The New Lost Cause

 “History is the consequence not only of people’s actions, but also of their forgetfulness.” Salman Rushdie, Victory City

Tucker Carlson and his employer, Fox “News” want us to forget what happened on January 6, 2021, and replace what millions of us saw with our own eyes with a fantasy. The mob inflamed by Donald Trump, all those fools carrying flagpoles, clubs, baseball bats, bear spray, firearms, knives, who smashed windows and rifled offices and chanted for Mike Pence to hang, never happened according to Carlson and Fox. January 6 was simply a peaceful gathering of patriots exercising their Constitutional freedom to assemble. Any violence that happened, the injuries and deaths, were committed by radical left Democrats and Antifa. 

Right. And when the moon is full and the wind blows from the east pigs fly like eagles and crows shit nuggets of gold. 

At this moment, American politics and right-wing media is populated with some of the most vile, ignorant, intolerant, and corrupt people I’ve ever seen. When the execrable and dimwitted Kevin McCarthy gave access to thousands of hours of surveillance footage from January 6 to Tucker Carlson -- and no other news outlet -- I knew what was coming. A whitewash. It was predictable that Tucker and his crack team of propagandists would cherry-pick the footage to show their viewers that nothing unusual, and certainly nothing violent, happened on January 6. It was just another day in America’s capitol city…

How stupid does Tucker Carlson think his audience is? How gullible? How infantile? He obviously believes they will swallow any lie that tumbles from his lips. That’s astonishing in and of itself, but what’s more outrageous is that Carlson is pulling this crap while Fox is being sued for defamation. 

Television occupied our American brains many years ago. Images and sound bites replaced words on paper. Facts became negotiable, mutable, malleable and it became possible for politicians and skilled propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson to create their own facts. When reality didn’t conform to the narrative they wanted to push, it could, like the script of a reality TV show, be rewritten, reframed, and re-contextualized. With enough repetition the new take could become a new truth. 

Carlson, with help from his buddy McCarthy, is trying to create a new “Lost Cause” for MAGA world. After the Civil War, the defeated but unrepentant plantation bosses and Confederate politicians and generals and soldiers, began spinning a new take on the war. States’ rights not slavery had been the central issue and reason for all the bloodshed. The Federal government led by Abraham Lincoln had tyrannically forced itself on the poor, beleaguered southern states, leaving them no choice but to take up arms to protect their culture and freedom. The South was noble and true, fighting for a great principle that had nothing to do with enslaved Black people. You see, Black people enjoyed their status as unpaid laborers and thought of their masters and owners as family. It was a benevolent relationship, not exploitative. Robert E. Lee wasn’t a traitor, he was a hero and patriot. 

The Lost Cause narrative was repeated for decades in newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, and in monuments to heroes of the Confederacy; it found its way into history textbooks and popular culture. No defeated population wants to see itself as evil. 

Will Tucker Carlson succeed? I want to think not, but this is a country awash in falsehoods and lies and outright lunacy. We’re a gullible nation. A certain percentage of Carlson’s audience is bound to believe that January 6 was simply a peaceful protest by thousands of red-blooded American patriots. Others might begin to doubt what they witnessed with their own eyes that horrible day. 

January 6, 2021 wasn’t a peaceful day in Washington D.C. A mob whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump breached and ransacked the Capitol and disrupted a congressional proceeding for several hours.  It happened. People died. Hundreds suffered serious injuries. 

What’s outrageous, at least in this citizen’s estimation, is that none of the key players or architects of the attempted coup, including Donald J. Trump, have been held to account more than two years after the fact, and I think there’s a very good possibility that they never will be. I can hear Attorney General Merrick Garland in my head, explaining in his calm and measured way that the report by Special Counsel Jack Smith, though damning, will not be acted upon -- for the good of the nation, of course.  

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. 

Get Behind The Mule

 “My generation takes what it can get/Are you surprised that the kids are all upset?/They’re looking at Nothing and Nothing turns away and yawns.” Greg Brown, “Whatever It Was”

I’ve got this suspicion that when the January 6 committee wraps up its labor and delivers a comprehensive and damning report to the DOJ, nothing will happen. No indictment of Trump. Possibly indictments for some easier targets like Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, but not the kingpin himself or his many enablers and co-conspirators, like Mark Meadows. Not indicting Trump will come down in the end to fear. Fear that an indictment might spark civil unrest and violence from Trump’s heavily-armed tribe. Fear of losing what should be an open and shut case on multiple charges. Fear of Steve Bannon’s podcast. Fear that voters will turn against Democrats. Whatever. The excuse will sound reasoned but naked fear will still be the reason for inaction.  Nothing is in shorter supply in Washington D.C. than courage. Justice, rule of law, and enforcement is reserved for targets that are poor or working-class -- black or brown or female -- not the mandarins and the owners and powerful political bosses. Elites in every society are adept at ducking accountability and punishment; the worst offenders often walk away, unscathed, like the many Nazi’s that escaped to South America. The worst butchers, the truly despotic, slip the net and vanish. When the elites write the rules, they always weave in loopholes and exceptions. It’s just the way power works, and it’s as corrosive as salt water on metal. 

