Post No. 997 - Equinox

 

“Your belief in yourself must be greater than everyone else’s disbelief in you.” August Wilson

The equinox passes. I didn’t know the significance of the day until M, a man who reads books and watches videos on his phone on the patio at the Market, told me. M’s a tall man with a large frame, sunburned skin and close-cropped gray hair, who has lived on Hitchcock avenue out of the camper shell of his red Toyota pickup for several months. M uses the bathroom in the store, fills many water bottles at the filling station, and buys items from the hot bar now and again, all without troubling a soul. M is obviously resourceful having survived being unhoused so long. It can’t be easy or comfortable, particularly for a man in his 70s. M’s got a weathered look about him, but he’s never dirty. One day he complimented me on what he called my “work signature,” telling me it’s obvious when I’m on duty because the men’s bathroom is always clean. As to why he’s here I gathered that he’d blown the engine of the Toyota and was waiting for money to get it fixed. He moves between Bend, Oregon, Boulder, Colorado and Santa Barbara. I don’t think I’d be a very kind or rational and patient soul if I lived like M. 

Running errands this morning with a runny nose and a dull headache. Not feeling 100%. Passed my first stop like it wasn’t there because my mind was elsewhere. I had to drive three blocks out of my way and double back. My debit card failed twice and to pay the bill I had to draw money from an ATM. Service charge for this privilege of $3.50. Drove down the road to BevMo and spent several minutes wandering around in search of tonic water. When did BevMo start selling groceries and sundries? Checked out a selection of bourbons. My debit card worked fine at the checkout. 

Feels like I have a late-summer cold. When I get home I drink a cup of herbal tea for cold/flu symptoms. 

Lately I’ve spent more time reading than I have writing. Finished a fine biography of James Baldwin by David Leeming, and am deep into a biography of August Wilson, the playwright who shook Broadway with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “Fences.” The usual periodicals, New York Review of Books, the Nation, The New Yorker. 

The Baldwin bio gave me some new insight and understanding about a man I consider a prophet. I also read True North by Jim Harrison for the third or fourth time, with renewed appreciation for Harrison’s perceptive observations about the human condition, particularly greed. I’m just getting into The Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard. The way Shepard strung words together is under-appreciated; there’s music in his writing -- and also an edginess. I’ve read a lot of his considerable oeuvre.  

My daughter is discovering the rigors, deadline pressure and sleep-deprivation of a packed senior year at an arts university. She had to memorize long monologues in four different classes, and then, along with the memorization, make the characters’ speech carry weight. The actor’s art, in other words. But otherwise she’s doing well, with a cozy room in a decent apartment, a circle of friends, acquaintances and classmates. We talk to her several times each day. I worry about her less than I did last year when she struggled with homesickness and the shock of moving from Santa Barbara to Philadelphia. 

If only my football team, Chelsea, was faring as well as my family. But no, the boys are struggling to jell and after five league matches have scored five goals and won five points. By contrast, Manchester City have fifteen points. About a dozen Chelsea players are out injured, including Reece James, Moises Caicedo, Christopher Nkunku, and Wesley Fofana. It’s all very dismal and looking like a repeat of 2022’s futility and failure. The club’s new owners have spent an enormous amount of money on players, many of them young, but in football money doesn’t always lead to results; the money has to be spent in the right way. My sense remains that Chelsea is a collection of parts rather than a cohesive unit and that there’s no short term fix. This means Chelsea supporters are in for another long season. The glory of the recent past fades quickly.   

Sweet and Sour Meanderings

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell
That’s the story of the Hurricane
But it won’t be over till they clear his name
And give him back the time he’s done

“Hurricane,” Bob Dylan

+ My daughter is going back to Philadelphia in a few days, back to university and student life. She’s feeling sad about leaving. Of course. She’s 21 and life here is comfortable and familiar and easier. But she needs to be back in school. She seems so young, much younger than her peers of the same age. The progress she made last year was hard-earned, with tears and daily thoughts of throwing in the towel. Homesickness. We thought she might quit. We encouraged her to see out the semester. She did. She also changed her living situation, from the dorm to sharing an apartment off-campus with a new friend. She’s working it out in the Big City. 

+ There wasn’t any flooding or damage in our immediate area from the recent rains. Crazy rains after years of drought. But that’s the history of this state, cycles of drought and flood. Water in the wrong places, far from the majority of the population, water that has to be moved north to south and east to west, through canals and dams and a massive aqueduct. Engineering marvels on one level, but on another destructive as hell. Fucking with nature, changing the course of rivers, streams, making lakes where no lake was meant to be. Displacing people. That’s part of the California story, too.  

