Patience & Stillness

 “The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.” Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

I saw a podiatrist and he diagnosed my foot problem as Morton’s Neuroma. Most of my shoes have a tapered toe box, and when I wear those shoes the nerve in my foot is compressed and causes a burning sensation in my third and fourth toes. The diagnosis confirms my own experiments with different shoes. Before I started working at the Market I bought a nice pair of Columbia hiking shoes, not considering that the narrow toe box would cause me problems. The only shoes I can wear for my job are an old pair of AllBirds, which are comfortable enough but dangerous on wet floors. At least I now know what I’m dealing with. 

Now, if I can fix the biceps tendonitis in my left arm, I’ll be 100%. This condition really bothers me at night when I sleep, I often wake up with my shoulder howling, and of course it restricts my training.  What’s next in this process of aging? Hair loss (in progress), flagging sex drive, forgetfulness, indigestion, wrinkles, liver spots, constipation. Aging requires coming to terms with loss -- of physical and mental capabilities, of friends and relatives, of jobs and settled routines -- and forces us to to get it through our thick heads: nothing is solid, nothing lasts forever, the sand is always shifting beneath our feet. Even though we know how life ends, we must walk on, through loss and disappointment, pain and suffering. This takes honesty and courage -- or a strong gin & tonic. 

November. Thanksgiving on the way, a strange holiday that I can take or leave. We don’t yet have a family get-together planned, and have given no thought to buying a turkey. The day is over-hyped to get the public to spend money, to set up a vigil outside Target; what’s the hot gift this year? What can’t the children live without? You have to give advertisers credit for linking holidays with consumption. I’m sure there are people who believe that shopping is the point of Thanksgiving, the reason for the day. Get out there and plunge yourself deeper into debt! It’s your patriotic duty! Pilgrims, what pilgrims? Amazon Prime, baby! Instant gratification. 

It’s overcast today. The orange cat from next door is in the front yard, hiding beneath a cactus, within two feet of the spot where small birds congregate. Perhaps the cat will finally get one. The cat is a study in patience and stillness. His owner’s name is Bob. Bob is over six feet tall, completely bald, and often wears suspenders. His one-car garage is as neat as a pin, everything in its place. We don’t see Bob that often. He makes a trip to Costco once a week; from our kitchen window I watch him unload his Toyota Highlander. Patience and stillness isn’t encouraged in our society. I always laugh when I’m working at the Market and a customer, usually a younger female, enters the store on her phone, and remains on the phone, gabbing away, through the produce and dairy aisles, past the meat counter and the prepared food islands, through the baked goods, the wine and beer section, and even while she’s checking out; phone clutched between shoulder and ear as she digs in her purse for her debit card. In the waiting room of the podiatrist’s office I counted eight people, myself included, all over the age of fifty, and only one man on his phone. An older woman was reading a book. The others were just sitting quietly, lost in their own thoughts. 

Is the cat taking a nap? Slumber or eternal vigilance? 

My wife and I marked our 29th wedding anniversary on the 7th of this month. My brother turned 64 on the 11th. Milestones of time. 

I’m reading Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose, and The Big Seven, a novel by Jim Harrison. 

Chronicle Of A Failure Foretold

 “I was reminded again how the men who start wars invariably live through them to justify the behavior that has left millions maimed and dead.” Jim Harrison

Saigon, 1975. Kabul, 2021. The motif of the limits of American military power is that of helicopters evacuating personnel from embassy compounds once thought to be impregnable, and permanent. 

I was opposed to the invasion of Afghanistan from the beginning. While the American reaction to the 9/11 attacks was understandable, it always struck me as an overreaction, misguided, out of proportion. I place the Patriot Act in the same category. The folly of trading civil liberties for the illusion of safety, and in the process creating a massive bureaucracy with a creepy name -- the Department of Homeland Security -- was sure to return to haunt us, and did in the summer of 2020 when protestors were snatched off the streets of Portland by DHS thugs in unmarked vehicles and uniforms without insignia or identification. I never consented at the ballot box to be kept under constant electronic surveillance by my own government. Homeland. The word has fascist overtones. 