Why can’t I let this go? Because of what I predicted when Trump was elected, and what I saw with my own eyes on January 6. Because if Trump isn’t held accountable the jig is up on American democracy. I know both parties are corrupted by lobbyists and corporate money and untraceable money, by the madness of perpetual foreign wars, because I’ve been writing about this shit for nearly 20 years. Racism. Militarism. Class Warfare. The creeping cruelty of American life. Dark shit, from George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump. My understanding of American politics, how it works, how it fails to work, its inherent corruption, is better than most. If I could bury my head in the proverbial sand, I would, but I can’t; I’ve got children to consider. I predicted in 2016 that Trump would do grave damage to the country; his manifest incompetence and authoritarian bent were as obvious to me as the wrinkles on my face. If I have an obsession it’s with the fact that a complete fraud like Donald Trump can convince millions of Americans that he’s their champion. My God, after all that happened with Covid and the election, can’t you see that Trump is for Trump and nothing else? How many Covid deaths can be attributed to the Trump administration’s criminal mishandling of the federal response? 10,000? 50,000? 100,000? All Americans, fellow citizens, fellow human beings. 

OK, so I’ll tell you what you already perceive: the order is shifting and the corridors of power are being rearranged, and it’s time for people of decency and goodwill to get off the couch and up behind the mule, because there is much work to be done, many seeds to plant. Turn off Fox News and tune in to your own inherent sense of right and wrong. Trump lied about the 2020 election -- before, during and after -- because he knew he was going to lose, and nothing terrified him more than being exposed for the loser he has been all his misbegotten and miserable life. Trump is a coward at heart, a draft evader, a tax cheat, an elite punk who has never been properly put in his place. He’s an attention-seeking moron who never understood even the most basic functions of government. He disgraced the United States on the world stage, sucked up to Vladimir Putin, ran interference for Mohammed bin Salman after the Saudi prince set his killers on Jamal Khashoggi. How can you put your faith in a man like Trump? Is it just because you despise the same people he does? 

There can be no justice without courage. 

 

The Gathering Storm

“What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false and have already led to events like the January 6 insurrection?” Katha Pollitt, The Nation

Are you as tired of the spectacle of American politics as I am? I hate to be defeatist and cynical, but I don’t see a path out of the box canyon we’ve hiked into over the past twenty years. When I look at the scene I am reminded of a line from Yuval Noah Harari’s book,  21 Lessons for the 21st Century: never underestimate human stupidity. Look at Mike Pence, for instance, a man as full of ambition as he is devoid of substance, who now blames the media for the January 6 assault on the capitol. This is the same man who was rushed to safety by Secret Service agents as the Trump mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” Who knows what may have happened if the mob had seized Pence, but now Mike has developed amnesia and is back to kissing Trump’s ass with the servility he displayed for four years. Mikey is apparently convinced that God wants him to be president one day, and his penance in the meantime is to suffer humiliation and degradation at the tiny, corrupt hands of Donald J. Trump. 

Nine months on and none of the architects of the attempted coup have been held accountable. With the notable exceptions of authorizing military actions, gifting billions to the military-industrial-surveillance complex, and enacting tax breaks for the wealthy, the gears of Washington D.C. grind and squeal but the wheels barely turn. I assume the efforts of the House committee investigating the coup will come to naught, zero, nada. Let’s see what the committee does when Trump’s aides and toadies refuse to comply with subpoenas, as they almost certainly will. Steve Bannon thinks he’s untouchable. When all is done and dusted, the likely outcome is a voluminous report that will garner media attention for a day or two and then be forgotten without any significant remedial action taken. We’ve seen this movie many times. Iran-Contra. The 2008 financial meltdown. The Mueller Report. I will also not be surprised if Biden decides to shield Trump’s Oval Office actions and communications from scrutiny under the convenient guise of “Executive Privilege.” Political elites rarely hold each other accountable because it sets a bad precedent. As I’ve written on this blog many times, accountability is reserved for those of us without wealth or connections. When the law or the government comes for us, we have no place to run or hide. We can’t ignore Congressional subpoenas or stash ill-gotten gains in offshore tax havens. One country, two sets of rules. It’s good to be King or Queen, lousy to be a serf. 

Life goes on as it has always gone on, through fire, flood, famine, drought, pestilence, war, revolution, insurrection and disaster. The poor scrape and scramble for their living while the wealthy party in high style in gilded palaces. As in the past, so in the present. 

The battle for Truth is in jeopardy of being forfeited. And then what? An America ruled by the Trump family? Will we suffer Big Daddy Donald until he draws his final breath, then watch Junior ascend to the throne, and after him Ivanka, and finally, Eric. Is that what the future holds? Camelot is dead, long live Mar-A-Lago. You think I’m crazy? Perhaps so, but the scenario doesn’t seem that outlandish to me given the chicanery happening in state legislatures and in the chambers of the radical Supreme Court. Add the fact that millions of Americans believe whatever Donald Trump spews or the latest QANON fantasies rather than what they see with their own eyes. The fix is in the process of being hard-wired. Once the Truth and the Law are totally debased what remains? Will Americans come to expect that every politician and public servant is on the take, amenable to bribes, as most Russians do? Possibly. What’s to prevent it from happening, appeals to decency, morality, or ethics? Fat chance. America isn’t immune to the endemic corruption that has sundered other nations. We’re on the slippery downslope. 

