The New Lost Cause

 “History is the consequence not only of people’s actions, but also of their forgetfulness.” Salman Rushdie, Victory City

Tucker Carlson and his employer, Fox “News” want us to forget what happened on January 6, 2021, and replace what millions of us saw with our own eyes with a fantasy. The mob inflamed by Donald Trump, all those fools carrying flagpoles, clubs, baseball bats, bear spray, firearms, knives, who smashed windows and rifled offices and chanted for Mike Pence to hang, never happened according to Carlson and Fox. January 6 was simply a peaceful gathering of patriots exercising their Constitutional freedom to assemble. Any violence that happened, the injuries and deaths, were committed by radical left Democrats and Antifa. 

Right. And when the moon is full and the wind blows from the east pigs fly like eagles and crows shit nuggets of gold. 

At this moment, American politics and right-wing media is populated with some of the most vile, ignorant, intolerant, and corrupt people I’ve ever seen. When the execrable and dimwitted Kevin McCarthy gave access to thousands of hours of surveillance footage from January 6 to Tucker Carlson -- and no other news outlet -- I knew what was coming. A whitewash. It was predictable that Tucker and his crack team of propagandists would cherry-pick the footage to show their viewers that nothing unusual, and certainly nothing violent, happened on January 6. It was just another day in America’s capitol city…

How stupid does Tucker Carlson think his audience is? How gullible? How infantile? He obviously believes they will swallow any lie that tumbles from his lips. That’s astonishing in and of itself, but what’s more outrageous is that Carlson is pulling this crap while Fox is being sued for defamation. 

Television occupied our American brains many years ago. Images and sound bites replaced words on paper. Facts became negotiable, mutable, malleable and it became possible for politicians and skilled propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson to create their own facts. When reality didn’t conform to the narrative they wanted to push, it could, like the script of a reality TV show, be rewritten, reframed, and re-contextualized. With enough repetition the new take could become a new truth. 

Carlson, with help from his buddy McCarthy, is trying to create a new “Lost Cause” for MAGA world. After the Civil War, the defeated but unrepentant plantation bosses and Confederate politicians and generals and soldiers, began spinning a new take on the war. States’ rights not slavery had been the central issue and reason for all the bloodshed. The Federal government led by Abraham Lincoln had tyrannically forced itself on the poor, beleaguered southern states, leaving them no choice but to take up arms to protect their culture and freedom. The South was noble and true, fighting for a great principle that had nothing to do with enslaved Black people. You see, Black people enjoyed their status as unpaid laborers and thought of their masters and owners as family. It was a benevolent relationship, not exploitative. Robert E. Lee wasn’t a traitor, he was a hero and patriot. 

The Lost Cause narrative was repeated for decades in newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, and in monuments to heroes of the Confederacy; it found its way into history textbooks and popular culture. No defeated population wants to see itself as evil. 

Will Tucker Carlson succeed? I want to think not, but this is a country awash in falsehoods and lies and outright lunacy. We’re a gullible nation. A certain percentage of Carlson’s audience is bound to believe that January 6 was simply a peaceful protest by thousands of red-blooded American patriots. Others might begin to doubt what they witnessed with their own eyes that horrible day. 

January 6, 2021 wasn’t a peaceful day in Washington D.C. A mob whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump breached and ransacked the Capitol and disrupted a congressional proceeding for several hours.  It happened. People died. Hundreds suffered serious injuries. 

What’s outrageous, at least in this citizen’s estimation, is that none of the key players or architects of the attempted coup, including Donald J. Trump, have been held to account more than two years after the fact, and I think there’s a very good possibility that they never will be. I can hear Attorney General Merrick Garland in my head, explaining in his calm and measured way that the report by Special Counsel Jack Smith, though damning, will not be acted upon -- for the good of the nation, of course.  

Snow Day

For the first time in maybe ten years, there’s snow on our mountains, below the 3,000 foot level. It’s a lovely sight and if the forecast pans out snow might be visible for a day or two. We’ve experienced another drenching rainfall, and yet another of the Italian stone pines has toppled on Anapamu Street. Twenty years ago, the Italian pines formed a dense canopy nearly six blocks long. But as the drought went on and on the trees suffered and many have fallen. 

Not much desire to write of late. Cause unknown, but it occurs to me that I have nothing novel or intelligent to say about any of the outrages going on in the world, from Russia’s war on Ukraine, mass shootings in the US, Israel’s strangulation and erasure of Palestinians, climate disruption, crime, inflation, political malpractice, book banning, LGTBQ bashing, to how long it’s taking Donald Trump and his criminal associates to face some indictments. It all saddens and sickens my spirit, but I don’t have solutions. 

