World Leader in Death

“Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.” Henry A. Giroux

Columbine. Virginia Tech. Aurora. Sandy Hook. San Bernardino. Orlando. Las Vegas. By some estimates I’ve read, there are 300 million firearms in the United States, and every single day in this country, 92 people are killed in firearm related incidents. After a mass shooting I always feel the same sense of unreality, numbness, and then outrage because no matter how murderous the rampage -- and the scope of the Vegas massacre is almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around -- nothing changes. The NRA still presses campaign donations on easily purchased members of Congress, and launches a PR blitz designed to blunt any criticism, and of course remind us all of the sacred Second Amendment. Politicians wring their hands, offer prayers, tell us to honor the innocent victims, but in the next breath declare that now isn’t the time to have a debate about sensible firearm protections. (If not now, when?) Whoever the sitting president is makes a speech condemning the violence, knowing full well that the carnage will continue in another place, at another time. Obama’s rhetoric after a mass shooting brought people to tears, but his beautiful words never changed a thing. (As emotionally stunted and inappropriate as ever, the current occupant of the White House offered his “warmest condolences.”)

Firearms are historically, politically and culturally embedded in our American DNA. Violence is as much a part of our creed as the Declaration of Independence and the Star-Spangled Banner, as college football and NASCAR.  

More details about the Vegas shooter emerge in fits and starts, as they always do in the aftermath of a mass shooting, though his motive remains murky. Was his intent only to inflict death and pain and trauma, to forever alter thousands of lives, or just to etch his name in the history book as the architect of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history? Job accomplished on all counts. The man is in the annals now, the latest, but not the last, deranged white man with demons running around his brain and a huge cache of weapons and ammunition in his garage.

The numbness returns. A woman who trains in the dojo I attend was at that concert in Las Vegas on Sunday night. She survived unscathed, physically, but her husband told me that she has descended deep within herself, suffering from wounds unseen.

This madness never ends. America has never been great, and only good when it suits the powerful, but nobody can argue that we are not the world leader in death, at home and abroad.

Take a Knee

“But even he knew that things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to.” Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Where to begin? Puerto Rico? The NFL? College basketball? Another week of Donald J. Trump’s vicious idiocy. Another week in which the United States is diminished in the eyes of the world. The mind reels, the gut convulses, but this is a logical juncture in a country that rewards the most perverse incentives, that puts profit above human life, that wages war indiscriminately, that thinks tax cuts for those with the most is sound economic policy, and that refuses to come to grips with the fact of climate change.

Which brings me back to Puerto Rico, our island colony. I wrote an angry e-mail to my congress person, complaining about the tepid response from Washington to the humanitarian crisis on the island. Imagine, I wrote, if Santa Barbara County had been hit by back-to-back magnitude 7.5 earthquakes. Would you accept the foot-dragging currently on display in Washington? Our idiot president is too busy attacking African-American athletes for exercising their first amendment right to protest injustice, racism, and violence to fret about Puerto Rico; besides, we’re not talking about aiding white Americans, right? Puerto Rico was in distress before Irma and Maria devastated the island, held in bondage by an unelected Fiscal Control Board hellbent on extracting every last nickel to satisfy bankers and hedge fund managers and God knows who else. Capitalism and humanitarian impulses are not compatible. But don’t worry, Puerto Rico, Trump is going to pay you a visit soon. Don’t be surprised if he tries to sell you some hats.

So, it appears that the FBI has determined that some NCAA basketball programs are cheating. The shock! Of course NCAA colleges and universities cheat. They do it because there is inordinate pressure to win, to build a team that can go far into the annual March tournament and thereby rake in big money for the school. I hate college sports. I don’t watch them. The day I might watch is the day college athletes are paid to play the games. As it stands, many college athletes are being exploited, as are most workers in a capitalist system. Add the NCAA to the long list of American institutions soiled and compromised by greed.

I don’t watch NFL games either, not simply because I find American football utterly boring, which I do, but because the NFL -- more than any other professional sport league -- is a die-hard promoter of the American war machine. If the NFL wants to hawk beer, automobiles, cell phones, carbonated beverages or artery-destroying fast food, go ahead, but get the hell out of the war promotion racket, tell the Pentagon to fuck off.

Ah, but are we not Americans who love violence? Yes, we are.  We can’t live without bloodsport. Our president acts like he’s a tough guy, but it’s clear that Trump is a pussy who wouldn’t last 10 seconds in a street brawl. Sad, pathetic excuse of a white man, draft dodger, insecure blowhard. Can you imagine Trump as a soldier in a war zone? He’d shit his fatigues in thirty seconds and start wailing like a baby, probably call for his nanny or Melania.