2 + 2 = 5

 “I have come very late to the pleasure of sitting still with little or nothing on my mind.” Jim Harrison, The Road Home

Coming to the end of my first month of retirement. My Freedom Summer, the first time in twenty-two years that I haven’t been yoked to someone else’s schedule. It has been brilliant. A run of days of cool mornings and lovely sunny afternoons. I’ve been writing, reading, walking or riding my bike up Garcia Road, doing my training sessions, drinking wine, and watching TV in the evening with my wife. We’re into Dr. Death and The White Lotus at the moment. We enjoyed the Kominsky Method. The money is holding. Everybody’s healthy and we don’t suffer at all; life is crazy good right now. 

But back east in the nation’s capitol, the seat of our government and home of our limited, tenuous democracy, and many of our most cherished national myths, the war between Fact and Fantasy rages on. Trump fans the flame, Fox News amplifies it, and GOP nitwits like Kevin McCarthy and Ted Cruz repeat the talking points. Whatever the issue, employ the same tactic: work a bit of verbal jujitsu and flip it. Thus can Elise Stefanik, the third ranking member in the House GOP hierarchy, blame the breach of the capitol on Nancy Pelosi. Stefanik is banking on the American people being too ignorant to know what Stefanik clearly knows, namely, that the Speaker of the House isn’t responsible for security at the capitol. Not that facts matter. Slinging mud is what matters to the GOP. Anything and everything can be blamed on Pelosi. 

The modern GOP is like the Communist Party in the old Soviet Union, decrepit and morally debased, interested only in clinging to power; it’s a party based on denial -- of everything from climate change to who was responsible for the insurrection on January 6. We learned this week that neither Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell watched the first hearing of the House subcommittee investigating the Trump-inspired insurrection. Couldn’t be bothered, nothing to learn from four officers who battled rioters on that mournful day. Over on the Fox propaganda network, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson accused the officers of “theatrics.” So much for backing the men and women of Law Enforcement. 

Keeping an eye on politics tests one’s faith in human nature. Where else in this country do people so regularly sell out as in the halls of Congress? I’m not talking about the compromises politicians must make in order to craft legislation -- horse trading and compromise is how the sausage gets made. It’s messy and few are happy at the end. It’s the art of the possible and all that. I’m talking about selling out one’s principles. Condemning Donald Trump for inciting a mob one minute, then skipping down to Mar-A-Lago to lick his balls the next, as Kevin McCarthy did earlier this year, is what I’m talking about. Shamelessly describing the mob as a bunch of peaceful tourists, trying to turn rioters into patriots and martyrs, gaslighting people every day into doubting what they saw with their own eyes is my point. 

Insisting that 2 + 2 = 5. 

The last thing the GOP wants is for the full scope of what went down on January 6 to come out. They know where the trail of evidence will lead. They must know which members will be implicated. That’s why McConnell nixed a non-partisan independent investigation and McCarthy did his best to ratfuck the House subcommittee by clogging it with wingnuts and bomb-throwers like Jim Jordan. McCarthy wanted to turn the hearings into a circus, but since being outmaneuvered by Nancy Pelosi, all he can do is carp from the sidelines. Kevin’s not the brightest bulb, but he is scared of Jim Jordan and his ilk, and doesn’t want what happened to John Boehner to happen to him. McCarthy plays all the angles.

I don’t know how these folks sleep at night after spending an entire day pissing on the oath they swore. Corruption is corrosive and power corrupts and absolute power (which is what Trump wants. He wants to be Vladimir Putin) corrupts absolutely. If I were Steve Scalisi, I’d be watching over my shoulder for Elise Stefanik. She likes power, she’s hungry for it. She’s had a taste of it and wants more. 

You can’t swim in a cesspool and come out smelling of lilac. 

Killer Instinct (Lack Of)

 “The result is a metastisizing corruption at the heart of the polity. About the Capitol coup there is no shared reality.” Mark Danner, New York Review

I understand some of the political calculations being made by Democrats. If they move too zealously to punish Trump for his myriad abuses of power, they risk inflaming Trump’s diehard base, many of whom are armed and waiting for a provocation. But if Democrats don’t act to hold Trump and his enablers accountable, and soon, they run a real risk of legitimizing Trump’s abuses. 

If the tables were turned and a crazed horde of armed Black Lives Matter supporters had stormed the Capitol on January 6, the Republicans would have spent the last six months holding Benghazi-style hearings to the exclusion of any legislative activity. The rabid right-wing media universe would throb and buzz with dire predictions of an incipient attack on God-fearing white people. That’s just how the GOP rolls. By comparison the Democrats seem tame and phlegmatic, totally lacking in killer instinct; they are like a soccer club that always sits deep and defends, with only the faintest hope of hitting their opponent on the counter attack. The GOP plays to win, the Dems are content with a draw. 

