Forward to the Past

 

“Prophet’s take risks and speak out in righteous indignation against society’s treatment of the poor.” James H. Cone

I’m not surprised at all by the vehemence of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s recently leaked opinion. Alito was writing for the majority -- on behalf of the infamous political operatives in robes -- Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett “Spring Break” Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett. How the draft became public is irrelevant. Alito made very clear where this is going, the repeal of Roe V. Wade and what will mark the beginning of a gradual, but steady, erosion of other fundamental human rights most of us take for granted. What’s going to change between now and when the decision is handed down except maybe the addition of another line of fencing around the Supreme Court building? We know the outcome. John Roberts might insist on watering down some of Alito’s more obnoxious phrases, citations and inferences, but the outcome will not change.  

What happens when this illegitimate, unaccountable, and reactionary Supreme Court delivers its anticipated opinion?

The crusaders are going to find the magic cup they have chased since I was a boy -- the repeal of a woman’s Constitutional right to abortion health services. Health services for women, many of them working-class or poor, the ones for whom life is already difficult enough. The crusaders will lift the cup like the winners of a European Champions League football final.  And then the unholy alliance of the GOP/Evangelical Christian right will move to the next target. Their odds of success are good. They’ve got tons of unaccountable money, FOX News, and a network of evangelical churches that enjoy tax-free status while they preach a vile form of theocracy. In the short run, before they start feeding on each other (a hazard of amassing too much unaccountable power), they will wield power like a hammer. And then, if the GOP regains control of Congress and the White House, watch out. 

America isn’t immune to the consequences of Empire Rot, a terminal condition. The example Trump sent the political class during his disastrous single term was that norms don’t matter, laws against political corruption and ethical violations are tepid and easy to evade by simply ignoring them, and telling  extreme and outlandish lies is a viable and effective tactic. In fact, the more outlandish the lie the greater the likelihood it will become the truth, and for some small percentage of the population, gospel. 

What happens when this illegitimate, unaccountable, and reactionary Supreme Court delivers its anticipated opinion? Will we stage another massive Women’s March, feel the rush of solidarity and purpose and tolerance, and then retreat to our separate silos waiting for someone else to do the work of educating, organizing, and channeling the energy and outrage and determination into a coherent, focused political direction? That’s one of the tallest orders there is, yet it’s the only way social change is made. Ground up, slow, painstaking, and, yes, incremental. In contrast, when hard-won rights are diluted, narrowed, or stripped away, it’s usually a top down process, opportunistic, cynical, and cruel. We forget so many elemental lessons, or perhaps we never learned to begin with. Rights won are not forever; they can be lost. Rights must be defended with vigilance, like liberty itself. We will soon be a country where abortion is legal in some states and a crime in others, not unlike the years leading to the Civil War when half the states permitted and perpetuated chattel slavery, and the other half forbade it. 

Serfs in Russia did not have pension plans or social insurance. They depended on their master, from birth to death. When Alito and his noxious cabal put Roe down for good, they will set their sights on other rights they find objectionable: birth control, same-sex marriage, other privacy rights, and then, one day they will come for the last prize of the New Deal era, the big one, Social Security. It will happen in stages, by a cut here, a scratch there. But once they get going more will come, more impetus for unaccountable power to go further, take more, control more. Only a credible, focused and organized people’s movement or coalition of movements that pushes back whenever it detects a threat can stymie these radicals. The demise of Roe isn’t a women’s issue alone, it must be part of a broader coalition focused on securing human rights. Losing Roe is a major setback, an insult to women, essentially a white man’s declaration of sovereignty over women and their bodies; it could be the centerpiece of a mass movement, perhaps it will, but to be transformative a movement needs size and depth. And staying power, which is where the tax-free Evangelical church network has been so lethal. 

The Democratic Party isn’t the vessel, let’s establish that from the jump. The Democrats have not done much to enshrine the right to abortion health services in law since the time abortion became a wedge issue more than 40 years ago. In 1976, a young Senator from Delaware named Joseph Biden voted for the Hyde Amendment, legislation that banned federal funding of abortion health services. Both parties have used abortion as a moblizing tool. The Democrats will talk-the-talk but fail to muster the support to pass legislation protecting the right to abortion health services. They’ll mount one of their patented doomed-from-the-outset initiatives that will have zero chance of being enacted in anything resembling its original form. 