Don’t be surprised that Tom Price has resigned in disgrace for flying in luxury on the people’s thin dime. If you are a regular reader of this page you know that I refer to the Trump administration as Trump and the Kleptocrats. Every last one of these motherfuckers signed onto the Trump team thinking it would lead to a trip to the bank. These people are punks and thieves.

Take a knee, and then rise up.

Welcome to Oregon

I made a short trip to Tillamook, Oregon to visit my brother. We hadn’t seen one another for eleven years. I flew into Portland, rented a car, and drove west in the rain. When I crossed into the Tillamook city limits I was pulled over by an Oregon State trooper for speeding. The trooper politely introduced himself and said he clocked me doing 68 in a 45 mile per hour zone. I didn’t realize I was traveling that fast. The trooper asked what brought me to Tillamook, I told him, he handed my license back and advised me to slow down.

Welcome to Oregon.

My brother’s first house in Tillamook was located on Trask River Road, a stone’s throw from the Trask River, but he has since purchased a manufactured home on a cul-de-sac in the city proper. The street is crushed rock and full of potholes, and without sidewalks. The houses of his immediate neighbors are well maintained, but many homes on the adjacent streets are weather-beaten, sagging, yards littered with rusted cars, refrigerators, and motor homes. Maintaining a house in that wet climate isn’t easy, and some folks don’t bother trying. Why park your truck on the street when you can park on your front lawn? Coming from Santa Barbara, a city obsessed with its appearance, its beauty and refinement, and the astronomical cost of its real estate, where the crappiest house costs a Midas-sized fortune, I wasn’t used to seeing dilapidated houses, pot-holed streets or trucks parked on lawns.

About 5,000 people call Tillamook home. There’s an elementary school, junior high, and high school (Home of the Cheesemakers!) in town, a big Hampton lumber mill, the Tillamook cheese factory (major tourist draw), a hospital that appears to be fairly new, and the air museum just outside of town, a relic from World War II. There’s not much to see downtown. On my first day we drove up to the Trask River in my brother’s Subaru station wagon. In less than ten minutes we were in the country, passing dairy farms, houses that were set well back from the road with plenty of distance from their nearest neighbor, pastures where cows grazed on green grass. It rained off and on. I saw a few houses that appeared to be abandoned, overgrown with wild blackberry vines; an excavator parked in a field was suffering the same fate, and I wondered who had parked it and how long it had been sitting there. My brother told me that most of the dairy farmers were members of the Tillamook Creamery Association. We saw some log trucks and some trucks hauling milk. We hiked along the Trask for a mile or so. My brother has a degenerative back ailment and he moves slower than he once did. Water dripped from Douglas firs that towered 60, 80, even 100 feet above our heads onto the damp forest floor. Ferns, tangled vines, rotting logs; thick moss -- thicker than I’d ever seen -- hung from the branches of trees, like long beards. We didn’t see another soul. The sound of the Trask followed us. “The river is pretty tame this time of year,” my brother told me, “but come January and February it rages like you can’t believe.”

My brother is experiencing serious fear and loathing of Donald Trump. I have never known him to be a political person, I didn’t know he voted, but Trump and his band of kleptocrats have knocked my brother for a loop, and, like many, many Americans, he feels an intense embarrassment almost every time Trump opens his mouth or takes to Twitter to spew his violent, vapid, vicious idiocy. He rations the amount of corporate news he watches; most of the time, his television is tuned to the Weather Channel. He doesn’t own a computer, a tablet, a Kindle, a laptop, an iPhone, and has no electronic footprint; he still writes a paper check when he does his grocery shopping at the Fred Meyer store.

We drove all over Tillamook county in the two days I spent there, from the forest to the coast, Netarts, Cape Meares, around Tillamook Bay to Garibaldi. It rained, hard at times, and then the sun would make a brief appearance and steam would rise off the pavement and the pasture land. After nearly 50 years in California I don’t know if I could live in a wet, damp, chilly climate like Tillamook but I enjoyed the beauty and diversity it had to offer, and the experience of walking in the deep woods was rejuvenating. My brother is happy there and lives a simple existence. He manages his back pain by swimming every morning at the YMCA, but by 6:00 p.m. or so he needs to get off his feet. He reads a lot. He fishes for cutthroat trout on the Trask when he can.

It was good to get away, good to renew the ties of blood, good to step off the treadmill of daily routine, work, chores, obligations. When I returned home I felt wealthy.