While Democrats make their political calculations in wood-paneled corridors, the GOP is doing everything it can to cement minority rule. Writing in the New York Review, Mark Danner notes, “If in close elections Republicans can place the effective power to award a state’s electoral votes in the state legislature, they will have gone far toward establishing a permanent grip on the White House.” This certainly appears to be the operating strategy. Accepting Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen election is the first step, putting in place the mechanisms (blatant voter suppression and nullification measures) to prevent future elections from being “stolen” is what logically follows. 

As I wrote here after he won the election, Biden will do what he can to return the country to a state resembling normal (meaning, I suppose, a less over-the-top level of deceit and corruption than we experienced during Trump’s misbegotten reign), and steady the institutions Trump tipped over, but I can’t help but think he’s the proverbial boy with his finger in the dike. Opposing him is a political party in thrall to a con artist along with millions of people willing to practice magical thinking. Even if Trump is indicted by any one of the agencies on his trail, his supporters will not abandon him. I can’t see the moment when the fever breaks and the reality of who Trump really is becomes crystal clear. As Hunter S. Thompson might say, we are well and truly fucked. A country in which nearly half the population believes in idiotic conspiracy theories and “alternative” facts is doomed. 

What does the reality-based half of the country do, where do we turn, and how can we stop this unholy onslaught? That sound in the distance is the drumbeat of minority rule. January 6 was a skirmish in the war. Under American flag and Christian cross, the aggrieved have begun to march. 

Not Quite Home Sweet Home

 ”At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.” Mike Davis, City of Quartz

We keep asking one another, “does it feel like home?” The answer for me is yes, our new digs strike a homey vibe with me, even though we are not fully situated and have at least a dozen boxes left to empty, artwork to hang, stuff to put away. Our familiarity and comfort level grows, routines develop, but we still carry the muscle memory of the little apartment we lived in for so long.  I set up my gym in the carport, heavy bag, double-end bag, suspension trainer, and can do all the modes of training I did up the block, with the benefit here of being able to leave the heavy bag up all the time. My wife still feels unsettled, in part because she’s been distracted by her mother’s physical condition after hip replacement surgery, and the prospect of rotator cuff surgery in July. Two surgeries in less than a year for an 80-year-old woman who wasn’t in the best of health to begin with. Like millions of Americans, we have elder care responsibilities. My sister-in-law says worry is the weight; she’s right, it’s the worry of what might happen next. 

My son takes after me in several respects (poor boy), and one of those ways is that he hates meetings, corporate-speak, and bullshit. When he worked at the LA Philharmonic there were too many meetings that meandered around and accomplished nothing, and now he’s experiencing similar nonsense at the San Francisco Opera. “This is definitely my last non-profit arts gig,” he tells me, exasperated by all the hours he considers wasted. He complains but on the other hand he’s lucky as hell and knows it, with a tolerable job in the city he wants to be in, health insurance, a measure of predictability, and less than $20K in student loan debt for the year and a half he was in college, first at Southern Oregon University and then Pacific Northwest College of Art. I don’t know if he’ll ever go back to school. But whether he does or not, my son is an artist in his soul, and nothing can change that. The kid is 24 and already has figured out that the world into which he was born is fucked. 

While I was cleaning out a bin I found a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center titled, The Year in Hate and Extremism. It was from 2019, a year before the January 6 Trump-goaded insurrection. Skimming through the Executive Summary I came across this passage: “It is time to move beyond the illusion that hate violence and extremism is merely a criminal crisis in America. It is also a political crisis.” What most of us saw with our own eyes on January 6 was a manifestation of that political crisis -- the refusal by the loser to accept the results of an election. We watched the storming of the Capitol happen in real time. Then we watched the same scenes replayed over and over. For the first time in American history, the transfer of political power was marred by violence. The folks who breached the Capitol under the Trump flags were not peaceful, law-abiding tourists as some in the GOP would have us believe. They were not victims, they were perpetrators. Five people were killed. The Vice President was a target of the mob. Those are facts. The rewrite of history by the Trump wing of the GOP -- and that’s most of the party -- is well underway. Lie big, lie often, and never let the lie die. Tell me, someone, can a two-party system function when one of the parties is insane? Surely the answer is, not for long. It’s the old notion of a house divided against itself, as true now as it was in 1861. The American experiment in self-government is fraying, and the hard reality is that we might see, four years from now, a GOP-controlled Congress refuse to certify the results of an election if the outcome doesn’t favor its candidate. And then what happens? If you think this is farfetched, you had better think again. The GOP as currently incarnated cares about one thing, and one only: power. Kevin “Tiny Balls” McCarthy and Mitch “Cowardly Lion” McConnell flip-flop like bass in the bottom of a boat. Although it’s critically important for American democracy that the events of January 6 be fully investigated, such an inquiry is the last thing the GOP wants as it’s likely to expose complicit party members. Some sort of watered-down, toothless investigation may still happen, but if it’s not a bipartisan effort, it will have very little legitimacy. Corruption in Washington D.C. is a stubborn thing, like a bloodstain on a white shirt. 