So, what are We the People going to do? 

Are You Ready for Minority Rule?

 “Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

It was cold in the apartment this morning. I started the coffee brewing and donned my heavy Chelsea Football Club sweatshirt. Although I didn’t want to, I looked at the news; it confirmed what I knew -- the GOP had succeeded in ramming Amy Coney Barrett down our throats eight days before the presidential election. 

Mitch McConnell achieved his dream of cementing minority rule, and said as much on the floor of the Senate. The cynical, corrupt man from Kentucky held the power, and he used it with ruthless efficiency. I wondered what might have happened if the tables had been reversed and the Democrats held a majority and tried to seat a moderate associate justice at warp speed. Would the Dems have trampled Senate rules, procedures and norms? I doubt it. They don’t have the killer instinct or sufficient disregard for the institution. For far too many years, the Dems believed they could deal with the GOP on level terms, as if both sides play by a common set of rules. They don’t. It was this naivete on the part of Barack Obama that drove me crazy during his first term. No matter how many times Republicans dissed him, Obama kept trying to find common ground. Obama wanted to make policy, the GOP only wanted to expand its power. Even if the GOP had been a minority party, I think McConnell would have found a way to block the Democrats from rushing to confirm a justice. Appeals to rules and fairness work on Democrats, but bounce off Republicans like BB’s off armor plating. 

I don’t know what will happen on November 3rd and in the weeks after. I’m not confident that Biden will win, despite early indications that the turnout will be record-setting. What I imagine, though, is that regardless of the results, Trump will preemptively claim victory, either on election night or the next day, and FOX News and Breitbart and all the other Trump mouthpieces will amplify his claim. Trump will blitz the public with tales of massive fraud, cheating, and fake absentee ballots. Lawsuits will follow in all the states where the vote tally is close. Trump might hold rallies in those states, and encourage his supporters to demand a halt to the count by marching on election offices in a sea of MAGA red. After living through the 2000 election, it’s not a stretch to imagine the final outcome being decided in Trump’s favor by a hyper-partisan Supreme Court. 

And then what? 

For many years the Dems believed they could deal with the GOP on level terms, as if both sides play by a common set of rules. 

Even if Biden prevails -- and let’s hope he does -- Trump will have more than two months to plant boobytraps, string Claymore mines, and retaliate against his perceived enemies. That’s a long interregnum, particularly with Covid-19 resurgent in many states. Trump & Company have surrendered to the pandemic, raised the white flag, folded the tents and let the horses and mules run loose. Damn the needs of the people, let them fend for themselves. The coming winter looks long and dark. Despair lives next door. In less than four years, Donald J. Trump has driven a wedge between millions of Americans. His talk of red and blue states, his sowing of mistrust in public health experts, and in simple measures like wearing a face covering; his constant lying about the severity of Covid-19, which he knew about in February; his demands for loyalty over competence; his grift and self-dealing; his cruelty and stupidity. The man is a reckless and destructive sociopath, and we are not free of his evil stench, not by a long shot. Trump may lose at the polls in a margin too big to steal, as legal analyst Glenn Kirschner puts it, but we shouldn’t for a moment think Trump will leave the national stage. His cult followers, the people who wear the red hats and can’t get enough of his act, will still believe in him, listen to him. If Trump calls them to Mar-A-Lago, they will go. If Trump tells them to march into the Gulf of Mexico, they will, like lemmings off a cliff. 

Tell me, please, what happened to America? 

In a week at least the fund-raising text messages and emails that daily barrage my phone will end. I remind myself that the antidote to despair is to focus on what is within my control. The present is a soap bubble. The old days aren’t returning. Octavia Butler is right -- things are always changing. 