Had 9/11 been treated like a crime America would not be scrambling to exit Kabul today. Nor would Osama bin Laden have been able to evade capture for ten years, hiding in plain sight in Pakistan. We were told that bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world, hunted by all of America’s major intelligence agencies, and with help from our “allies” in the region. I’m sure it will be fifty years before the full story about bin Laden is known, but my gut sense is that the reporting on the raid that killed bin Laden by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is nearer the truth than any official explanation by the US government. And, of course, the War on Terror didn’t end with bin Laden’s death. Over the course of two decades the lies told by the military establishment to Congress, the media, and the public about Afghanistan rival the lies told about Vietnam. We’re winning; progress is being made; we’re turning the corner; we can leave victorious once the local security forces are trained and equipped, indoctrinated with our fool-proof methods; all we need to completely turn the tide in our favor is a troop surge; all we need is to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Year after year. Thousands of Afghan and American lives, trillions of taxpayer dollars, wasted. 

Once the rather nauseating explosion of “thank you for your service” tributes, solemn moments of silence for our fallen heroes, and stadium flyovers by Navy F-14’s lost their novelty, the American people forgot about Afghanistan. Who could keep track of the Whack-A-Mole nature of the conflict, with the Taliban being routed one year only to return the next more potent than ever. Our victories on the ground were ephemeral; the Taliban had only to be patient, to wait. That was the way to outwit the overwhelming military power of the foreign invader. It worked against the Soviet Union. It worked against the United States, too. 

I’m struck by how often the most egregious blunders are conceptualized and sold by men and women with the finest pedigrees, educated at elite institutions like Harvard and Yale. The best and brightest of the Vietnam Era, the financial wizards who crashed the world economy in 2008, and the architects of the War on Terror, which was always meant to be evergreen. We’ve forgotten the inconvenient fact that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were nationals of Saudi Arabia, but the United States could hardly launch a military invasion against our dear friends in Riyadh, not at the risk of losing access to Saudi oil. No, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney gave the Saudis a soft pass, as has every administration since. What was the first foreign country Donald Trump visited? Saudi Arabia. Hubris. Greed. Corruption. Rot. This is how global empires deteriorate and collapse. Under the crushing weight of stupidity and the mythology of their own infallibility. 

In my head I can still hear the voice of George W. Bush, the faux cowboy, as he justified the undeclared war against a country that had not attacked the United States; a country in a part of the world that most American citizens couldn’t find on a map or begin to understand; a country of regions, tribes, languages, dialects, feuds and traditions. Bush painted with a simplistic brush, good against evil, on our side or the side of our enemy, our benevolent god against their malignant god. A shocked and frightened nation bought the story. Now will come the excuses and justifications and retellings of the story, recast, not as a tale of colossal failure, but as a noble effort to bestow American-style freedom and democracy on a country that never asked for either. 

Hardwired

 “I will finish it by saying that you should resist letting self-analysis become self-abuse.” John Steinbeck

That’s good advice from John Steinbeck, a writer who had a deep understanding of human psychology, and something I frequently violate to my detriment. I am my harshest and most consistent critic. I need a certain amount of order and predictability to feel balanced, a trait I’m not proud of because it can easily lead to falling into a rut and a lack of spontaneity, which makes one dull and rigid. Sometimes the set of my ways, my habits of mind, make me feel closed off, isolated inside my head. Staying in the moment is as challenging as ever. 