Speaking of...I have to have some blood work done and a colonoscopy. The prep for the colonoscopy is worse than the procedure itself. My personal history of colonic polyps. 

It appears that the legal noose is dangling closer to Trump’s fat neck. The Attorney General of New York is looking at potential criminal liability, not only civil liability. Trump’s long-time money man, Allen Weisselberg, is being squeezed. When it comes down to saving Trump’s bacon or his own, what will Weisselberg do? Stay tuned. Trump trampled just about every norm we’ve come to expect an American president to adhere to, and I won’t be surprised if he’s our first criminally indicted former president. 

Jeffrey St. Clair writes on the Counterpunch website, “The Palestinians are a stubborn impediment to the inexorable growth of the Israeli state. They are an obstacle that must be removed. But removal is not enough. Their cultural identity and history must be erased, all traces of their existence as a people wiped away.” 

For a brief time Israeli bombs and artillery shells will cease raining down on Gaza, but the apartheid regime and the gross imbalance of power between Jews and Palestinians will remain. There’s no victory lap to be taken by anyone. It’s a human tragedy, a miscarriage of justice, and a grotesque, ongoing violation of human rights. 

 

Down At The Crossroads (Ain't No Devil Down Here)

 “We need a wealth tax everywhere. We need quality free health and education for everyone, everywhere. We need a green new deal everywhere. There’s no country where this is impossible, and no country where this is not necessary.” Djaffar Shalchi

Remember last month, January 6, were you watching when the Trumpists attempted to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College (an undemocratic process to begin with, but that’s not what motivated the Trumpists) results? Trump’s people wanted to monkeywrench the ritual, not overturn it altogether; they’re after less democracy, not more. It’s a strange country to begin with when the rules say the candidate who receives fewer popular votes than his opponent can yet win the Presidency. This has happened twice since the turn of the millennium -- a warning sign about our limited democracy we’d better not ignore. If a real investigation of the January 6 Insurrection happens, and is invested with proper authority, we may find out just how much advance coordination occurred in the run up to that dark day. This is for sure: it was more than a random mob. 

I’m trying to wean myself from the national news, stop imbibing the stuff two, three times a day, be more selective and discerning about the voices I listen to and whose writing I read. (Like a selective drunk, I suppose. Keep your rotgut, barkeep, give me the good stuff from the top shelf.) Managing any perspective about America is never easy because we’re a confounding nation. There’s too much noise from too many voices that reasonable people should avoid. Grandstanding fools like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, ambitious punks like Josh Hawley, and jackasses like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Fuck off miscreants, one and all.

In the days when cities and regions had more specific identities because newspapers were the primary means of mass communication, the papers reflected their readership. Who is reflected on social media? If this were 1905 would QANON publish a newspaper? I’m old enough to miss a good newspaper. All those city and town specific newspapers, who published the local news, the obits, reported on city hall, the police, sports, living, arts -- all the aspects of society that make it possible for us to co-exist. Were we more civil then, more tolerant, more accepting? Of course not. Were we better informed? I don’t know. In the days of newspapers did readers always read below the headlines? My dad always went straight for the Sports page. When we only had television broadcasting -- the three networks -- the dream of marketers and advertising gurus was narrowcasting, honing in on a specific audience at whom to pitch commercials between the programming; now we have the almighty algorithm that will feed you all you want of whatever you want. 

Are we better critical thinkers today than, say, a half century ago? I don’t know. Donald Trump received 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016; millions of Americans seem incapable of thought, let alone critical thinking. 

My little family finds ourselves nearing a crossroads of sorts. The tiny two-bedroom, one bath unit in a triplex built in the 1950’s that had housed us in enough comfort, but never enough space, for more than twenty years has become untenable. We need a change of provenance. Five years became ten, ten became twenty, the rent was fair and the landlord was mostly reasonable, we were near downtown, the kids’ schools, and my job, squeezed in always, but still able to live in relative comfort. Tiny kitchen, limited cabinet space, severe shortage of usable electrical outlets and countertops, no dishwasher. No ice machine in the refrigerator. We made it work. Four people, one bathroom. Intricate morning dances to get everyone up and out. Old gas wall heater with a thermostat that has often acted balky. Cold in the winter because of old , thin windows, stifling in the summer, especially in the last ten to fifteen years. The hot weather now presents itself from May to November, and every year feels hotter than the last. 

We’ve been here through flood, fire, and now, pandemic. About two miles from the Pacific Ocean. 

In our time here we have accumulated too much stuff. The space below us that functions as a low-ceilinged multipurpose laundry room-storage area-gym was, until last week, crammed with stuff. Boxes, bags, old furniture that never got refurbished, a wooden chest, bins full of artwork produced by my kids, stuffed animals, board games, motor oil and glass cleaner, a bucket of hand tools,  a toolbox, and my fitness gear. Knowing -- because this is Santa Barbara and folks in our working-class income bracket struggle for decent spaces, particularly within the city limits -- we will likely move somewhere with less storage space than we have now prompted a decades overdue frenzy of cleaning, purging, shredding, donating, tossing. “Be ruthless,” I told my wife and daughter when sentiment got in the way of practicality. To set an example I said goodbye to my weight bench, all my free weights, my tractor tire, 8-lb sledgehammer, a few pairs of dumbbells, and lots of stuff I’d hauled from Japan to Honolulu, across the Pacific to Seattle, to Irvine, and then back to Santa Barbara in 1987. In boxes that hadn’t been opened for years I found stained notebooks filled with the scribblings of my twenty-year-old self, photographs, letters (shows you how old I am), journals, schoolwork from my undergraduate days, magazines, newspaper articles, and military service records that I didn’t know I even had. 