I worry and brood, drift far from the present, like an off-course sailboat.

In the past three weeks I’ve been reading mostly fiction. L.A. Weather by Maria Amparo Escandon, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. I felt like a break from heavy non-fiction and wanted to read some female authors. I liked both books. I’m going to review them for the other website I’m involved in, California Review of Books. 

I’m going to begin reading Victory City by Salman Rushdie. 

It’s raining again. A full Lake Cachuma is hard to fathom after years of drought conditions. Water always wins, always finds a course to follow. Drops accumulate, pool, puddle, determined to flow. No matter how much we have we can never afford to waste it. We can’t afford to contaminate it, but of course we do. I was thinking the other day about the idea of stewardship, and concluded that modern people are terrible stewards, and that unfettered capitalism is not a system that can co-exist with stewardship. But we have it drilled into our American heads that no other economic arrangement is possible because, well, tyranny! As if poverty itself isn’t tyrannical. We fear godless communism so we created a “prosperity” Jesus to make our Christianity more popular and easier to swallow. We’re also conditioned to accept the idea that the rich are more deserving than the poor and the lazy criminal underclass, which is full of Black and brown and Indigenous people, queers, lesbians, drag queens, and transgender folk. All Muslems are suspect on principle.

What is so alarming about tolerance? What is frightening about knowledge -- general knowledge, political and economic knowledge, religious knowledge? I imagine a white swath of Americans who are scared shitless of “others.” It’s fucking weird. Thirty percent or more of the American population is more scared of drag queens than gun violence or climate change. 

It is strange to be in your 60’s and still uncovering things you didn’t know about yourself? Asking for a friend. 

Turbulence Ahead

“The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.” Salman Rushdie

New year. Like a child peeking out from under his blankets I peer out at this new year. Is the Orange Menace still holed up in the White House, wreaking havoc while he watches Fox News and issues insane Tweets about “border security?” As I write this, the NYSE is down another 500 points, below the 23,000 mark. Since the market began sliding in December, Trump hasn’t had much to say about the economy, except to blame the Federal Reserve for hiking interest rates. Trump is never responsible for anything negative, only the good, what little of it there is. Trump’s ability to debase whatever he touches is astonishing. America has had lousy presidents, but never one so blatantly inept and dishonest. Ditto the entire Trump junta. What a pathetic assortment of brutes, shitheads, assholes, and jerks. Like attracts like. Perfidy begets perfidy.

I’m not one for making resolutions, other than to stay in the present moment and try to be calmer and kinder, worry less, and enjoy more. I’m a lucky person, blessed with fortune. I have a rich life. When your chief wank is that your beloved football team (Chelsea) is playing uninspired, boring football, it means that the major aspects of your existence are damn good. I attribute my good fortune to luck more than anything else. I won Santa Barbara in the birth lottery and was reared before the American empire turned overtly, openly, cruel and maniacal. That’s the most disheartening aspect of the post-9/11 years, how America has lost whatever moral bearing we had before the Towers fell. Now we run side-by-side with rogue nations and make no excuses for it.

Because the federal government is at a standstill due to Trump’s temper tantrum over his Wall I have been thinking about the border with Mexico, our long suffering neighbor. As pointed out by Francisco Cantu in the New York Review of Books recently, the border area is one of the most heavily patrolled and surveilled on the planet. Migrants face a staggering array of obstacles, not to mention terrain that easily becomes deadly. Drones, helicopters, Humvees, infrared cameras, ground sensors, heavily armed agents. Against all this, and the fact that border crossings are down, the Orange Menace demands the public pony up the money for his vanity Wall. Colossal stupidity. When have walls, fences, moats or barricades ever worked for long? People always find a way under, over, around or through.

We don’t look at root causes, how from our very hand fell the seeds of the Central American migrant “crisis.” The elites in both political parties always have convenient justifications, plausible deniability, sound reasons, and, of course, historical amnesia. America is due a reckoning. We have to get over our 9/11 trauma and change cruel and inhumane systems, starting with our winner-take-all, survival-of-the-richest economy. The rich will have to take less, give more, and our tired empire must soon fold its tents, herd its livestock, and begin the long journey home. Trump is only a symptom of a disease, and even were he to be frog-marched from the White House in shame or shackles -- and no matter how good it might feel to witness Trump’s long overdue comeuppance -- the disease would remain, malignant cells rampaging over healthy ones.

Keep your seatbelt fastened. There may be turbulence ahead. If you ignored the flight attendant while he went over important safety features, you might want to take a moment now to identify the nearest exit.