The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 8

“It signifies a fact that has not fundamentally changed since the defeat of Reconstruction: black people can be subjected, usually with impunity, to arbitrary aggression.” Fintan O’Toole, New York Review of Books

Covid-19 days, nights, weeks and months. It feels that we’re almost back where we started in March, as if the virus sent us back to the starting line. Covid-19 is active in Santa Barbara, though tourists roam State Street and dine outdoors; people in masks queue outside the Apple Store, still hungry for the latest gadgets. Life in a pandemic is strange to begin with, but when you live in a country with corrupt and incompetent political leaders, strange becomes surreal. 

Our Trumpian nightmare, our American Horror Show, eternal night. As expected, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, punted the question of Trump’s tax returns back to the lower courts, where the matter will be drowned in briefs and motions and legal stalling for God knows how long. This has been Trump’s way of dodging accountability for decades. Sue, countersue. The secrets in Trump’s financial records will not be seen by American voters prior to November. Trump won the round. Yes, Roberts and the Court upheld the most basic legal concept -- that no one is above the law -- but if reinforcing that assertion is what passes for courage or justice -- we really are in deep water. 

The wealthy buy justice. No surprise. Even the law has a price tag. 

I studied the architectural plans for the office’s HVAC system while heating a cup of water in the microwave. The schematic might have been Sanskrit and I understood little of what it communicated. In my next human incarnation I wish to have two skills: carpentry and music. I want to be able to build a tool shed or a doghouse, erect a fence. My father was a butcher, a skilled one, but he had no mechanical aptitude and neither do I. Taking things apart to understand how they work never has intrigued me, and I regret this fact. Same with music, I like many forms of music but I don’t understand how it works and my attempt to learn the guitar was a failure. I am tone deaf, can’t keep a rhythm. I remember being in the second or third grade, forced to play an instrument; my mother chose the clarinet. I was inept. All I made that instrument do was screech like nails on a chalkboard. It was torture, an embarassment. 

I’m deep into Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography. Like his legendary live performances, the book is long. I’m to the part where Springsteen has just released Nebraska, his dark, spare, and haunting masterpiece. I’ve always liked the album, though I didn’t discover it until many years after it was released in 1982. “Nothing feels better than blood on blood.” The early 1980’s. I was living in Japan then, cut off from what was happening in America. The early days of the conservative political revolt led by Uncle Ronnie Reagan, the AIDS crisis, the death twitch of American manufacturing. The Japanese economic juggernaut was going to eclipse us in an avalanche of Honda and Toyota automobiles and SONY boomboxes. Long ago. When I think of the 1980’s my memories are dim as ash. 

Springsteen’s quieter albums, Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils & Dust, Magic, and Western Stars won my respect and admiration. The imagery, mood, and beauty of the writing, the empathy are why I return to them over and over. The autobiography fills in some of the spaces, explains Springsteen’s state of mind and circumstances; his childhood in Freehold, New Jersey, exerted a tremendous pull on his imagination and heart. Poor, working-class, houses with thin walls and no hot water, a taciturn, distant and sometimes menacing father, a vivacious and loving mother. Springsteen willed himself to become the leader of a band that could follow his voice, ambition and vision. The man’s a product of hard work. Springsteen hauled his Catholic guilt around for years. Many of his songs are rooted in the fear of, and longing for, his father’s love. 

I understand that longing. My dad passed away long ago, aged 57, his body ravished by a pack-a-day smoking habit and too many years of heavy drinking. He never met his grandson. He wasn’t present when I got married. I assume he would be proud of me. I wish I could talk to him about his life, his dreams and desires. 

Covid-19 summer. Fruit falls from the trees, rots on the ground. My emotions swing like a frayed rope bridge over a deep ravine. Am I a fraud and a failure? Have I slept-walked through my days and nights, always searching for a prize I cannot see or name? I wrestle with my contradictions, kick myself for wasting time searching for clues in dark corners. Too selfish I conclude, too stingy with my love, too walled off from other people, too solitary, too locked in my own head. Feels too late to slip this skin now. I have to harvest the seeds I’ve sown. 