Doing Time in My Mind

“Trump embodies the decayed soul of America. He, like many of those who support him, has a childish yearning to be as omnipotent as the gods. This impossibility, as the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote, leads to a dark alternative: destroying like the gods.” Chris Hedges

My children were born one day apart, September 3 and 4, five years apart. My son is now 21, my daughter 16. The United States has been at war in Afghanistan my daughter’s entire life. My son was born during the Clinton administration, which, politically, seems a very long time ago. When my son was two or so, the Lewinsky scandal broke and the GOP controlled Congress went after Bill Clinton with a vengeance. The Puritanical streak lodged in the American psyche kicked in and day after day the news was full of lurid speculation about semen stains on a blue GAP dress and Bill Clinton’s insatiable libido. For telling fibs about a blowjob, Clinton was impeached. Today a ridiculous man who fibs spectacularly all the time about damn near everything sits in the Oval Office.  

We have to live in the present but cannot forget the past. Around my children’s birthdays I always think about the passage of time. I think about markers, significant events like birthday parties, graduation ceremonies, Christmases. I think about who I was and who I am, and I wonder if time is my nemesis or my friend. In my day to day life time feels like a weight I haul around. I’m at an age where there is likely more of life behind than ahead. I despair a little when I think of all the books I will never read, the places I may never see. Instead of expanding, my viewpoint seems to wither and shrink. I wonder if something is wrong with me. To look back at one’s life with regret -- and ahead with trepidation -- can’t be healthy. I also think about people I’ve known who have died, and as the years pass the number grows. I see the effects of time on people all around me, in Trader Joe’s on Sunday afternoon, in line at the movie theater: arthritic fingers, swollen feet and ankles, bent backs, mottled skin, gray hair. Evidence of Time’s merciless toll is everywhere. Every human will suffer. Such is the nature of existence. For the most part, we receive no instruction in dealing with the nature of our existence.

Funny how the certainty of youth, the clarity of right and wrong, just and unjust, becomes the doubt of middle age. My son is far less of a fool than I was at his age. At 21 I was serving my third year in the Air Force, in Japan, and because I could sustain myself I felt like a grown-up when in reality I was still an immature, hot-headed boy. In my mind the memory of that time is sepia and dim. I spent hours riding trains, and when I wasn’t riding I was walking, from the train station to my tiny apartment, from the station to the front gate of Yokota Air Base. How many miles? I have journals from that time that I have carted from Japan to Honolulu, and from Honolulu to Seattle, to Irvine in Orange County, and then back home to Santa Barbara, that I refuse to read for fear of embarrassment. I should pile them in the backyard and set them on fire, and one day, perhaps I will. When you’re a hot-headed, foolish young man as I was, you do things that hurt yourself, but also others.

My children will make their way in a world radically different from the one in which I made mine. I fear for them. First, because they are already casualties of a failed economic system. Second, and intimately linked to the first, because of the real prospect of catastrophic climate change. And third, because of the invasive power of the US surveillance state. The balance of power between the government and the governed has never been so out of kilter, and unaccountable power is terrifying. But even more I fear for my children because of the strong undercurrent of cruelty that is loose in our land. As the US has become more fearful of losing its hegemony around the world, compassion for its own citizens has atrophied. Instead of a helping hand, more often than not only a clenched fist is offered.

I feel sad for the people of Bangladesh, Houston, and parts of the Caribbean, who have been severely harmed by natural disasters exacerbated by climate change. It pains me that my country has for so long been so two-faced and craven about our environment, fixated on economic gain and geopolitical advantage to the exclusion of human life.

Forever Unhinged

“Market capitalism is simply not conducive to mutual human concern. It is a system based on social warfare, cultivated by its root socioeconomic orientation.” Peter Joseph, The New Human Rights Movement  

The corporate-owned media always acts surprised when Donald J. Trump goes off script and rants, as he did after the murder of a peaceful demonstrator in Charlottesville, and then again at a pro-Trump rally in Phoenix. But nothing Trump does or says or tweets should surprise anyone. Disturb yes, surprise, never. Trump was unhinged when he declared his candidacy for the White House, unhinged on the long primary campaign trail, unhinged through the general election, and unhinged the day he sat behind the big desk in the Oval Office. Trump hasn’t changed. Trump can’t change. Trump won’t change.

What should be clear to the people of the United States, and unfortunately isn’t, is that Trump and the two political parties have no interest in confronting the massive problems facing the country. This isn’t necessarily because all the people in government are evil fucktards -- though some of them (Attorney General Sessions, for instance) surely are -- but because our political and economic system is designed to serve the interests of private property and private capital. Forget all the rhetoric about “We the people” and “all men are created equal”. Our system rewards particular behaviors along a very narrow spectrum that doesn’t include the welfare of the many. In the past, in the New Deal era for example, because the entire system was teetering, the negative consequences caused by unregulated capitalism had to be addressed and some effort to better distribute resources undertaken. This worked reasonably well for several decades. In fact, the financial reforms and social initiatives of the New Deal era worked too well, presented too much of a challenge to the system and those who own and profit from it.