Full, leisurely retirement here in our delightfully comfortable bungalow on Milpas Street has been wonderful but I know for the health of our bank account that I have to transition to semi-retirement before long. Today my wife looked at me and said, “I’m a little worried about money.” So, this pleasant run we’ve been on will soon come to an end. I expected this, and planned all along to find part-time work within a few months of bidding the school district goodbye. This will hopefully mean a reasonably tolerable part-time gig of thirty hours a week. I don’t want to do much thinking, I just want something I can do primarily on my feet, even if it’s repetitive, in exchange for time to write, think, and breathe. Thus far, Trader Joe’s has rejected me twice, not even an interview to look me over, see that I’m ambulatory, pleasant, and capable of doing the job. If I’m honest with myself, and I usually am, I admit that my job hunting efforts to date have been scattershot, not even classifiable as half-hearted. I don’t want to surrender the slow-paced, completely free hours spent writing, reading under the market umbrella on the patio, afternoon naps, training sessions, drinking wine and sleeping past six a.m. Not yet. Part of me wants to hold on to this luxury as long as possible. 

Dissipation and dissolution are for the wealthy. I’m just a working-class guy. 

My daughter started her first post-City College job today, at a local sandwich shop. It’s an entry-level gig, part-time. She was nearly a half hour late because she mixed up the start time, but she made it and put a full day in, and came home smelling of salad oil and bemoaning the math involved in making change. She’s had this awful phobia about numbers for years, it’s her academic Achilles Heel. She may return to school in the Fall, but she doesn’t yet have an idea where. On the other hand, she’s not yet twenty so I refuse to push her faster than she can go, not as long as we can afford it. No rent, no chores to speak of, a car to get around. My daughter’s best girlfriends, her posse, have returned to their colleges and universities, one at Cal Poly in San Luis, and two at UC Berkeley. Smart girls, but goofy as hell. They start laughing for no reason. Why does Ally titter when I ask if she wants a glass of water?

My wife and daughter rarely read this blog, but somehow always react if I mention them in a piece. I’m making an effort to bring the lens closer to who I am, although any regular readers of this thing I created in 2004 and have obsessively kept going since should have an idea. My politics lean left and have since I had a brief fling with the GOP in the mid-80’s. My preoccupation is with the balance of power between citizens and their government, between the wealthy and the many, between corporations and consumers, and between humans and the planet. Our economic system works too well for the few and is too hard on the many, and is making the planet sick, and in some places unlivable. The resources America hands to the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex at the expense of the welfare of the nation’s citizens is obscene. The War on Terror was a misguided delusion that I opposed from the outset. Ditto the Patriot Act. Serious shit is happening on every front, but if it’s not unfolding before our eyes every day we lose interest, until the next flood, fire, mudslide or hurricane. Human nature, hard-wired. It’s like Robbie Robertson sings, “Hardwired for war, hardwired for sex.” 

The only book I’m reading now is The Road Home by Jim Harrison. Nearly done with it. Harrison’s writing gobsmacks me. I love this tale about the Northridge clan on the American Plains. It’s a story of land and cattle and rivers, of lost brothers and a long absent son, and his mother, Dalva. Harrison gets the tone right, and the reader always knows the season, the temperature, and what flowers are in bloom or lying dormant. But Harrison also gets his characters right, builds them with insight and detail and humor. Like some people are taken with certain painters, I’m taken with Jim Harrison, though I feel like I’m late to the party, having intentionally immersed myself in his writing only in the last two years. 

We’re taking a road trip to San Francisco in a few weeks for our kids’ birthdays. Our son Gabriel lives in the city again, so we’ll see his neighborhood and do some wandering. No idea what the Covid situation is up north at the moment. In the third week of September I will travel to Oregon to visit my brother in Tillamook, our annual get together. Whenever we spend time together I realize how similar in temperament we are. We’re both obsessive, neat, and practical, and born fretters over the mundane details of adult life. I was mulling over a road trip, sort of a repeat of what I did last September, hopefully minus the wildfires and closed freeways and smoky air, but have decided not to risk getting stuck somewhere and will fly to Portland and rent a car that will sit in my brother’s driveway while we head off in his Jeep Cherokee with bikes on the rack and a cooler full of snacks in plastic bags with twist ties. Granola bars, crackers, cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Green pastures, dairy cows, rivers, trees. I hope to once again look upon the mighty Columbia. 

