Sailing Under the Black Flag

 “White supremacy is ravenous and vicious. It is America’s embryotic fluid. America was born in it and genetically coded by it.” Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know

The other day I learned that my dentist died. I last saw him six months ago. His practice had slowed down due to the pandemic, but he was managing to keep two hygienists and his office manager employed. All three had been with him for years, decades in one case. Good people. The office had a friendly vibe, a treasure chest for children, family photos on the walls. This man cared for my teeth for thirty years. Two or three root canals, a couple of cracked teeth, crowns. He was five years my senior, but our children -- one boy, one girl apiece -- were about the same age. The news of his death hit hard because it wasn’t preceded by an accident or illness, his time was simply up, his existence claimed by natural causes.

The back end of life isn’t an easy victory lap. 

My dentist’s sudden death made me aware of the passage of time and the precariousness of all the things we think of as solid and lasting. I believe a reckoning is coming that will make the Covid pandemic look minor by comparison. Much of what’s coming I can do little about: shit’s going to happen to me and those I love, to my city and state, my country, the world. Some of it will be wrenching, of that I have no doubt. As I was skipping rope the other day this thought flitted across my mind: am I training for the apocalypse? Am I trying to be physically ready for whatever comes? Maybe. The training regimen I’ve created for myself has become a lifestyle. Funny how that happens. What we do consistently, we become some version of. The women from my mother’s side of the gene pool live a long time, several of them into their 90’s. My mother’s older brother, my last remaining uncle, is 87, still mentally sharp, a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan. With good fortune and smart choices I could live another twenty years, a thought more unnerving than exciting given the state of the world. I think of the film Nomadland and remember that in this soulless consumer Potemkin Village called the United States, it takes very little for people to lose their grip and freefall. Lose a job, health insurance, fall behind on the rent -- name a calamity -- and it could mean living on a rectangle of concrete under a freeway overpass. When I was a boy back in the 1960’s and 1970’s we thought of “hobos” in romantic terms, riding flatcars from state to state, heating Dinty Moore beef stew over an open fire, free to ride the breeze and laze around while others toiled. To my young eyes the world seemed more hospitable. Of course, it wasn’t hospitable then and isn’t now.  There’s nothing romantic about homelessness and poverty. 

Our politics is a cynical, empty circus of bullshit, and our citizens are easily duped by fools and charlatans. 

Every morning on my ride to the office I see the same three vans parked near the Armory. People live in these vehicles. They migrate around the block, at times parking on Nopal Street, other times on De La Guerra. It has to be hard living, cold at night when the temperature drops, cramped, and under constant threat from the authorities to move along. After watching the film Nomadland I can’t look at these vans the same way. They’re emblematic of a serious curse that afflicts working people across America -- a shortage of decent, affordable housing. The roots of this problem are long and run deep beneath the bedrock of our capitalism-gone-haywire era. In the words of Matthew Desmond, the author of Evicted, without adequate housing, lives fall to pieces. I think the same can be said of the absence of health care, which in America is a feature of our fealty to the Market God. We can’t have Medicare for All because the idea of a collective system provided by the government runs counter to our faith in Markets, and would brand us as Socialists, which might bring on a permanent eclipse of the sun and the end of the world.  In America our one and only choice is to sail under Capitalism’s black flag. Better to let people suffer and die without health care than to imitate the Europeans or Japanese. 

We live in serious times, but America isn’t a serious country. Our politics is a cynical, empty circus of bullshit, and our citizens are easily duped by fools and charlatans. We long ago stopped teaching civics. Americans don’t appreciate the effort that rule of the people requires, and those in power seek to keep it that way. A dumbed-down polity is easier to manipulate and control. So, facing a rabid movement of white supremacists who would rather burn it all down than share power with black and brown folks, we argue over Mr. Potatohead and Dr. Suess. America has been trapped in a downward spiral of dumbness for a long time. The pandemic exposed America’s crumbling facade, its utter hypocrisy and idiocy. Drink bleach. Fuck masks. Ignore science. 

What shall be done? The eternal human question. Either we renew our commitment to democracy or we accept authoritarianism, there’s no third way or middle ground. 

I will miss my dentist. He was a decent man who cared about others and used his skill to make their lives better. 