+ The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday crept up on me this year. It’s usually a time of reflection, but this year it came and went. Dr. King. Frederick Douglass. W.E.B Du Bois. James Baldwin. My pantheon of great Americans. Each one a prophet. The radical King is largely unknown now, except to scholars and careful readers. With every passing year we get a watered-down, white-washed, sanitized King. I encourage folks to read or listen to King’s 1967 address, “A Time to Break Silence.” It’s all there. “There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.” The American war budget for this fiscal year is $858 billion. A fair chunk of that is earmarked for Ukraine, another war that might continue for some time. $858 billion while so many Americans are unhoused, hungry, without access to medical care or an education, in need of mental health care, and the wealthiest corporations and individuals have gamed the tax system. We saw Trump’s tax returns. They’re the returns of a lousy businessman and a cheat. No surprise, not really news. Not that uncommon in his circles, either. 

King said that America has a “proneness to adjust to injustice.” How right he was. We have adjusted to being ruled by the magic of the Market and every inequity that it brings, as well as conditioned to accept permanent war as normal. I’m not a communist; when it comes to economic matters I’m more of a social democrat. The infallible “logic” of the free market has failed for too many and succeeded for too few. People created the Market, it wasn’t handed down by the Christian God. It’s not free, and rarely has been in this country. King knew that unregulated capitalism produced rough and ragged edges, which led to other maladies, social, political, racial. Read or listen to the address. It seems to me that we’ve never been most distant from King’s vision.

+ Democracy isn’t perfect, not close, but it’s better than most alternatives. We’ve neglected ours, assuming, I suppose, that it’s carved in stone and will last forever. Neither is true, Trump and his accomplices proved that. The legal guardrails were challenged. Innocent people died. Trump and Meadows and Flynn and Giuliani and Stone are free, all  of them. Kevin McCarthy is Speaker of the House. America is in trouble. Remember what Hagrid said to Harry Potter: “Dark times, Harry, dark times.”

+ Our natural gas bill rose from something like $75 to $220 in the space of a month. Our little house is 90 years old, drafty and poorly insulated. We have to run the heater. 

+ Two minutes on Twitter is enough to convince me that America has lost its collective mind. Fortunately, Twitter doesn’t present the entire picture. 

Holy Trinity: God, Guns, Abortion

 “This is a country built on violence and determined to survive by violence or take the world down with it. It consistently rejects peace talks in favor of war, nonviolent approaches to crime in favor of killer cops, and open borders in favor of heavily militarized border enforcement. Then it cries when its children are killed. Then it sells more guns. It’s a twisted place to live and most of its residents have no clue how twisted.” Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch

They will say anything to deflect attention from guns and their complicity in making guns easy to obtain. They ramble on about mental illness, entry doors, armed guards, armed school teachers, hardened schools, but the bottom line is always more guns, not less guns. And so this deadly wheel turns, in Texas, New York, California, Georgia. Readers of the Balcony know that I’m proud to be an unarmed American. I hate guns. This doesn’t imply any desire on my part to impose my views on others. Anyone of legal age who wishes to own a pistol, shotgun, or hunting rifle should be allowed to do so. Responsible sport shooters and hunters pose little risk to the public. If owning a pistol makes you feel safer in your home, by all means acquire one and learn how to use it. I don’t, however, believe in open carry laws because I see no justification for them; they are part of the Wild West mentality we must cast off. 

My problem is with the weaponry of war, military-grade assault rifles like the AR-15 or semi-automatic pistols. Citizens have no need for such weapons, no matter what the NRA or its silver-tongued lobbyists say. Fuck them. And fuck all politicians of either party who bend over for the Gun Lobby year after year. I reserve special disdain and contempt for Greg Abbott, a coward and a punk; Dan Patrick for being a self-righteous asshole; Ken Paxton for just being who he is; Ted Cruz for personifying a perverted Ivy League education; Kevin McCarthy for being a dry turd masquerading as a man. All of these pissants, and many, many more, have blood stains under their fingernails.

Money and power. Cower behind the cross, hold up a gun, wail for the unborn and millions will follow you, send you money, and vote for you, no matter what. Republicans have message discipline and get on the same page very quickly, but the GOP is an immoral gang of weasels. On the other side the Democrats stagger around the frontier of the culture war, preoccupied with identity politics, wokeness, call it what you will. You want to know what triggers me? Stupidity. Injustice. Cruelty. The rule of law is being eroded, abroad and at home, and those in power escape accountability for their misdeeds. What’s a progressive to do? Where do I turn? Like James Baldwin, I hold the right to shame and criticize my country until it does better. Our society will never be perfect or even close to it, but one predicated on fear and hatred cannot long endure. 