The Death of Shame

 Shame: n. The feeling of humiliation or distress arising from the consciousness of something dishonourable or ridiculous in one’s own or another’s behavior or circumstances, or from a situation offensive to one’s own or another’s sense of propriety or decency. Oxford English Dictionary

You might think a man with three daughters would be hyper-sensitive to issues facing women in the workplace, including unequal pay and sexual harassment, but in the case of Andrew Cuomo, the embattled Governor of New York, you would be wrong. Having three daughters hasn’t curbed Cuomo’s penchant for hitting on women, groping them, kissing them, and other lecherous behavior. Despite compelling and voluminous evidence that he harassed numerous women, Cuomo defiantly asserts his innocence. His Italian heritage is what accounts for his excessive displays of physical affection, he says. All the women who came forward to accuse him are mistaken or exaggerating. He’s a good guy, just misunderstood. 

I wonder what Big Daddy Mario thinks of all this? Does he wonder where his boy went wrong? 

Suppose one of Cuomo’s daughters came home and told him that her male boss, an older white man in a position of authority, touched her breast or rubbed her backside or kept pestering her to have a date. Would Cuomo be fine with that? Would he write it off as harmless? Would he tell his daughter that she must be misinterpreting her boss’ actions? By all the accounts I’ve read, Andrew Cuomo has always been a bit of a bully and a thug. During the early days of the pandemic, when New York was hit hard and suffering, Cuomo’s stock rose on the strength of the striking contrast between his daily briefings and Trump’s fact-free, rambling, misleading and self-congratulatory monologues. New York, and the nation, looked to some political figure for serious leadership, and there was Cuomo, who in comparison to the petty and whiny President of the United States seemed like a tower of strength and competence. In reality, Cuomo’s leadership on Covid was shockingly poor, as described in a new book by Ross Barken titled The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York. Barkan argues that the actions Cuomo took -- and failed to take -- resulted in thousands of preventable deaths. So much for competence. 

Has the concept of honor lost all meaning in modern America? The smashing of norms was perfected by Donald Trump, but it didn’t start with the King of Mar-A-Lago. Shame no longer has the power to temper boorish or criminal behavior. Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Ron Desantis, Andrew Cuomo  -- no shame, no contrition, no remorse. I wrote a satirical bit on this blog a few years ago (I’ll link it here https://ozongsbalcony.blogspot.com/2019/07/blue-ribbon-president.html) in which Trump had sex with a sheep in the Oval Office and lost not a single acolyte or fan. Even brazen cruelty to animals couldn’t turn the MAGA crowd against Trump. Every one of Trump’s malignant acts, idiotic statements, and cruel policies can be explained away, deflected, or flipped on its head and weaponized in the alternate reality of MAGA world. 

I came across this quote while reading The Road Home by Jim Harrison, an American writer who is very underrated in my estimation: “The rich and the upper middle class were now seething with resentment over protecting their position and were demanding an enforceable mono-ethic which was gradually turning the country into a fascist Disneyland.” The Road Home was published in 1998. I’d say the transformation is complete. The mono-ethic is market capitalism. 

I received my sample ballot for the recall election of Gavin Newsom. There are 46 would-be governors waiting to take Newsom’s place if the voters of California are lame enough to remove him, including Caitlyn Jenner and Larry Elder. My favorite candidate is a Republican named Denver Stoner. I have no idea who Stoner is or what he stands for, I just love the name, Denver Stoner. There’s the obvious association with cannabis aficionados, but also a strength: Mike Hammer. Jason Bourne. Denver Stoner. I imagine some CIA Director in the middle of a crisis turning to his team and barking, “Get me Denver Stoner.”

The sun beats down. In other parts of California fires rage on. The pandemic has returned on the wings of the Delta variant, and we’re back to taking a mask everywhere. This resurgence belongs to the unvaccinated who refuse for misguided political reasons. 

