The Sage in the Back Bedroom

My 17-year-old son knows everything about everything, and he’s not shy about telling his mother and me that we are idiots, relics of the Dark Ages who can’t possibly have anything meaningful to say on any topic. I don’t think I was much different at his age, though time has dimmed my memory somewhat. My son’s youthful arrogance is unbridled and annoying, and I wonder how many years it will be before he realizes that his parents are not complete dunces.

The American media haven’t made it easy to follow the situation playing out in the Crimea. The major networks focus on evil Vladimir Putin and his thirst for power and empire. It appears that ethnic Russians in the Crimea want to turn away from Ukraine and join Russia, while the United States and Britain want things to remain as they are. The U.S. reserves to itself the right to invade other countries and violate international law, but we become puritanical when another nation (except Israel) decides to do the same thing. Vladimir must pull his thugs and paramilitary forces out of Crimea, stuff the genie back in the bottle…or else. Or else what? Economic and cultural sanctions from the EU, perhaps, and a hard slap on the wrist from U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, maybe another lecture from President Obama about international law…

On another subject, Syria, the west doesn’t seem particularly interested. The plight of a few million refugees and displaced persons simply isn’t as interesting as a missing passenger jet liner; the major networks spend minutes on the former and hours on the latter. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that the Syrian civil war has dragged on too long and is too confusing to explain to an audience with a short attention span and little interest in international events. The leader of the bad guys in Syria is easy enough to identify – it’s trickier to identify the good guys, what they are fighting for, and what Syria might look like if they prevail.

Weird times. Here on the Platinum Coast it’s 85 degrees, which on the one hand is wonderful – who doesn’t like warm sunshine and blue sky? But on the other hand this kind of weather this early in the year isn’t helping our drought condition, which can only be described as dire. I am already capturing gray water from the washing machine to water the plants on our deck; the other day I installed a low flow showerhead. It’s only the middle of March. We need fans in the apartment to push the overheated air around. March is supposed to be a month for mild temperatures and several days of rain.

I just finished an excellent non-fiction book, the Big Burn, by Tim Egan. It’s the story of a mammoth wildfire that scorched parts of three western states in 1910. Fine read, highly recommended. There were powerful economic interests in the United States at that time who thought turning millions of acres of federal lands into national parks was ludicrous; in the eyes of these interests, it was far better to hand the land to the highest bidder (or the most politically connected) and let the exploitation begin.

Getting back to my son…he has been accepted at the American University of Paris, France, and the lad is so enthralled by the idea of studying abroad that the $45,000 annual price tag seems more a minor nuisance than an insurmountable obstacle. Trying to tell him that debt is easy to run up and difficult to pay down is as hard as finding an honest politician in Washington D.C. The boy, bless his innocent heart, believes – against all evidence to the contrary – that gobs of money will fall softly into his young lap. I wish that were so.

Life on the Dole

“So long as the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for the weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed upon by these swindlers and rascals.” W.E.B DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks

Paul Ryan thinks he has pinpointed the cause of persistent poverty in America. No, it has nothing to do with the 2008 financial meltdown. The reason poverty persists in America, according to Ryan, is LBJ’s War on Poverty, now fifty years old. Dependence on government largesse has kept the poor down, prevented them from taking responsibility for their own lives, halted their progress and retarded their initiative; this is why the poor aren’t launching entrepreneurial ventures or investing in Fortune 500 companies. It’s all the fault of the federal government’s attempts to alleviate poverty.

Like most politicians of his ilk, Ryan believes poverty is lucrative and that people enjoy life on the dole. He obviously thinks that taking a welfare check makes for as comfortable an existence as taking a fat congressional salary and all the perks that come with high office.

Paul Ryan is an asshole. He should be horsewhipped.

The other day I was listening to Adolph Reed, Jr., a very intelligent man, talking to Bill Moyers. Reed has been in the trenches of the political left for a long time and he has a good memory; he remembers where the left was and contrasts that with where the left is today, which, to put it succinctly, is up a creek sans paddle. No one on the political left can make a cogent argument in support of the causes the left once championed: economic opportunity and justice, education, health care, a real social safety net, civil rights, equal rights, and human rights. The left is all about neoliberalism now, laughable fantasies of upward mobility for people through fealty to corporate power and profit; both parties are guilty of slapping a price tag on our lives, turning our wants, desires and dreams into commodities to be bought and sold. Both parties tell us that free market capitalism is the cornerstone of democracy, the well from which all bounty springs; both parties reduce social problems to individual problems; both parties suck at the teat of corporate masters.