What’s the breaking point, where does this madness end? Does it end? How do we break the iron grip of the gun lobby and the defense industry, and stop promoting violence as the answer to our mutual problems? How do we reinvigorate the anti-war movement? How do we change the American economy to make it less predatory, unfair, unequal, and also less detrimental to the planet? There’s so much heavy lifting to be done.

In the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy I come across this passage which, if we continue staggering blindly down our current path, might just apply: “We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.” 

The Bullets of August

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to.” Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian 

Republicans have figured out the cause of gun violence in America. It’s not guns themselves. It’s not white nationalism. It’s not the unhinged brand of capitalism that has hollowed out towns and inner cities and hamlets, put people under extraordinary stress as they struggle against structural poverty and a diminished future, and made them look for scapegoats to explain their misery and anxiety and fear. It’s not our hyper-militarized culture and glorification of war, our “big, beautiful military” as Donald J. Trump calls it, the F-18’s screaming over football stadiums, and the endless “Thank you for your service” adulation given to our troops, even those who have never been within 5,000 miles of combat.  

Video games, violent video games, there’s your culprit. 

Video games. 

A video game didn’t drive 600 miles with the intent of launching a murderous rampage outside and inside a WalMart store in El Paso, Texas. El Paso. A border city with intimate ties to Mexico. A city of immigrants. A city that has pushed back against Trump’s demonizing. 

A video game didn’t load the assault weapon, aim and pull the trigger. A video game didn’t install fear of brown-skinned immigrants in the head of the murderer. A video game didn’t refer to immigrants and asylum seekers, over and over, as an invading force, a gang of criminals, rapists and drug dealers. A video game didn’t demand that Congress authorize funding to build a dubious border wall, itself a symbol of fear. A video game can’t claim to have the unfailing backing of the NRA and all the political clout and cover it buys. A video game has no influence over the United States Senate, and the bills that body takes up or ignores.  

If you have the power to act, but have no intention of doing so because it might cost you political support or campaign donors or invitations to appear on FOX News, you play the distraction game. You shout and point, over there, not over here where the problem is. Trump gives a master class in this misdirection nonsense every single day. 

As I write this I am being pilloried on social media for suggesting that Trump will probably make a quick run down to El Paso, not because he cares about the dead or the grieving, but because the optics might help his re-election effort. The people attacking me have forgotten Trump in Puerto Rico, tossing rolls of paper towels to people after Hurricane Maria. They have forgotten his deploying military troops to the southern border in the runup to the 2018 midterm elections. Trump uses people and places as props. A man who condones, even encourages for its chilling effect, the separation of small children from their parents at the border doesn’t care about people. But it’s me, and folks of my bent, who are the problem. Unpatriotic. Haters. We don’t love America. We are suspect. We are trolls. We should leave. 

As he did so many times, the great James Baldwin said it best. To paraphrase, I love America so much that I reserve the right to criticize it. I reserve the right to demand that my country live up to the ideals enumerated in its founding documents. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All men are created equal, with certain inalienable rights. Due process under the law. Freedom of speech and assembly and religion; freedom from unlawful search and seizure.

And, yes, the right to bear arms. But the right must come with responsibility and a measure of common sense. If you want to operate a motor vehicle, you have to take a test and obtain a license; in most states you also have to prove that you have insurance because a motor vehicle can become a danger to others. Periodically you have to renew your license. States mandate this and we comply. States also mandate that our vehicles be registered, that our tags are paid for and properly affixed. We don’t lose our minds and scream that the government is intruding, abridging our rights. Why shouldn’t this be true for purchasing and owning a firearm? You can have one, or more than one; you can own pistols and rifles and shotguns. Undergo a background check, take a safety course, obtain and maintain a license. Seems like a fair trade-off, given the damage a firearm in misguided hands can do. 

But here’s the thing: assault-style weapons are for the battlefield, not the mall, the nightclub, the concert hall, the theater, the school, the synagogue, the church, the mosque, the university campus, the city hall.    

And most definitely not a WalMart in El Paso.  

America is a violent, angry, confused and divided nation; we’re angry because we’re afraid of who might lurk in the shadows, afraid they might take what we have, even if all we have is an illusion of how exceptional we are; afraid of a future that looks grim; afraid of the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians; afraid of Islam. Fear breeds hatred, and hatred breeds violence, and violence breeds more violence. 

And here we are. Again.