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. 

Star Spangled Fantasy

 “It is the burden of life to be many ages/without seeing the end of time.” Jim Harrison

Another 4th of July. Life, liberty and the pursuit of property and profit. We hold these truths to be self-evident (for white men). The many myths of America, shining city on the hill, beacon of freedom, cradle of liberty, welcoming arms for huddled masses from every corner of the globe. Rockets red glare. Dawn’s early light. Remember the Maine! Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My Lai. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The reality withers the myth like the burning sun shrivels the Pacific Northwest. Un-American you say, love it or leave it, Commie-Pinko-Socialist-Liberal. Get out if you don’t believe that America is the greatest country in the world, if you refuse to acknowledge the essential goodness of the people who inhabit this blessed nation. We’re No. 1!

America is a Land of Lies and Fantasy. Our history is littered with reverence for ignorance and fear. We avoid staring Truth in the face the same way Superman avoids kryptonite. We can’t accept or reconcile our long history of racism, violence, genocide, and destruction of our forests, rivers, lakes, and mountains because not enough of us have the courage to acknowledge the truth. We prefer to divide into our camps, red and blue, liberals and conservatives, the woke versus the Trumpian Zombies, and ride our fairy tales over the edge. After all these years and all the trauma, millions of white Americans can’t let go of the notion that there is something inherently inferior about black people. Am I alone in thinking that America is a madhouse, an air-conditioned nightmare as Henry Miller called it back in the 1940’s? 

The foundation is cracked and crumbling. Tears fall from the eyes of Lady Liberty, splash into the roiling waters of New York harbor. Huddled masses yearning to breathe free are no longer welcome here. The Republican Party is as conformist and sclerotic as the Communist Party was in the old Soviet Union, as adverse to facts and logic, reason and evidence. America is a fearful nation, not a confident one. Mainstream Democrats put up limp resistance, compromised as they are by corporate cash. The Supreme Court is ruled by political operatives in dark robes. As a country we’re not prepared for the coming crisis; there’s too much disunity and distrust within our borders, too much blatant celebration of our ignorance, fanned by Trump and his many enablers and imitators. Fire and flood and drought and famine are in our future, but we ignore the warning signs and dig ourselves in deeper. 

Raise Old Glory and aim your fireworks into the night sky. It’s Independence Day in the indispensable nation. We’re No. 1, remember? 

Suitcase Full of Memories

 “We can, and must, tax the rich. But not because we can’t afford to do anything without them. We should tax billionaires to rebalance the distribution of wealth and income and to protect the health of our democracy”. Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth

Write utter gibberish I tell myself, howl at the moon, nobody cares and it will cause no harm. I call my friend G in Michigan who just turned 60 and is legally blind and learning how to live as a sightless person. Lost his sight suddenly and for no cause a pack of MD’s could determine. He tells me about a place called Blind University, where blind folks are taught to navigate in the kitchen and out in the world. We talk about once a week, exchange text messages in between, usually about what’s happening in the news, with Trump and the balless, soulless, witless assholes, male and female, who ride with the GOP. G lives in a town full of Trumpers, with several of his nearest neighbors included. They don’t talk politics. G owns a firearm and often schools me on the lethal power of today’s weapons. His son’s in the Army, based at Fort Hood in Texas.  His oldest child, a daughter, is in the process of becoming an MD.  We met thirty years ago here in California and have kept in touch, with just one gap of a decade or so, since. 

