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. 

 

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. 

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.