Adolph Reed Jr. told Bill Moyers that American democracy has been hollowed out by corporate and individual money; political power and influence is just another commodity with a price tag that only the rich can afford to buy and sell. Ordinary voters are priced out of the game, our voices silenced beneath a tidal wave of campaign dollars. The only way to defeat organized money is to organize people, but that’s difficult when neither political party represents the interests of the majority of citizens. Don’t believe it? Then why is it that the power brokers in Washington D.C. talk only of austerity, budget cuts, deficits, and the dangers posed by entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare? Outside the corrupt Beltway, people sit around their kitchen tables and talk about jobs, wages, the cost of college for their children, the cost of medical insurance for themselves and their ailing parents, the price of basic commodities we all need to live. Consider the state of our current politics. The men and women we elect (and, let’s be honest, most of the time our choices are between Tweedledee and Tweedledum) do not devote themselves to addressing the issues we care about. They claim to, but a cursory examination of most congressional voting records confirms the real story.

The American left lost the battle of ideas with the American right back in the 1980’s. The left’s core ideas weren’t perfect, but they were responsible for keeping the worst excesses of corporate capitalism in check. If the left represented working Americans the way it should, and could articulate its ideas powerfully and clearly – the way FDR and Henry Wallace once did – nobody would pay any attention to phonies like Paul Ryan.

Real Rain

It’s raining here on the Platinum Coast. A real, honest-to-goodness storm has parked itself over the coast and rain is pouring down, rushing through gutters and down storm drains, forming puddles in parking lots; the field at the junior high school is covered with seagulls, white on green.

Our local TV news station, KEYT, bless its soul, is reacting as if this is the Mother of All Storms, a once-in-a-century event; the station sends reporters in yellow slickers and waders to the waterfront, the banks of Mission Creek, and even to a street corner for a dramatic live report. “This is Senior Reporter John P. and I am standing at the intersection of Garden and Ortega Streets, where just behind me you can see a large volume of water rushing into this storm drain. This is real water, as you can see, and so far the storm drain is holding its own against the onslaught from Mother Nature.” 

We’re not accustomed to extreme weather out here on the coast and when we get anything out of the ordinary we tend to freak out and totally overreact. Some people, of course, will assume the drought is over, though this rainfall, wonderful as it is, is but a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. Only a flood of Biblical proportion could end the drought this time around.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the sound of rain on the roof. The trees and shrubs are enjoying a long, refreshing drink.

No Rain in the Forecast

“I hate and despise, I feel indignant, outraged, and afraid. I’ve become excessively severe, demanding, irritable, ungracious, suspicious.” Anton Chekov, A Boring Story

The sky clouded over briefly today, but no rain fell. If this pattern keeps up – and there’s no reason to think it won’t at this point – the drought will worsen, putting the squeeze on farmers, vineyard operators, home builders, the tourism industry, and many others. The California economy may sour, again, though it will likely be a year or two before the full effects of this drought hit home.

Do most Americans still believe what Fox News tells them, that global warming is a myth, the science still up for debate, or, more precisely, obfuscation, from slick shills paid for by energy extractors? I see in the news that John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, has become a believer in the perils of climate change – belated though his conversion may be – since no nation on earth has done more to delay real action on climate change than the U.S. Apparently, Kerry is now very worried about extreme weather events. Sometimes it takes years for the fog to clear and the truth to be seen. Kerry should mention to his boss, President Obama, that no such thing as “clean” coal exists in the world, that nuclear energy is dangerous, and that the Keystone XL pipeline is a terrible idea after all.