We signed the lease on the house a block south from where we live now. Money will soon change hands, and that will seal it tight. Have also given my landlord notice. My family is excited about this move,  as am I, but I also find myself thinking of all the major moments we’ve had in this space, birthday parties, graduations, Thanksgivings, Christmas mornings, then too the screaming fights, slammed doors, arguments, the time I wanted to strangle my son for locking us out of the house, and all the sweet everyday moments. Many nights I felt very lucky to tuck my children into clean beds with a roof overhead and none of us hungry or sick. Too many people take this luxury for granted. I happen to believe that the walls of houses, especially old houses, hold memories, stories, mysteries and miseries; certain spaces just speak to us, give us an immediate sense of familiarity and safety or a shiver of disquiet. I find what I’m feeling surprising, unexpected, because on the one hand we are ready to go, but on the other, I feel a certain reluctance. We had a great run here, and for many years we paid the rent on time and the landlord let us be. Only in the past few years has he become Mr. Grumpy, hunched and haggard-looking, a man carrying a weight he can never unload. 

Time to pack our memories away. 

I finished reading Dalva by Jim Harrison. The main character is a tough, resilient, physically attractive and intelligent woman, independent and confident of her own judgment. She’s the kind of woman who will see a man she wants to sleep with and go after him through the front gate. A woman of many lovers but few loves. Her father was killed in the Korean War. She had a baby with her half-brother. A major thread of the novel is about the American West and the many ways white people ousted the native tribes. There were fortunes to be made on the frontier (and nothing mattered more than that), towns to found and consecrate, railroads to build, and Indians to dislodge. It’s an ugly, brutal story. Millions starved during the harsh winters. The native people fell victim to the white man’s diseases, and succumbed by the thousands. I remember watching westerns on black & white TV when I was very young, the Indians always portrayed as one-dimensional caricatures, murderous barbarians speaking in strange dialects. Americans forced them off the lands they had roamed and survived on for millenia. The native people, far more sophisticated than white people gave them credit for, took what they needed from the land to survive, but they don’t appear to have devoted their lives to squeezing the Earth of everything it had to give. Americans drove the indigenous off, stole the land, rivers, creeks, and streams out from under them, and the American government never made a solemn treaty it didn’t later break. Killed the buffalo herds. Hunted down and Killed Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and all the rest. Americans treated all the tribes as one monolith rather than many distinct groups, a mistake America has since made in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. We didn’t see the native people as being worthy of a share -- and still don’t. There’s a swath of American history I don’t know as well as I’d like, specifically the period from the Louisiana Purchase, around 1804, to 1920. That was a consequential period, great fortunes were made harvesting timber, gold, iron ore, silver, and water. Canals and railroads were built, commerce expanded. The US Congress was corrupt. Manifest Destiny and all that imperial thinking took hold of the American imagination. 

I’m also reading a quirky, wonderful history of Los Angeles by Mike Davis called City of Quartz. I have never understood how Los Angeles became the jumble it is today. LA has always seemed to me a city without a center -- or perhaps too many centers, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Echo Park, Century City and Hollywood. I knew little about LA history, and the few times I went to LA as a child felt more menacing than enthralling. LA was where I was sworn into the United States Air Force. Davis gets under the surface, exposes the major players, the money, the movers & shakers, the politics and the racism against the non-white population. LA was imagined, then sold, as a sunny American Dream, a city safe for white people. 

Poor Matt Gaetz, GOP congressman from Florida, big hair, media whore, rich family, great ally and ass-kisser of Donald J. Trump, a born used car salesman if ever there was one. But wait, there’s more, and it’s salacious and the media is eating it like cake. Gaetz is going down on the spike that has dynamited many a man, many a career, many a marriage, many a reputation: the taste for young flesh. 17-years-old if media reporting is accurate. Gaetz splashed the cash on his underage queen, or queens, (who knows what details will emerge), and now the media glare is hot and uncomfortable. Many Republicans are having a ball watching this punk squirm, and it will be absolutely delicious if he is indicted for transporting underage females across state lines. Live by the prick, die by the prick. I’m astonished whenever I consider how some of the so-called prestige schools in America -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton -- have given us nitwits like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton. I don’t know where Gaetz went to school, though I imagine he never fretted the cost or worried about how he was going to afford tuition and food. Matt strikes me as one of the pampered, a fuck-up with a gilded safety net beneath him. Makes it easy for him to spout horseshit about self-reliance, hard work, and the Christian God who smiles on the wealthy and spits on the poor. At least Gaetz has Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene in his camp. 

