The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 12

“Of course politicians have been pretty much the same since the beginning of history, and part of the game is creating illusion.” Gore Vidal

Mornings in Santa Barbara are foggy and cool and gray, but the fog gives way to sunshine before noon, and by mid-afternoon it’s warm. On our daily walk down State Street my colleague and I see tourists dining outside, on wooden platforms, surrounded by potted plants, strung with lights, shaded by market umbrellas.  Outside the Palace Grill on Cota Street, a carpenter builds an outdoor dining platform with iron railings. Not only fancy, permanent looking. 

///

The November election will be chaotic and contested. As I said months ago, when he loses, Trump will not go quietly. He will scorch the earth in his wake. 

///

Jonathan Swan of Axios is being hailed as the second coming of Edward R. Murrow for pressing Donald Trump during a one-on-one interview at the White House. Swan appears intrepid because most reporters from our corporate-backed media giants can’t ask Trump hard questions for fear of being ostracized or losing their access. For nearly four long years, corporate reporters let Trump roll them with BS claims, word salads, nonsense statements and outright falsehoods. Until recently, when the Covid-19 pandemic made Trump’s incompetence glaringly obvious, few reporters pushed back with any gusto. I don’t have an opinion about Jonathan Swan and Axios one way or another; Swan did what any journalist worthy of the name must do, and in doing so, demonstrated to his colleagues how easily Trump can be knocked off balance. Good job, but not worthy of Murrow status. 

The only journalist I’d like to see one-on-one with Trump is Mehdi Hasan of the Intercept. Hasan is as tenacious as he is intelligent, he knows political BS when he hears it, and he doesn’t let nonsensical statements stand unchallenged. Put Mehdi and Trump in a room and in about three minutes Trump would piss his Depends. 

///

Trump now claims that voting by mail is wonderful in Florida, but terrible in Nevada. The Trump campaign has sued the state of Nevada to stop voting by mail. 

Quiz question: what’s the difference between an absentee ballot and a mail-in ballot?

///

Trump said the November election will be an embarrassment to the United States. How is that possible? Donald Trump is our president, and nothing is more embarrassing than that. 

///

Ever the top used car salesman in a one dealership town, Trump insists, at every opportunity, that his administration has done a great job containing the pandemic. World champion in testing. The virus is going away. Hydroxychlroquine works! The very powerful travel ban against China. The economy is roaring back! Like quintessential marks, Trump’s followers wait for the miracle that never arrives while he keeps moving the target.  

///

Donald Trump, draft dodger, tax cheat, adulterer, racist, white supremacist, and textbook example of a narcissistic sociopath, snubbed his nose at John Lewis, refusing to view Lewis’s body as it lay in state, skipping the funeral at which three former presidents spoke, then, during the interview with Jonathan Swan, refusing to grant Lewis his due, unable even to guess at Lewis’s place in American history. Trump claimed he couldn’t remember meeting John Lewis. The wounded little boy inside Trump was miffed because Lewis didn’t attend Trump’s inauguration, nor did Lewis attend one of Trump’s magnificent State of the Union addresses. Mr. Lewis used his time on earth wisely; he didn’t waste it on insignificant men. 

///

Do black Americans know that Donald Trump has done more for them than any president since Abraham Lincoln? 

///

Lebanon, long suffering Lebanon, pawn in the geopolitical game the big powers and Israel play with and against one another. Target of aerial bombardment with American ordnance. Less a country than a place adrift. Government corrupt, dysfunctional, with no capacity to govern, regulate or adjudicate anything. A place dependent on imported food and its main port totally destroyed. How many tons of grain were destroyed in the explosion? The hospitals weren’t great to begin with and are quickly overwhelmed with casualties. The blast was felt for miles. The sky raining shards of glass and debris. Lebanon, landing spot for thousands of Syrian war refugees. Lebanon, casualty of war from without and within. The death toll will no doubt grow as the days pass and the humanitarian crisis intensifies. Think of the human needs and the difficulty in meeting them: food, clean water, working sewage systems to prevent outbreaks of disease, electricity, shelter for thousands of human beings, medical care. How will people cope? Once again, Lebanon is faced with the daunting challenge of rebuilding. 

Robert Fisk, the author and journalist who lives in Beirut, wrote the following for the Independent (UK): “We all know the context, of course, the all-important “background” without which no suffering is complete: a bankrupt country which has been owned for generations by venal old families, crushed by its neighbours, the rich enslaving the poor, its society maintained by the very sectarianism which is destroying it.”