I heard the intrepid journalist Jeremy Scahill on the radio, talking about Dwight Eisenhower’s warning to Americans about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Ike would not believe his eyes if he could see how his worst fears have manifested themselves. Add the security-intelligence complex to the military-industrial complex and you have a behemoth of global proportions -- intrusive, overbearing, and to a dangerous extent, under the control of private operators such as Halliburton, Blackwater (or whatever name this army-for-rent is calling itself now), and the Carlisle Group. Huge corporate entities have major skin in the war game, the anti-terror game, and the national security game. Preposterous sums of money are at stake, and therefore no incentive exists to stop the failed War on Terror or the intensive surveillance of Americans, Germans, Russians and whoever else the NSA deems an enemy, a threat, or an economic competitor. The incentives all work in the opposite direction. This beast is now so huge and unaccountable that we may not be able to tame it.

Eisenhower would be appalled, but if George Orwell were to come back I imagine he would just shake his head and say, “I warned you.” Orwell did warn us against perpetual war, intrusive surveillance, and debased language; when the Ministry of Truth is devoted to lies, and most people cannot tell the difference, your goose is boiled; when corruption, bribery, and mendacity become the norm in a state, elites win and ordinary people lose.

I walk outside and gaze at the clear sky, the waning gibbous moon, a smattering of stars. No, there’s no rain in the forecast. Mother Nature is unhappy and withholding her love.

The Blank Page

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”           W.E.B. Du Bois

The blank page. The wide world. Everything to write about, and yet nothing to write about, a total failure of imagination and daring. The voice inside my head is accusing and indignant.

California is in the grip of a serious drought. The Winter Olympics are underway in Sochi, Russia; ice dancing, speed skating, downhill skiing, hockey, and all the rest of the typical events. The mainstream media reports that all is not well in Sochi. Aside from the military-style occupation for “security” purposes, there are more practical problems like clean tap water, hotel rooms with missing doorknobs, and, fright of all frights, gay people mingling with straight people! This mingling happens on the down low, of course, as public displays are criminalized in Putin’s prudish, homophobic Russia. At least there is snow in the mountains. Seeing a quick glimpse of NBC’s host, Bob Costas, I wonder what happened to his face. Botox treatments are not always successful.

Speaking of Botox, there has been plenty of it on display at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Botox queens and mavens pour into our city from Los Angeles and the hills of Montecito, their faces frozen in permanent smiles or frowns or grimaces – trophy wives of trophy husbands. State Street, our main tourist artery, is full of film industry-types, hipsters, poseurs, and fans. Our restaurants and bars do brisk business this time of year, and rooms in local hotels and B&B’s are very costly and hard to secure. The American Riviera is on display, big stars walk the red carpet beneath bright klieg lights, targets for hundreds of photographers, and fans turn out to catch a glimpse of Leo, Marty, Bruce Dern or Bob Redford. This is good, though, a celebration of art and culture, of our shared humanity and conundrums. Good films show us things we may otherwise not want to confront.

We need rain, like a Biblical deluge of forty days and nights, to replenish Lake Cachuma and the Gibraltar reservoir, and turn the rolling hills from tawny to green again. But the sky won’t rain today, the sun is out and the temperature is warm. Back to the rain dance or the silent prayer. I will remind my children to keep their showers brief. What is not held dear is often wasted or neglected. Kids, don’t take clean running water for granted; don’t take or use more than you need, think of others. This advice is sure to fall on deaf ears.

I have all manner of thoughts in my head, slippery as eels, never still, always darting this way and that. It is black history month, so I think of Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Cornel West, of the book I’m reading by Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow; the name Oscar Grant flits across my consciousness. America never has been, and may never be, a colorblind society. Though it is less blatant, racism is still with us, the constant current running through our society; we criminalize black drug addicts, rehabilitate white drug dealers. Racism is more subtle, coded, but no less prevalent.

It was also nine years ago this month that Hunter S. Thompson ended his eventful life with a bullet to the brain. Thompson spared himself the frustration of the Obama years. I suspect Thompson would have been hopeful, as many were when Obama was elected, that change was coming after the dreadful reign of Cheney-Bush. Hope lasted until Obama surrounded himself with Clintonites, dug in deeper in Afghanistan, and unleashed drone warfare on a level never reached by Dick and W. Watching Obama bend over for the GOP time and time again would have been enough to make Thompson reach for his pistol.