The Real American Divide

“Now it seems exhaustingly obvious that what’s happening to refugees, to the climate and the biosphere, to the poor under hypercapitalism, is a vicious disregard for their rights and humanity, and that some of the men perpetrating public brutality are monstrous in private is a given.” Rebecca Solnit

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges has warned for years about the corporate takeover of the American state, but because Hedges is, for all intents and purposes, banned from mainstream media outlets, his warnings go largely unheard. 

I bring Chris Hedges up because South Dakota recently passed two laws to make protesting the construction of oil pipelines a crime. Eight other states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois are considering similar measures. Think about this for a moment: energy extraction companies -- keen to avoid another Standing Rock -- flush with lawyers, lobbyists and cash, use the power of the state to make public dissent a criminal act. By passing such laws, under euphemistic titles like The Infrastructure Protection Act, the state prioritizes corporate interests over public welfare. This is, or should be, astonishing, but I would wager that most Americans are completely oblivious to such affronts to democracy, let alone the environment on which we all depend. 

Robert Reich recently wrote that the divide in America isn’t between the left and the right, it’s between the oligarchs and the rest of us. He’s correct. The oligarchs, the ruling class, the elites, call them what you want, have been on a 40-year roll, a grand neoliberal economic project of low taxes, privatization of public services, monopolies, scant regulation, and endless military conflicts. They have gutted America’s manufacturing base, decimated organized labor, made it legal to buy politicians (see the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling), and organized an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the many to the few. 

Grotesque income inequality leads to political inequality and political inequality makes it nearly impossible for citizens to exercise agency when it comes to protecting the environment, voting rights, reproductive rights, or stopping the Pentagon from sucking up almost half of all federal government revenue. Neoliberalism has been a spectacular success for the few, and an unmitigated disaster for the many. This is blatantly obvious, but look how both political parties cling to the tenets of neoliberalism. Only Bernie Sanders, and to some extent, Elizabeth Warren, come close to offering a critique of this system that is inexorably destroying our environment and what remains of representative democracy. But none of the bumper crop of Democratic presidential candidates dare to name the real villain: unregulated capitalism. 

And that’s the other factor about the oligarchs -- they set the boundaries of debate, what can be discussed, and what topics, like catastrophic climate disruption, will be studiously ignored. Capitalism itself is never questioned, it’s the only system on offer, the sole possibility, even if it ultimately renders this planet uninhabitable. 

It seems to me that neoliberalism has also stunted our collective imagination. The mass media (owned by a handful of corporations), the universities, the think tanks, all reinforce the dominant narrative of free markets, fossil fuels, imperialism (in the name of freedom and democracy, naturally), and the dangerous idea that the unbridled accumulation of wealth and power leads to virtue. It never has and never will. 

Goodbye, Lady Liberty

“For the monster on the move, or on the watch, lurking in his lair, there is no mercy.” Samuel Beckett

The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the people of the United States, has now outlived its usefulness as a symbol of our country. Since we are no longer about welcoming the world’s huddled and tired masses yearning to be free, and our liberties have suffered sharp curtailment in the age of mass surveillance, Lady Liberty should be dynamited and replaced with a massive tower at the top of which will sit a colossal bust of Donald J. Trump’s head, in full Trumpian snarl. An inscription below shall read: Turn back, murderers and rapists, unless you be white and Christian.

The literal rape of our country by Trump and his associates continues, gathers speed, like an enormous ball-bearing rolling down Lombard Street in San Francisco, unstoppable, whether by tradition, norms, the legislative branch, the Constitution, or an instinct for self-preservation. We are rat-fucked.

It’s likely that very soon John Bolton will achieve his long cherished wet dream of attacking Iran. That the US can apply economic sanctions against Iran, and financially punish sovereign nations that want to continue their business relations with Iran, and at the same time threaten Iran with militarily force, is the height of imperialism. The US is, hands down, the world’s paramount thug. It lashes out with all its might at any country that refuses to bow to it, like Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran.