 

End of the Decade

“Illusions were given credibility by a superpower moral overdrive. Any kind of mendacity could be used to fuel this ideological project.” Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation

Divorced from my normal routine, with work at certain hours of the day, the starting and ending hours pretty well set in stone, I get a little lost. The only reason I knew today was Tuesday was because yesterday was a dojo day, for me the final class of this year. Not that I mind getting head and body away from the job, who doesn’t like slipping the yoke for a run of days, when the most important thing on the agenda is the time the soccer match starts? Off the clock the rhythm of the day changes, slows down and comes into better focus. I see how I jam through my days without much awareness, without seeing things as I should. I guess this is why travel is so wonderful, a real luxury that many in this world can only dream of. Opens your eyes, makes you more aware of where you are, seeing new patterns, shapes, rooflines and rivers and birds and clouds over a new place. One thing I really appreciate is our trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Red-brick buildings, mid-19th century porticos and columns, houses with enormous front porches, the history. My son took more than a thousand photographs, but I haven’t seen them yet. He has an artistic eye and I’m excited to see what he saw. (Gabriel just launched a website showing his photographs.)

Link here: www.gabrieltanguay.com. 

It just hit me today that we are ending one decade and beginning another. End of the 2010’s. Start of the 2020’s. What’s going to happen to us all in the next ten years? Where will we venture next, as individuals and as a world? Our steps are all mixed up now, we’re tripping over one another, out of synch with the music, and a confusion of angry voices constantly argues over who deserves to own, divvy up, and distribute the world’s bounty. This is the foundation story, I think, of human history. Who rules and how do they rule? We’re wrecking the dance hall right now, breaking every stitch of furniture, tearing the curtains from the windows, rolling up the carpets. Up on a small stage stands Donald Trump, with Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and, finally, behind him, William Barr. Put different clothes or uniforms on these characters and they could be in ancient Egypt or Rome, and quite possibly more than we want to admit, Nazi Germany. Talk about power over our lives. I don’t want to be a paranoid person, but when you rationally consider how much government and corporate entities know about us, or can find out fairly easily, it’s unsettling. Think about what power the government has right now: the ability to watch, to intrude, to monitor, to censor, to imprison, to kill. There are seventeen different intelligence agencies in the United States. It’s boggling to think of all the data stored on all the servers these people own or administer. The margins seem much finer to me now that I’m older. That America has functioned without exploding since the Civil War is kind of astonishing. History makes old arguments new again, though it all comes back to the same fundamentals, who rules and why?

Very heavy material for the end of the decade. Hope tinged with fear. Our current American Emperor, mad King Donald I, loses more of his mind every day, and yet he’s protected and insulated by Rupert Murdoch’s giant FOX megaphone and the Senate majority led by Mitch McConnell, one of the wickedest devils America has produced. I don’t know if Mitch is worse than Murdoch or the other way around, but one feeds the other. Mitch ranks way up there with some of our history’s most illustrious Obstructionists, men who clung to their ideology all the way to the grave. Like Horatio Seymour, twice Governor of New York, who said, “This is a white man’s country. Let white men rule.” Next up: Theodore Bilbo, Governor, then Senator from Mississippi, who said, of a bill being debated in Congress, that it would “open the floodgates of hell in the South,” meaning white women by the droves would be raped by violent brute Negroes. The old sexual scare tactics. Strangely, it was quite acceptable in many places if a white man had sexual concourse with a female Negro. This was typically by coercion or force or just because the white owner felt like he could do whatever he wanted with his lawful property. Yeah, Bilbo was a big star. And one more: Jim Clark, Sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, who was known to go after civil rights activists with an electric cattle prod. These are McConnell’s soulmates, he is their heir. 

Part of me rebels against the idea that a man like Mitch McConnell has the power to stymie or suffocate any proposal he deems unacceptable. On the other hand, ours is a government of men, (mostly men in any case), and this is the way it goes. Political systems get corrupted, whether Soviet Communism or American neoliberal capitalism or ancient Rome. 

What the global climate may look like in ten years makes me uneasy. It will look much different than it does today, that we know. Again, the margins are fine and the balance point treacherously small. I know there is more happening around the world than I can see or read about. It’s tumultuous in so many places, because inequality is so wide, and people are full of want and fear, and fed up with struggling for the bare essentials. The rulers have done what rulers always do: take too much for themselves and their families, friends, and cronies, while the masses build up more grievances and justifications for their overthrow. The polity in America seems really dumb to me, I’m sorry to say. Give most a compelling spectacle to watch on a screen, and they will stand transfixed while their house burns. I don’t know what insane event, what calamity, will trigger millions of Americans to go out in the streets, as people have done in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Colombia, France and India, or whether or not it will be peaceful or violent when they do. Could go either way, obviously. We’re tromping backwards on history’s cobblestone path. 

