The Isolation Diaries No. 1

“You have to turn yourself around and change. You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.” Roberto Bolano, 2666

Time feels weird, not passing in the same rhythm. Of course not, everybody’s off beat, off schedule, off the clock or off the job. I’m a public employee so I have it better than most. 

Visions of hordes storming the castle walls, determined to wrest a fair share from the greedy and hated king. The king is clearly mad, confused and befuddled, but not yet exhausted of cunning or devoid of escape routes. He’ll never admit how weak he is until he can no longer hoist a sword or knife or gun or pen. 

The afternoon sun is warm on my skin. Makes this more surreal. Normally I love being at home, reading, writing, drinking a beer or two, but under these circumstances it feels strange. 

How will the world share the spoils after the Covid-19 is past? Back to business as usual? Might not be possible. In the US, we have a roadmap, the New Deal, when wealth equality surged and people gained a measure of financial security. But we also have a more recent experience, the Great Bailout of the reckless banks in 2008-09, when, though wealth moved around, almost all of it remained in the same hands. New asset bubbles started forming almost immediately, an illusion of recovery. From every hill, valley, knoll and seashore, people, workers, were told, “All is well, we’re back on course.” For the wealthy, yes, they got even richer. Our Mad King calls it the greatest economy, ever, and takes all the credit. He will not accept the blame.

Be grateful for the ordinary, things taken for granted, the simple stuff that goes unnoticed. Now you might have time to look. The world is forced to take its foot off the gas, step back, take a long, slow collective breath. We all face this virus. Rich, poor, white, black, young, old, male, female, gay, straight. The virus doesn’t care who you think you are, doesn’t take your wealth or social status or beauty into account, doesn’t care if you live in a fine mansion or a shack. 

Be grateful for the sound of your daughter’s footsteps on the stairs. She’s home. She’s safe.

I was 17 or 18 when I discovered Carlos Casteneda. In my young mind, old Don Juan was the guy who had figured out how to live, how to see and experience a deeper life with deeper meaning. I loved those books. Spy novels, too. A few years later, very far from home, I found Herman Wouk, James Michener, Leon Uris, writers of big broad canvas narratives. I always read a lot, and always at a higher level than the grade I was in. 

I wish Trump would take a vow of silence. Trump needs to sit with himself, by himself, in a bare room, alone. Maybe, after many hours, or days, even longer, after making many excuses, telling many lies, Trump might get a glimpse of his soul. Not the phony one, the real one. Do you like what you see, Donald? Say yes and you’ve got to look some more. Some people see their soul often, are friends with it; for others, it takes a while longer before the noise they make about themselves settles. 

We walk to Ralphs on Carrillo Street. Only a small number of shoppers are allowed inside at a time. We wait in line. We find ground turkey, a few canned goods, oranges and bananas, cheese, crackers. There’s no almond milk and, because it’s late in the day, no TP. We hike home, packs full, down deserted city streets that two weeks ago would have been busy at this hour of the evening. With most people at home, those without shelter are more visible than ever. 

Will this virus and its global ramifications TKO the neoliberal order? Our systemic frailties are exposed for all to see, and the worst still lies ahead.  

Moon Over Trumpland

“A society in terminal decline often retreats into magical thinking.” Chris Hedges

I’m still trying to sort out what the election of Donald Trump means, how it happened, and what might lie ahead for the “indispensable nation.” I’ve been reading articles, opinion pieces, analysis of the returns -- how Clinton did with this group or that group (seems she sucked when it came to white females and didn’t do all that well with Hispanics, either).

I still feel slightly off balance as if suffering from vertigo, and my thoughts pingpong from despair to resignation to resistance; my email in-box is full of messages asking for money or issuing dire warnings. I’m glad people are in the streets, protesting Trump’s election, because if Hillary had won the electoral college (that quirky anti-democratic feature of our democracy) but lost the popular vote, Trump supporters would be out in the streets, possibly armed.

And I’m also amused by the talking heads and so-called liberal commentators who are contorting themselves to explain Hillary’s loss: it was the Russians, Jill Stein, James Comey, racist whites, white men, and so on, everybody but the corrupt Democratic Party apparatus, which shoved Hillary down our throats, offering nothing more exciting than maintenance of the failed status quo.