The America that is Coming (whether Trump likes it or not)

“But it is not permissible that the authors of destruction should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” James Baldwin

Divide, divide, divide

Them and us

The worthy and the unworthy

In America this has always meant

White people

And black people, with white on top

Ever on top,

Better than

More deserving

Destined by God’s hand, by biology, by natural selection

to rule

Go back, go back, go back

To the shithole from whence

You came

That failed state, that crime-infested hood

So bellows the Racist-in-Chief,

Donald J. Trump

Whose DNA is racist

Who came from his mother’s womb racist

Who learned racism at his father’s knee

The racist loved by the Grand Old Party &

Beleaguered white men in red states

Who blame black and brown people for their sorry lot,

As if those people had the power to transform the US 

Economy

Into an oligarch’s 

paradise

The racist loved by evangelical Christians

Who line up to lay hands

On Trump’s twice-divorced

Porn star banging

Pussy grabbing

Lying

Cheating

Shoulders

The racist frightened-to-death of four

Women of color

Remember their names, for they are the face

Of 

The America that is coming

Whether Trump and his followers like it or not:

Ilhan Omar

Rashida Tlaib

Ayanna Pressley

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Remember too that those who lead

The way against the status quo

Are always

Maligned

Attacked

Denounced

As unrealistic, strident, radical

Just as Martin Luther King Jr. was

And the suffragettes and the brave souls

Who agitated for an 8-hour workday

And an end to child labor

Time for all good people to stand up,

take a step forward

Not two steps back,

Because

We know where that road leads.

The Impunity of Privileged White Men

“There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.” James Baldwin

Imagine if a female nominee for the United States Supreme Court acted like Brett Kavanaugh did last Thursday. Angry, belligerent, accusatory, self-pitying, whiny. How would that behavior have gone over if it had come from a woman? Yeah, think about that for a moment, think of the double-standard, and think of the courage it took Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford to walk into that lions den of mostly old, closed-minded, judgmental white men, who hired a woman to question Ford so they wouldn’t look like a gang of bullies. The drunken frat boy, son of privilege, white-skinned, always has the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence. Not so the woman, the accuser. She misremembers. She can’t be certain. She is distraught, emotional, easy to dismiss. Or she invited the man, laid a trap, cast a spell to which the man succumbed. Go home, my dear, bake cookies and polish the furniture.  

Brett Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump, is a symptom of a disease, the disease being hoary old white privilege, the presumption -- so persistent in America -- that whites, particularly prep school Ivy League whites like Kavanaugh - are the superior race, ordained by God to run the affairs of this world, and who are schooled in the notion that their behavior, no matter how obscene or injurious to others, carries no consequences, for they are the chosen, above the law, masters to whom lower mortals must submit. Members of the superior race cannot even be questioned about their behavior, their lies, their crimes without becoming outraged and indignant.

Kavanaugh’s White House sponsor, the lying, boastful, tax and draft evading, misogynistic and idiotic Donald J. Trump, is cut from the same bolt of fabric, also a son of privilege and wealth, saved from failure repeatedly by his daddy’s money and connections, who has never had to account for his boorish behavior and criminal deeds. Privileged white men like Trump and Kavanaugh defy the laws of nature and fail upwards. Trump is so morally and ethically bankrupt and debased that at one of his weird “rallies” in Mississippi, home to some of his stalwart supporters, he mocked Christine Blasey-Ford. The irony of the coward Trump mocking a woman who had the moral courage and fortitude to act on her conscience isn’t shocking or astonishing or breathtaking, it’s simply repugnant and despicable. That Trump can’t keep his mouth shut about the Kavanaugh confirmation process, like a normal sitting president, isn’t surprising; the man is deranged and cannot help himself.

I have, like most Americans of good will and decency, grown accustomed to the daily stupidity and idiocy oozing from the White House and Trump’s mouth, just as I am now accustomed to Trump’s nonsensical boasts about peace agreements and trade deals and the booming economy, but what I refuse to get used to is the cruelty, venality and mendacity of Trump and the people around him, and the moral indifference of his most ardent followers.  

Fragments

“Educated people, of any color, are so extremely rare that it is unquestionably one of the first tasks of a nation to open all of its schools to all of its citizens.” James Baldwin

Sooner or later, everyone will be a stranger in a new place. A visitor, a tourist.

What did Trump and Putin talk about in Helsinki?

Is Trump Putin’s bitch?

The Dow fell by 137 points today. Should I care? Should you?

Is the universe benevolent or indifferent?

Can reality be bent?