The notion that Iran would invite an American military response by attacking American allies or “interests” is ridiculous. Iran is suffering from crippling economic sanctions, a form of collective punishment. I have no doubt that Iran will fight back if attacked, but I do not believe Iran seeks a military conflict with the US. Only the leaders of the US think the Iranians are stupid.

Oh, Dr. King, so long ago you warned against the dangers of militarism, how militarism abroad sooner or later manifested at home. Well, here we stand, a country that has become cruel, uncaring, mean-spirited, exclusionary, crass, and corrupt, one that sees brute force as the solution to every problem. We lead the world in incarceration. Police routinely murder unarmed citizens of color and rarely pay a price. Our economy punishes working-class and poor people and then on top of that we criminalize them. White-collar criminals run the house. We accept homelessness as normal rather than an aberration. We don’t care if people die because they cannot afford medical care or prescription medications. We gleefully saddle young people with staggering student loan debt.

Every day that our political leaders -- and the corporate and wealthy interests that own them -- ignore climate change in favor of business as usual, we tempt fate.

Fate will win, humanity will lose.

The will of the governed no longer matters, if it ever did. We have normalized a tyranny of the minority, led by human toads like Mitch McConnell, who will without doubt burn in the furnaces of hell. Do you have any doubt that Roe v. Wade is on death row, soon to be executed by our radical Supreme Court?

Tyrannical monarchs and dictators of the past were toppled when the people had had enough, when too many starved to death or were fed like fodder to foreign wars or were imprisoned on false charges or had their land confiscated. Things are different now. Humanity faces two grave threats, catastrophic climate change and nuclear annihilation.

Time isn’t on our side. As Tom Waits once sang, “the Earth died screaming.”

The Cherry on Top

“Right now, the triumph of market logic, with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing almost all serious efforts to respond to climate change.” Naomi Klein

You know how it feels when something you believed in -- a person, a company, a social institution -- turns out to be an elaborate sham. Like when you learn that dear Father O’Brien, your first grade teacher at Saint Augustine, buggered thousands of boys; like when you finally grasp the brutal reality of American capitalism; like when you realize that the “democracy”  American leaders are always crowing about is a steaming pile of goat shit.

Millions of Americans are horrified by Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s ultra-right wing, reactionary Supreme Court nominee, but he will be confirmed no matter how horrified we become. We don’t matter. This game is being played on another level -- the process is rigged, the dice loaded, the cards marked. Carefully scripted theater. You don’t believe this farce, do you? Kavanaugh, a highly suspect jurist, who was probably the biggest dick in his college fraternity, will join four other men who will determine the direction of our legal system for the next 30 years. Kavanaugh is a corporate toady, against human beings in decision after decision, against the environment, against holding police officers accountable when they lose their minds and pump 20 rounds from a 9MM into the back of a suspect. This pasty fucker is against workers, gays, women, transgender folk, African-Americans, protesters of any color or creed, union members, and any style of sex beyond the missionary position.

How did we get to this sad fork in the road? Well, that’s the question isn’t it, how in hell we got ourselves in this bleak (unless you’re rich) capitalist wasteland. It was 1971 when the Powell Memo was issued, that blueprint for a corporate counterattack against the America the flower children were attempting to midwife into being. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, socialism, and real respect for the planet. Man, the white elite, the wealthy, the corporate honchos, the Christian zealots, freaked out, shook from head to toe, shit their pants, and got themselves organized, poured major money into think-tanks and university endowments, into the campaign coffers of capitalist zealots, and in the space of 40 years, transformed America into an oligarchy. Bought state houses. Bought congresspeople. Bought judges. Capitalism will, they pledged, be the basis for the law of the land, for every decision we make, for the value of human life. The pillars undergirding this assault are: privatization, deregulation, and reduced taxes for corporations and the wealthy.

Mission accomplished. Kavanaugh is the cherry on top, the last piece of a solid 5-4 radical right majority.

They’ll kill the right to a safe abortion. They’ll make Christian prayer mandatory in public schools. They’ll allow corporations to pollute our air, water, and land in the name of profit. They’ll allow guns in schools. They’ll force workers to toil in unsafe conditions. They’ll make voting harder for people of color.