It felt liberating to lighten our load, to say goodbye to the stuff of our past, to make a big donation of usable things to the Alpha Resource center, to put good books back in circulation. My sense is of a shifting foundation, a tilted floor with slippery footing. Change is coming and we will need to be agile. For the first time, we’re all in agreement that the time is right. My son lives in Los Angeles, my daughter might be headed off to school somewhere -- if she is accepted and we can pay the fees without going into major debt. I feel a strong need for different space, different angles, maybe a larger kitchen. 

I don’t know what will happen to this country politically, but I foresee more and more madness from the far right, more braying from Trump as he attempts to remain relevant so he can keep his grift going. The minority, by way of the arcane, undemocratic United States Senate, means to hold power by any means necessary. A handful of men from states with small populations compared to New York, California and Illinois, thwart every action with which they disagree, even when what they disagree with would materially benefit the people they purport to represent. The Senate stands for stalemate and obstruction. Why do we have it, what purpose does it serve? 

Texas is what happens when disdain for government and the exaltation of markets becomes a religion. When disaster strikes the wealthy manage fine, they can get away, like Ted Cruz, or stay on the dry high ground in their gated compounds with backup generators and private security patrol. The majority must depend on a collective response, from local, state or the federal government when a major disaster strikes. America has been kidnapped and raped by Capitalism-on-steroids, a beast never to be let off the chain lest it run amok and punish the common people, the working-class and the poor. Punish, abandon, repeat. This cruel system makes the cost of basic necessities like housing, heat, clean running water, food and medical care too expensive, at the same time it keeps wages low and profits high. It’s an arrogant system that doesn’t recognize any limits, not even of our planet itself. How can someone like Jeff Bezos ever be satisfied when there’s always more? He’s got enough money to insulate himself from the problems his business model creates for millions of people all over the world. He’s of the elite. He doesn’t live in the same world most of us common folk do.

The rich start the fire, then convince you no one else has the expertise to put it out. The failed architects of the Iraq Invasion become grey-headed sages on cable news shows; the bankers who broke the economy in 2008-09 are asked for policy advice; men and women speaking on behalf of our government tell boldfaced lies, argue, straight-faced, that what we just witnessed with our own eyes didn’t happen, then counsel the masses about truth and honesty on TV and in print. In America, if you have the right pedigree, the right credentials, you can fuck up royally, cause real hardship to millions of human beings, and pay no penalty. You get second and third chances, a clean slate. 

The red states make the laws, the blue states pay the bills. 

What I’m reading this week: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, City of Quartz by Mike Davis, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, and The Devil You Know by Charles M. Blow.  

Trump Makes History

 “But he (Biden) will fail at that task, risking both his presidency and his party’s fortunes if he refuses to hold Trump and his enablers to account. A politics of ‘forgive and forget’ will not unify the nation.” John Nichols, The Nation

The final tally was 232 to 197. Ten Republicans voted with the Democrats to hand Trump a second impeachment. After all that has happened over the past seven days, and with more information coming out every day about coordination between the insurrectionists and some on the inside, only ten Republicans had the courage to impeach Trump. 

The rest stuck with Trump. The best counter argument they could muster was a call for unity, and consideration for the delicate feelings of Trump’s loyal base. A few cowards warned against inflaming the nation; others said impeachment wasn’t necessary because Trump will be gone soon. It was a procession of craven Republicans with more fidelity to Trump than to the Constitution. 

 We need healing! We need unity! We need reconciliation! Called the Republicans, as if the past four years never happened. As if more than 350,000 Americans haven’t fallen to Covid. As if their slavish devotion to Trump isn’t responsible for all the divisive rhetoric about blue states and red states, us and them, evil Democrats, and months of racist dog-whistling and demonizing of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. 

The Republicans ask that the millions of Americans who despise Donald Trump and endured four years of cruelty, incompetence, grift, self-dealing, law-breaking, norm-shattering and criminal idiocy, be gentle and patient with those who support armed insurrection. They ask those who waited for the chance to vote Trump out of power to refrain from seeking accountability. It’s like asking for mercy for the arsonist who just torched your house. Republicans only believe in swift justice when it applies to black & brown Americans, Muslims, immigrants, and others they don’t favor. 

I’ve never heard any sane person argue that we shouldn’t arrest child-molesters, rapists, and thieves for fear of sparking anger in the criminal community. The majority of Republicans are happy to let Trump walk away, unscathed. It’s astonishing. It’s also a disgrace and an insult to any person who has sworn the oath of allegiance to the United States. 