I worry about stuff, I can’t help it; sometimes I brood too much. As the year ends I’m reading two books I brought home from the Equal Justice Initiative book store. Segregation in America, a title published by the EJI, and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward E. Baptist. 2020 is almost here. Ready or not, here it comes. 

Enough Bullets for Everyone

“The victims are themselves the culprits. This is exactly what the Palestinians have had to endure for 70 years.” Robert Fisk

Watching Israel and the United States stand truth on its ear is like riding Space Mountain at Disneyland in pitch blackness for hours on end; climb, descend, twist left, then right. Hearing Donald J. Trump compared to King Cyrus of Persia -- Persia! -- by nutjob pastor Robert Jeffress is nauseating. Too much irony and cognitive dissonance. I’m sure Trump thinks Persia is a theme park or a competing luxury hotel. “Where is this Persia?”

American evangelicals adore Trump, the thrice-married womanizer, pornstar banging, lying adulterer, and unabashed pussy-grabber. So much for Christian principles.

To hear Bibi Netanyahu and Nikki Haley tell it, Israel is simply protecting itself from hordes of Palestinians who have the temerity to approach the border. It’s all Hamas, Hamas, Hamas. Rinse, repeat. The American corporate media dutifully report the bullshit -- if they bother to report at all. Somewhere in America a cat is stuck in a tree, a community has been ravaged by a tornado, or a passenger airplane was forced to make a dramatic emergency landing. These are “breaking news” stories which must be covered in breathless detail.

The plight of Palestinians in Gaza? Not worth thirty seconds. Too complicated for Americans to understand.

Bibi Netanyahu: “We are besieged by the forces of Hamas. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly non-violent protests, the women and children waving flags -- they are killers, every one of them, trained by Hamas, armed by Hamas, controlled by Hamas. Israel faces a grave threat, an existential threat. Our brave soldiers face bloodthirsty Arabs armed with slingshots and Molotov cocktails and wire cutters. These wicked Arabs set tires on fire which threatens the health of our forces. The smoke gets in their eyes and lungs. One of our soldiers suffered a scratch on the arm that almost bled. Israel will not tolerate this. We have a right to protect our border and we have done so with extreme care, only firing on Hamas when under mortal danger from their advanced weapons. The casualties on the other side are caused by Hamas, not Israel. Hamas shoots its own people and then blames Israel. We have incontrovertible proof of this! Don’t fall for propaganda. Listen to me, I am telling you the truth. Israel is righteous and moral. We do not kill innocent people, only Hamas terrorists whose sole aim is to destroy Israel!”

Nikki Haley: “I have a message to convey to the UN Security Council from the President of the United States, the great and wonderful Donald J. Trump, who knows everything about the Middle East because he is the smartest human being to ever walk the earth: Hamas bad, Israel good.”

The gross injustice heaped on Palestinians for decades by Israel and the US has long troubled me, nagged at me, and infuriated me. The longer I live, the more I read, and the more I understand the difference between American rhetoric and American actions, the angrier I become. Israel could never have occupied Palestinian land for as long as it has without the unqualified support of the United States. As author Rashid Khalidi pointed out in his book, Brokers of Deceit, the US has long been an unreliable intermediary between Israel and the Palestinians; how can the US claim to be neutral and objective when it hands Israel billions of dollars in various types of aid every year? US allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt turn their back on the Palestinians.

In the same way that the American government does not represent the views of the majority of the American people (we are not as immoral, corrupt, greedy, and murderous as the political hacks, CEO’s and bankers who rule us), I want to believe that a majority of Israeli citizens realize that the actions of their government toward the Palestinians are unlawful, immoral, and antithetical to a real, lasting peace.

The American media has an infuriating habit of painting the Israel-Palestine conflict as one waged by equals, which is simply ridiculous. For years now, Israel has changed the reality on the land in the West Bank, displacing Palestinians, building settlements, walls, restricted roads, and making it next to impossible for Palestinians to return, ever.

In the meantime, the Israeli Defense Forces have plenty of bullets and no shortage of unarmed human targets.