Anyone surprised about Republican-led efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters? What happened in Georgia will be used as a template. The Republicans can only win elections if they cheat, it’s that simple. I wonder if John Roberts still stands by his decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. The root cause of these shenanigans is Fear, unfounded fear, of the dark-skinned Others who lurk in the shadows, waiting to rape white virgins. America is a fearful nation, armed to the teeth and frightened of the dark. 

A Quick Flash of Light

“The government’s central evil is its willful failure to distinguish the quality of intent or motive.” Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent

I am having a long conversation with myself about this blog and why I keep writing it. 15 years. Through George W. Bush and the Iraq Disaster, that unbellievably stupid strategic blunder, which has since caused distress and death for thousands of people, from Egypt and Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. We meddled, and we’re paying and paying and paying. I doubt  they can even keep count of all the money the US spent destroying those countries. 18 years in Afghanistan. Longest war in American history, and nobody’s pissed about the milestone except a few middle-aged liberal cranks like me. The Obama years were disappointing to me, a fumbled opportunity. Obama lost his political nerve and turned in the direction he was oriented in anyway, center-right. Outwardly kinder and far more sophisticated but no less deadly than W. Smoother by a mile. With no push forward, we stayed in place. But the optics as they say, the presentation of Barack and Michelle Obama, was to me always reassuring, even hopeful. Cautious man, that Obama. Measured. Honestly seemed to be a very decent person, and never for a minute did I doubt that Obama was doing his best for the country. The man was calm, cool, polished to perfection, and that drove some people in this country into anger, then near madness. I believe, historically speaking, in black backlash. Happens every time there are any widespread gains for people of color. 

Obama didn’t do much for the Democrats as a party. But he stayed smart and elegant and cool until the last day of his term. Only doubted the policies and decisions and compromises, not the man.

And then the system goes haywire and vomits up Donald Trump. And here I am three years and countless unread blog posts later, living in Trump Time. America is an amusement park violently flipped upside down. Donald Trump. Fuck! I don’t know what else to say. I cannot even keep track of all Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors. Everyday there’s a new transgression. And his party of supposedly rational, decent people, the Grand Old Party, continues to follow Trump, fear Trump and, if not licking Trump’s ass, at least kissing it. They keep turning a blind eye and a deaf ear, afraid of Dear Leader and his Twitter machine, but secretly hoping he falls, and falls hard. 

The ship’s taking on a lot of water. The captain is addled, to say the least, but pretends that everything’s alright, that he’s the greatest man ever to sail, king of the sea, even though he knows deep down that this is the caper he’s not getting away with. The ship’s not listing, yet, but it’s taking on a lot of water. When are the rats going to start jumping, by ones and twos, and then trios and quartets? When will the sailors turn on the captain? This captain will sell his mother’s soul if it means saving his own. He’s fucked things up pretty well, and now it looks like his treasure maps are soon to be let out in the world. 

The age of Obama feels a long way back, a quick flash of light in the dark. The man read real books. He understood the law. He followed the law, for the most part. He was eloquent, even inspiring. Obama in eight years left no stain on America’s soul or hole in her heart. He kept the world at bay and the American empire humming. That takes a bucketful of skill. Obama had that. He also hired competent people. There were no personal scandals during Obama’s tenure in the White House. And then Trump and Company tramp in and the beautiful white walls turn a shade of ochre, the windows grow a film, a smell of rot permeates the whole place, and soon the only people that remain are the most immoral, crooked, cruel, and stupid. Barr. Pompeo. Mulvaney. Mnuchin. It’s not even the fourth string. It’s a coup alright, a coup by a bunch of people you’d never invite into your home for a cup of coffee. Redolent of sloth, all of them. The bottom of the barrel, the dogshit on the bottom of your boot. A decent God would smote them one by one, or at least plague them with disease, but as Tom Waits sang, God’s away on business. 