Four years of Trump. It’s fitting that he becomes the first president in American history to be impeached twice. That’s his legacy as well as the heavy stone Republicans must carry from now on. They sold their souls and the bill has come due. 

Ten brave souls from a party of hundreds. Only ten. 

Like a nation under siege, the presidential inauguration on January 20 will be protected by a National Guard force of almost 20,000. It’s unknown how many in that number are Trump supporters. State governments from sea-to-shining-sea are bracing for attacks. This is the carnage and chaos wrought by Trumpism. This is what happens when people worship false idols.  

A Nation Starving for Justice

 

“Trump failed to steal the election because he and his legal team are incompetent criminals, not because our democratic institutions defeated him.” Elie Mystal, The Nation

In some ways the fall of Trump is like a Greek tragedy. The con man and his crime family flew too near the sun, and now their black wings are melting and their talons and teeth are disintegrating. 

Serves Trump right. Let it continue. What I’m watching for now is accountability from the politicians. It starts with removing Trump. I’m a lifelong, active Democrat, but I’m not a fan of Nancy Pelosi. She’s obviously very smart -- whip smart, and pretty formidable as a personality -- but I think she’s too much of a centrist and too often on the side of corporate power and enormous, immoral military expenditures. I don’t trust her to lead a legislative charge to reform the criminal justice system, end mass incarceration, make meaningful investments to confront the coming climate crisis, or begin a transition to Medicare for All. 

Today, as words and images and headlines about the insurrection of January 6, 2021 zipped around my brain, I thought back to the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. It was a little more than a year ago when Pelosi and her team drafted the articles of impeachment. Will Pelosi go narrow and shallow or wide and deep? Will she go big or small? I asked these questions on this blog. Pelosi and the Democrats, their eyes looking forward to the 2020 general election, went small, restricting their articles to the crimes identified in the Mueller Report. If our political machinery functioned with any measure of accountability, or justice, those narrow articles would still have been sufficient to take Trump down. They didn’t because Trump by then had cowed the GOP, taken it over, and pissed all over it to mark it as his; they didn’t work because the GOP is deeply cynical and obsessed with holding the intoxicating power of minority rule. Mitch McConnel, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, the detestable Josh Hawley, and so many more, put fealty to Trump (and their own ambition) ahead of fealty to the Constitution and the good of the nation. There’s no getting around that. Too little too late Betsy DeVos. Same goes for you Elaine Chao. You’re no champions of justice, and you do not even have the honor to go down with your captain. Don’t start making sense now Bill Barr. Have the heavy scales fallen from your eyes? Please. You’re marked like former Nazis were in the years after World War II. Don’t tell me you didn’t know, because you did, you noted the political winds and the opportunity for personal gain and made your choice. 

The point I was staggering towards was that had Pelosi gone big, brought the kitchen sink, the corrupt GOP would still have acquitted him, but it would have placed all of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors in the book, on the record. That might have been a cause worth fighting for. In any case, regardless of how few days remain in Trump’s disastrous and traitorous term, the Democrats must make the GOP go on the record, face again a choice: support Trump or the country. 

Ironically, the destroyer of the Republican Party isn’t even a Republican, not in the Party of Lincoln sense. Trump used the Republican Party like an inflatable sex toy, and he fucked it sideways and upside down, and thrice on Sundays. I despised George W. Bush with incredible intensity. I thought he was the nadir. W earns no pass from me. But say what you will about Bush, he was a decent man at heart, dumb but not crazy, and he respected most of our basic institutions enough not to deliberately destroy them. 

You can’t run a moderate and just government with lackeys and grifters in every key position. Expertise matters. Facts matter. Language matters a lot -- look what Trump’s words incited on January 6. Look at the seeds his words spread over the last four years, seeds of  hate and distrust, cruelty and revenge, incompetence and greed. 

Trump is for Trump and only Trump. So many of us told you this from the very beginning of this terrible era. I predicted serious damage. Look around. Covid-19 has us on the mat because there has been NO federal leadership. You can’t fight a pandemic with 50 different approaches. The president cannot delegate responsibility for fighting a pandemic to the individual states to sort out. Pandemic’s don’t work that way. You can’t defeat a pandemic when you deliberately pit states and regions against one another for needed resources, favoring those groups you like and starving those you don’t. That’s not simply unjust, it’s cruel and stupid. A pandemic is like a war. A reasonable level of command and control is necessary. People have to make sacrifices, be inconvenienced, for the good of the whole.

We knew how this was going to turn out from the beginning. Trump’s future was written in his past. The man was a serial failure, a reverse-Midas; look at the records of his bankruptcies, at his history of cheating the society of his fair share of taxes, his failed marriages, his racism and misogyny, stupidity and cruelty. It was all there, only the consequences of his failure are many times worse. The more power a man like Trump gets, the more he craves. There is no end. I imagine it’s like a heroin  addiction. 