Freedom to the Winds

“Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons?” Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

It hailed in Santa Barbara this week. My wife got some lovely photos of the courthouse lawn, green streaked with white, and a bed of succulents covered with ice. I can’t remember the last time it hailed here. As little rainfall as we get a hailstorm, no matter how brief, is notable. Lake Cachuma still looked pretty sad the last time we drove past on Highway 154, but our area isn’t in a severe drought. Not yet. The weather’s kind of unpredictable now, a result of our endless meddling in Mother Nature’s business. Do I think human beings are killing the planet? Yes. Will we adapt to it like we have adapted to Covid? Probably. And once we adapt, is there ever any going all the way back? Covid, or something like it, will be with us from now on. 

When I ruminate on our changing climate and the obscene disparities of wealth and power in most places, I figure the wealthy can buy many kinds of protection to give them the best chance of long term survival when the rule of law becomes the law of the jungle. Not hard to imagine a world where the wealthy hoard the resources needed to sustain life, and defend their control of those resources to the death. Grim. Has wisdom and justice ever prevailed in human history? Has decency and kindness ever ruled?  Not to my knowledge. Someone always winds up having more power over others than any human should. Life and death power. 

I received the single dose Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine in my left arm yesterday. This morning when I woke up I felt fine in every respect, but around ten o’clock I began to feel a little dull, a touch fatigued. It wore on as the hours in the office passed and I had to skip my usual Friday evening training session. It’s the one time each week when I feel like working in a higher gear, just because it’s Friday and I can recover the following day. I took a nap instead. My son came up from LA to file his taxes and is staying with us, and I could hear him and his sister sniping at each other in the next room. Non-stop insults, brutal sarcasm, obscene putdowns. The bickering hits a lull and then flares up. The problem is the lack of space, we’re crammed together, four adults now, much different from two adults and two children. I think we’re another month from moving. Our harried and haggard landlord continues his renovation project below us and in the backyard. Our “stuff” is scattered around, piled high, covered with concrete dust. Every day when I go downstairs my training gear has been moved; I stubbornly move it right back to where I can get to it easily. I try not to let the lack of control bug me but it does. We never amassed enough money to buy a house here in our hometown and likely never will. That vessel sailed long ago. This bothers me far less than it once did. I don’t see us becoming as rootless as the people in the film Nomadland, but nor can I see that we will ever own the roof over our heads, which means we will be subject to other people’s rules and bullshit. Money buys many kinds of freedom. 

Should we get used to the idea that we’re going to extinguish all life on this planet one day?That’s cynical and defeatist and hopeless, isn’t it? Yes it is. I’m trying to remember if I felt more hope before Covid hit and gave us a glimpse of the future than I do a year later, after 500,000 Americans have died and the lives of millions more have been forever altered. There are stories from the forgotten and the ignored that we don’t hear about. I’m lucky to have a speedily created vaccine in my arm that I paid nothing for directly. It’s not that I lack hopes and dreams and desires, I still have some. I definitely want to travel more, see places and people, watch a football match in Spain or Italy or England. I’d love to get back to Italy. I liked the vibe there. I’m cynical, yes, but perhaps not entirely faithless because I believe there are many people like me, neither rich or impoverished, who are very content to live and let live, who are opposed to violence as a national ethos, and who think justice is vital to insure long term peace. The big middle, that’s us. We’re rarely consulted about anything except what our money can buy. Money never excited me enough to chase it with all my heart. I read Henry Miller and other sages carefully and they spoke to me about life, what has value, what’s eternal and good in the human species. People go to incredible lengths to help one another survive. Covid has shown us the best and worst in ourselves. 

Joe Biden and the Democrats shepherded a Covid relief bill through Congress. No Republicans voted for the bill but many of their constituents stand to benefit from the legislation. Now Biden has to sell this accomplishment to the public, explaining and highlighting what it will do for working people, small business owners, and children. The Democrats cannot take for granted that the voting public will remember come 2022. Meanwhile, the GOP continues to bow to Trump, who is being hemmed in on all sides with lawsuits and investigations. America is much quieter now that Trump is off the main stage. The danger the Republic faces is still present, make no mistake about that, and what emerges from the investigation into the January 6th Insurrection will be important. How close to Trump will that probe get? How many of those charged will flip for leniency? What was Roger Stone’s role? Stone is a weird fucker, the kind of villian Made in America, something he shares in common with Donald Trump.