What I started with was the question of why I continue writing this blog. I’ll put that aside for now. 

It has been a strange week. I feel like I spent three days in a dark tunnel, with the faintest light at one end, and only today did I return to myself. I’ve been depressed. What Ernest Hemingway called the Black Dog. I bet my aura was tar black. I realized all of a sudden that I was garnering little joy for my day job, a job I have always performed very capably, but not one my heart is always in. The job pays the rent and puts food on the table and allows us to go to the clinic or the hospital. 20 years I’ve been there. 60 years old. I wonder about the remainder of my life, how we might survive on some pension money, my freelance work, and maybe a job at Trader Joe’s or something like that. The big worry is losing employer-based health insurance. I’m too young for Medicare. 

Land of the Sidewalk Dwellers

“They were that new kind of Democrat who didn’t seem to know any working people.” Jim Harrison

Crooked is straight. Wrong is right. Cruelty is kindness. Corruption is virtue. Lies are truth. War is peace. Ignorance is intelligence. Chaos is order.

Orwell’s nightmare vision coming to life.

Life in Trump-World is disorienting. The chaos and confusion is unrelenting. A rational person can only take so much before cognitive dissonance sets in. When you think the bar cannot be lowered any further, it drops another notch. When you think Trump can’t say anything more ridiculous than his last statement, bang, the Orange Menace pulls another whopper out of his ass.

It gets me every time we drive to the theater in Los Angeles. Tents pitched on the sidewalks. Makeshift shelters built from discarded cardboard boxes. Blue tarps stretched over a few possessions. One of the wealthiest cities in the US. Gleaming office towers boasting the names of major American banks. Luxury condominiums that sell for sums beyond the reach of mere toilers. And down on the street, a stone’s throw away, the sidewalk dwellers collide with LA’s upscale types.

Every time I see the tents I wonder where I am, how this came to be, and why it’s acceptable in a rich city, a rich state, and a rich nation.

How many souls live on LA’s streets? 50,000? 60,000? Are we devolving, back to the world of Charles Dickens or Jack London’s Iron Heel? Goes to show that human progress isn’t inevitable, that reason and logic can be rolled back to the Dark Ages, to the time of superstition and serfs. The great neoliberal project, launched by Uncle Ronnie Reagan in 1981 and going strong ever since, has placed the majority of the planet’s wealth in very few hands. Better to have 50,000 homeless people on the streets than to tax corporate profits. Better to despoil the soil, water and air than to regulate fossil fuel extractors and make the shift to renewable energy. Better to guarantee the profits of pharmaceutical manufacturers than to make life-saving medicines affordable for the masses. Better to pour billions of dollars into an insatiable war machine than to make higher education affordable or retirement secure or medical care universal. Better to let the Market God dictate the price of human necessities like housing.

Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic front runner, isn’t Donald J. Trump, but Biden and others like him, including Bill and Hillary and Barack, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck “Citibank” Schumer, were, or still are, integral parts of the machinery that made Trump possible. Without help from Democrats, there is no Trump. Trump is a feral, media-savvy opportunist who tapped into the anger of millions of working people left behind by 35 years of neoliberal economic, monetary and trade policies; by the outsourcing of millions of jobs to lower wage nations; by the privatization of public goods and the decimation of labor unions. Trump, incompetent con artist and serial failure, has no answers for what ails, other than to blame everything on immigrants, Iran, and the Chinese. As Thom Hartmann pointed out recently, Trump is holding an economic house of cards together with the same materials his predecessors used: tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity for the poor, increases in military spending. This will fail as it always does, and when it happens, the poor and what remains of the middle-class will get hurt the worst.

No, I will never get used to seeing tents pitched on city sidewalks, just as I will never get used to the cruel and incompetent con man who currently sits in the Oval Office. We cannot normalize these abominations. We must resist them in every way we can.