I’m also recalling the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and how Republicans behaved. Today Trump calls for unity, and Obama and Hillary counsel us to give the president-elect a chance, but no such pass was given to our first black president. Remember those Tea Party rallies where Obama was burned in effigy, and Donald Trump himself crowing that Obama wasn’t born in the Unites States, and fanning that flame for years? And Mitch McConnell vowing to do everything in his power to make Obama a single term president?

During the campaign, Obama and Clinton told us that Trump was dangerously unhinged -- now they ask us to give him a chance. So, basically, all the racist, obnoxious, abhorrent and outrageous statements Trump made on his path to the Oval Office are hereby wiped from the slate?

I guess words are not going to matter in Trumpland.

Something else just occurred to me: during the primaries when it looked more and more likely that Trump would win the GOP nomination, the press was full of stories about the disintegration of the GOP, how it was finished as a party. Let’s see. The GOP now controls the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate, plus a majority of governorships. So much for decline. Seems to me that the Democrats are the party in decline, a logical result of decades of slavish adherence to neoliberal economic policies that have battered the poor and the middle class. And who were the main proponents of those neoliberal, corporate-friendly policies? Bill and Hillary Clinton, of course.

I think this thought from Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch is on target: “I think Hillary lost because she was on the wrong side of the class war. From the beginning of their political careers, the Clintons have been on the side of the one-percent against the rest of us, regardless of gender or skin color. Her allegiance to Wall Street finally blew up in her face.”

Here’s a question that has been bouncing around inside my head. If Donald Trump succeeds in making America great again, what will America look like?”

Black Bill

So, Obama isn’t a Democrat after all.

The signs have been evident for a long time, starting with Obama’s reluctance to prosecute criminal bankers, to make good on his promise to shut down the colossal embarrassment that is Guantanamo prison, and his willingness to abandon a public health care option before debate even began.

Obama drifted further from his base by expanding drone warfare in Pakistan, cracking down on whistleblowers at home, and waffling on his support for real action on climate change. He talked about “clean” coal when he knew full well that no such thing exists; he expanded oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico -- after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Obama is the black reincarnation of Bill Clinton, a Democrat ever willing to abandon the party’s long standing principles in favor of a slick deal with his political opponents and campaign contributors. Let’s not forget that Obama surrounded himself with Clintonites in his first cabinet, including alumni like Lawrence Summers, Rahm Emanuel and Hilary Clinton herself. Like the consummate snake oil salesman that he is, Obama used soaring rhetoric about hope and change to get people – particularly young voters -- excited enough to elect him, and then, once in office, he methodically abandoned every one of his rhetorical positions in favor of “bipartisanship,” which means, of course, terrible proposals and awful legislation, or, more often than not, no legislation at all.

Obama has now made a budget proposal that offers to reduce Social Security benefits -- long a goal of political conservatives who abhor any government initiative that actually works as it was designed to -- in exchange for GOP concessions on tax hikes on the wealthy. Is this a savvy ploy to gain political advantage, the equivalent of a jujitsu move? Is Obama a master pragmatist? Or does he really believe the only way to save Social Security in the long run is to castrate it in the short run?

I don’t know.

What remains of the political left is angry with Obama, but we are an impotent, disorganized lot easily ignored or discredited by the corporate media. John Boehner and his little henchman, Eric Cantor, are probably giddy at the prospect of finally starting the process of dismantling Social Security as we know it, and even more ecstatic that a Democratic president opened the door. Wall Street bankers and money managers are salivating at the thought of the millions in fees they stand to rake in if Social Security is changed from a public trust to a semi-private one.

I’m not surprised that Obama bends his base over a chair and sodomizes it; he’s a stooge of Wall Street, as are most Democrats and almost all Republicans. Politicians of whatever stripe pay lip service to the will of the “American people,” and then proceed to do exactly what their masters tell them to do.  My own congressional representative, Lois Capps, who I believe is a decent person, nearly always votes with the president. I start every letter or e-mail I send to her like this: “You don’t represent me or my interests, and I know you never will, but you’re the only game in town…”

Our political duopoly is rotten, rotten from within, corrupted by money and influence peddling. The Obama campaign spent billions of dollars in 2012 to convince voters of how different he was from Mitt Romney, and of course Obama is different, but the differences are not as stark as his spin-machine wanted us to believe. Obama lives comfortably on the center-right of the political spectrum, rubbing ideological shoulders with financiers and bankers, playing golf at the country club with neoliberals and oil company oligarchs.

Obama is Black Bill, Clinton’s brother of another color.