Seems like a good metaphor for life. It takes time to make fertilizer, some patience and care, just as it takes time for the contours of life to start making sense. What I mean is that it takes time to learn to see the contours, how they fit together. It’s easy to miss a lot of signs along the way. What seems monumental today may be meaningless further down the road, and the apparently meaningless might turn out to be monumental. 

Two

The real criminal types aren’t satisfied with taking over a street or village or city. Real criminals think much bigger. They take over governments and entire countries, fix the laws for their own benefit and the benefit of their compatriots and collaborators. Hasn’t this always been so? 

Three

My congressman, Salud Carbajal, put his finger to the breeze begun by others with more courage, and only voiced his support for the impeachment of President Trump when it was safe to do so. Political pragmatism, I guess. Courage is more admirable in my book, especially when the most fundamental principle of representative democracy is at stake. Even while we watch Trump take hammer and chisel to the integrity and legitimate authority of the Legislative branch, Salud waited, hesitated, calculated. On the question of whether the chief executive is immune to, exempt from, and above the law, Salud followed the herd, but only when it was politically safe to do so. Not exactly a profile in courage. 

Four

Fiesta time in Santa Barbara. For some, a time to remember the city’s Spanish and Mexican origins, for others it’s all about commerce, hotel occupancy rates, bed taxes. We saw some of the parade on State Street, men on horses waving and calling out, “Viva La Fiesta!”, horse-drawn carriages or wagons hauling local bigwigs. Ladies on horseback, their colorful dresses flowing, flowers in their hair. Little girls in traditional dress tossing flowers into the crowd lined along the street. Horse hooves clip-clopping on the pavement. The image that stuck with me was of a vaquero holding an American flag. I imagined the days when State Street was packed dirt and Fiesta was a much smaller, more local affair. Progress. Maybe. 

Five

We used to think big in America. Send a man to the moon and bring him back safely. Eradicate poverty. Establish the Peace Corps. Now we think small. Once we had confidence, now we’re afraid, all the time, of shadows and just about everything else. What happened to us?

Six

I’m reading Sam Shepard’s last book, a slim volume called Spy of the First Person. Just finished Stony The Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 

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.

Viva!

It’s Fiesta time in Santa Barbara and the city is geared up for brisk tourist business, catering to wide-eyed Europeans flush with cash, out-of-towners here to enjoy Flamenco dancing and overpriced tortas. Most locals head for the hills when Fiesta rolls around, or, if they stay in town, do no more than check out the happenings at Our Lady of Guadalupe church, where the scene feels organic and authentic and one isn’t likely to see many Caucasian guys wearing silly sombreros and shouting “Viva La Fiesta!”

Again this year, the “El Presidente” is a pudgy Caucasian fellow with a European surname.

Fiesta wasn’t always such a big production around here. True, the event has always had a commercial angle, though in the old days it wasn’t as crassly commercial as it is now, but then again, the entire U.S. economy grooves to a crassly commercial tune, twenty-four hours a day, so why should the good merchants of SB (most of them now upscale corporate chains) miss an opportunity to hawk their wares? If some German tourist is willing to lay down $10 for a watered-down house margarita, and $25 for an official Fiesta T-shirt, what’s the problem?

Our Spanish heritage is hailed without getting into the messy details of what the Spanish did to indigenous people during their reign. Instead of an imperial campaign for God, Gold, Guns, and Genocide, the arrival of the Spanish in SB is placed in a benevolent light during Fiesta; the Spanish were decent folk who came to spread the Good Word and bring civilization to the heathen. OK, maybe some Indians croaked laying adobe bricks for the Mission, but on the whole it was a worthwhile endeavor, right? Maybe a few Indians didn’t cotton to the new arrivals, didn’t appreciate their style, and made it a point to say so and were summarily beaten to a pulp, but that was the exception, not the rule, the work of some bad apples. Just like Abu Ghraib a few hundred years later, right?

But despite the commercialism and the historical myopia, it’s still sweet to see the kids in the parade, and the dancers who work so hard at their art. For a few days these events take our minds off the failed Occupation of Iraq, the crumbling economy, and the nastiness of the Presidential campaign.

So bring out the mariachis and let’s get our collective Viva on!