How many days did it take Mitch McConnell to ram Amy Comey Barrett down America’s throat? I think it was 8. Do not tell me that Donald J. Trump cannot be impeached in the time remaining. He can, and must be. We need to construct strong guardrails of precedent right now, at this moment of crisis. The entire American experiment in self-government turns on belief in the rule of law justly applied to all, the high as well as the low; on the peaceful transfer of power after democratic elections; and on two things that have become rare this century: moderation and justice. America is a nation starving for justice, for a sense of essential fairness. We fight among ourselves while the economic screws are applied by billionaires, hedge funds richer than some countries, Citibank and Bank of America, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, ATT and Verizon. One reason MAGA nation is so angry is that they have lived through decades where the elites commit massive crimes, drag us into endless foreign conflicts, cheat the system, rip people off, and walk away with no consequences and no accountability. 

Democrats must bring articles of impeachment to the floor immediately, and they must drag those Republicans who are no longer afraid of Trump with them. This is a guardrail that must be set in stone. For there to be any hope of reconciliation, there must be justice. 

Very Fine People

 “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I expected violence on the streets of DC today, but never did I think I would watch a mob of Americans storm and overtake the United States capitol, on the very day the votes of the Electoral College were to be certified by Congress, the people’s representatives. 

My first question is: how did that mob manage to overwhelm the capitol building so easily? Did the security people from all the agencies -- FBI, ATF, Capitol Police, Park Police, National Guard, Metropolitan Police -- not know Trump’s MAGA army was coming? Did they forget that Trump invited them to DC for a “wild” day. Did they not know in advance that Trump was making a speech this morning in the city, at which he was one-hundred percent certain to incite his audience with rambling madness about fraud, stolen elections, victimhood and grievance? Didn’t get the email? Clueless? Just assumed it would be another day in DC? 

Why was the DC security apparatus -- all those federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies so quick to mobilize -- and with such overwhelming force and numbers -- against the Black Lives Matter protesters last June, and so absent today? What accounts for the disparity? 

We must ask many more questions about that, and maybe take a good long look at the racial composition of the security forces. Something tells me we will find many people sympathetic to, and supportive of, white supremacy and white nationalism. Yes, we better look at the people with badges as well as the people in the red hats. 

Mitt Romney can usually be relied on to say the right thing, and he did so again this evening.  

I didn’t expect that January 6, 2021 would go down as a day of infamy in American history.

Around 1:30 eastern time, I checked CNN to see what was happening and saw the bold headline. I was at work, but couldn’t tear myself away, knowing that this was a seminal moment in American history unfolding in real time. The bedrock idea of democratic elections and the peaceful transfer of political and military power was under direct assault, incited by Donald J. Trump. 

Do not call those people protesters. That was a mob of domestic terrorists, of insurrectionists. Do not compare them to peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. That mob was from the same tribe that stormed the Michigan statehouse and plotted to kidnap the governor. A pack of people who feel aggrieved, almost all of them white. Michigan was a dry run. 

Let’s ask more questions. First, how much of a punk is Josh Hawley from Missouri? Call him Blow-Dried Ted Cruz. What a sniveling, gutless punk. Waste of a fine education at Stanford and Yale. Who is Josh Hawley to question Pennsylvania’s election process? Nobody. How dare he condemn the violence on the one hand, so pious and squeaky clean, and on the other say he’s just innocently bringing questions to the floor of Congress for debate. He’s just a patriotic guy looking out for average Americans, not a shamelessly ambitious politician trying to hitch himself to Trump’s base. Hawley, rot in hell. 

How’s Ted Cruz feeling at this hour? Ron Johnson? Does Kevin McCarthy think his hands are free of blood? What about Jim Jordan? Mark Meadows? Are you fuckers proud of yourselves? All of you, and many more, supported Trump’s election fraud fantasies, fed the beast that escaped its tether today, and now you express shock that the beast went berserk.

Oh, the hypocrisy on display in America’s capitol today. 

If that had been a mob of black people, many would have been shot dead on sight by the authorities. No doubt in my mind. Just like those good old days Trump and his followers so deeply long for, those days and nights in parts of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas. The good old days when black people could be murdered with even more impunity than they can be today. 

Didn’t Trump call himself the Law & Order president? 

Has Lindsey Graham seen the light? After kneeling before Trump with his mouth wide open for four years? After four years of running interference for Trump? After four years of making excuses for Trump’s idiocy, incompetence, and ignorance? Now, Graham has seen the light? Another punk with blood on his hands. 

I’m sorry for being all over the place, and angry, but I am pissed off tonight. I’ve got CNN on in the background. I’m following the voting and listening to people being interviewed. 

Several weeks ago in this blog I warned of this danger: Trump has the nuclear codes. That’s why, four years too late, there is talk of invoking the 25th amendment. Trump’s ego is melting down and nobody can predict what he’ll do. 

And what will Trump’s MAGA army do next? What’s their next gambit? They had a big day today, off the leash and full of vigor, running amok under Trump’s banner. They were treated gingerly by the authorities, few were arrested, and the majority were allowed to walk away without penalty. White immunity works. 

How many resignations will we see in the next few days? How many will jump the disgraced Trump ship before it crashes? Who will be on the bridge with Trump when it all comes to an end on January 20? Jared and Ivanka? Don Jr. and Eric? Lara and Melania? Rudy Guliani and Kayleigh McEnany?