Can anyone tell me how the US war in Afghanistan, America’s longest war, is going? Are we winning, losing, playing to a draw? Will the US ever leave? What is it that Afghanistan has that we want so desperately? Opium? Minerals?

The train was orange. The windows were fogged over. My stop was third from the end of the line. I was 18 years old, ten thousand miles from home. On a clear day I could see Mt. Fuji in the distance. In 1978, I climbed to the top with two friends. We found drifts of bottles, cans, paper, cigarette butts. The summit of the most sacred mountain in Japan was a garbage dump.

The incompetence of the Trump White House is off the charts. Remember when the Orange Menace claimed he would only hire the “best people”?

Did Trump and Putin talk about porn stars in Helsinki? Did they whip out their dicks and compare size? Was Trump stunned when his dick proved to be the smaller? Is this why he looked shell-shocked when he and Putin emerged to meet the media? “It’s very unfair that Vlad’s dick is bigger than mine.”

Two mobsters meet to divide the spoils, define their territories, and pledge restraint so both can make money.

They found him sitting behind the wheel of his 1975 Cadillac Calais Coupe, the car he adored and had restored all by himself. If you didn’t see the bullet hole in his temple, he appeared to be smiling.

In America, money equals rectitude, status, accomplishment, and morality. My dad always told me that if you have money you can do whatever you want.

My dad died penniless. All those cigarettes, all that vodka, for all those years. He looks back at me when I look in the mirror.

We don’t get to pick our parents, the place of our birth, the circumstances, princess or servant. Life is a roll of the dice, a game of chance, a longshot wager on an unknown horse.

“Fuck you.” “No, fuck you.” “You want to fight?” “Not really, I’m kind of tired.” “How ‘bout we fight tomorrow?” “OK, tomorrow I kick your ass.” “In your dreams motherfucker.”

It’s a measure of how perverse the Trump Administration is that former CIA Director John Brennan, serial liar, torture advocate, is now seen as a torchbearer for Truth. The world is upside down.

Gangsta Nation

“In this hour, in this day of conflict, his insights bear repeating, for although some things have indeed changed, we must scream the naked truth that some things remain the same.” Mumia Abu-Jamal on James Baldwin

Who else but Donald Trump could stand before a gathering of Boy Scouts and make a total ass of himself?

That’s the American president, a gigantic asshole who every single hour of every single day demeans the highest office in the land. He is a turd floating in a wading pool. Trump makes war criminal presidents like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush look benevolent and entirely sane.

To be sure, the Boy Scouts of America have always been a creepy, paramilitary organization, designed to reinforce mythical American values, white and Christian supremacy, and imperialism, but the Scouts didn’t deserve that display of madness. Some of those boys may be scarred for life.

And how about Trump’s decree that transgender people will not serve in the empire’s military forces? Anyone willing to be shipped off to fight and die for the cause of American imperialism and hegemony should be welcomed to do so, be they white, black, brown, gay, straight, or transgender. Trump blathered about our military needing to focus on earning a “decisive and overwhelming victory,” but the fool didn’t mention which of our many conflicts this focus applied to. Maybe he meant America’s war on the Muslim world, over which a “decisive and overwhelming victory” isn’t within the realm of possibility. North Korea? Iran? Jamaica? Cuba? A citizen can never be sure with Trump.

Trump is so inept that he would be hard pressed to earn the lowest Boy Scout merit badge. Born with a golden spoon in his mouth and a silver one shoved up his ass, Trump has rarely had to lift a finger to secure his wants and needs, and he’s the last man I would want by my side on a trek in the wilderness. Imagine the whining and whinging, the claims of unfairness when flies and mosquitoes swarm, the moaning about being tired and thirsty and hot and sweaty. Trump swaggers around like a macho man, but it’s clear that at heart he’s a coward; most bullies are.

What a state of affairs. What a monumental cluster-fuck. We raise our glasses in praise of venal men and women, frauds and liars, thieves and perverts. We celebrate ignorance, glorify violence, and pray to a false god. In this climate to think too deeply, to search for and confront the truth is to dearly suffer.  

The black dog comes over me and everything feels very dark and hopeless. I can’t find an antidote. I feel out of step and out of time, weighed down by the stupidity, cruelty and injustice that has been exposed by the emergence of Trump and his band of thieves. I know these traits have always been present, under Obama, Bush, Clinton, Carter, Republican and Democrat, it makes little difference which party is in the ascendancy; from the beginning American rhetoric and American deeds have rarely matched. All one has ever had to do is pull back the velvet curtain and look, see Uncle Sam standing before a map of the world, his hands drenched in blood and his coat pockets bulging with $100 bills.