Poll after poll demonstrates that Americans of all political persuasions want affordable college tuition, health care, decent housing, safe roads and highways, clean drinking water, retirement security, and other basic necessities of life. The wealthy individuals and corporations who run the country have no interest in any of these things.

Our failed, stupid war in Afghanistan is set to last a lot longer. When Trump earlier this week announced a change in strategy, which was not much of a change at all, except perhaps to exacerbate tensions between India and Pakistan, many corporate media talking heads applauded in their usual knee-jerk way, so conditioned are they to support war. Insert 4,000 troops or 40,000 and the US is still going to flounder, and ultimately fail. Our brave and heroic troops may, as Trump boasted, kill some terrorists, but they will also kill and displace hundreds, if not thousands, more innocent civilians than have been killed and displaced in the past 16 years. This means creation of more fanatics filled with grievance and hatred and hell-bent on revenge.

Obviously influenced by the military men he has surrounded himself with, Trump offered only destruction and death in a country in desperate need of a political solution. Does the US even bother with diplomacy in the age of Trump and the Kleptocrats? Why talk when you can bomb? The majority of the American people are paying no attention to Afghanistan, have probably forgotten that any US troops are there at all. What we should have learned is that   starting a war is easy, ending one is much more difficult; the generals dig in, refuse to face reality, demand more troops, more drones, more cruise missiles, and promise that victory -- whatever that means -- is around the corner, within reach. Defense contractors like Raytheon and Boeing have a huge financial stake in keeping wars going, and their lackeys in Congress are scared to death to oppose them.

Do we ever learn? Of course not. And what does a culture of endless war abroad mean on the domestic front? Can a nation engaged in foreign military conflicts enjoy peace and prosperity at home? Ask the protesters at Standing Rock or activists from Black Lives Matter what it feels like to confront militarized police forces.

The taxpayer money that has been poured into Afghanistan, wasted, lost, funneled to warlords and corrupt officials, could easily alleviate the crushing student loan debt faced by so many Americans.

Opportunity lost in the fog of endless war.

Fire & Fury

“By interpreting freedom as the multiplication and the rapid satisfaction of needs, they do violence to their own nature, for such an interpretation merely gives rise to many senseless and foolish desires, habits and most absurd inventions.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The elderly of North Korea know fire and fury very well. They survived carpet-bombing by the US Air Force, the dropping of napalm on their towns and cities. War and utter destruction is their history, never to be forgotten. Yes, the leader of North Korea is as nutty and unstable as the leader of the United States, but let’s keep in mind that North Korea doesn’t stage massive military exercises -- war games they are called -- near the border of the United States.  

I keep reminding myself in these days of August that Donald Trump and his band of incompetent kleptocrats and bigots are a symptom, not a cause. The problem is neoliberalism, imperialism and militarism; I keep reminding myself that American capitalism is a failure, a brutal and inhumane system that works -- spectacularly well -- for only a small percentage of the population and leaves the majority insecure, indebted and in misery; I keep reminding myself that the economy is a castle of sand, sure to be toppled by the next big wave; I keep reminding myself that racism lies at the heart of the American experience, and that it takes little to unleash that wicked genie from the bottle. Look at what just happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. To me it was like being shot back in time, to 1955 or 1860 or 1741. We can say, “this isn’t us,” but it’s not true -- this is us. Racist, violent, intolerant and ignorant.

The author Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking on Democracy Now, placed the inaction of the Charlottesville police in perfect context when he said, imagine if, after the killing of Eric Garner by police, black people had organized a march and flooded into the streets laden with torches, clubs, guns and shields, and brawled in the streets with counter-protesters. Do we think the police would have stood idly by and done nothing? Unarmed black people are gunned down in this ass-backward country for driving a vehicle with a busted taillight.

Fareed Zakaria passes himself off as one of the wise men of CNN, but, like so many of his colleagues, he’s a hack who toils within the narrow confines of what masquerades as public debate. On Bill Maher’s HBO show the other day Zakaria said that illegal immigration has been a long-standing problem in part because it has driven down the wages of working Americans. Maher let this trope pass without challenge. Wages in America have been flat for decades by design. Offshoring manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and other countries where labor is dirt cheap was a conscious decision by American corporations and the allies they bought in government. Trade, tax and monetary policies that favor capital over labor, investors over workers, have also contributed to wage stagnation here. And let’s not forget the effects that union busting have had on wages. Decades of corporate attacks on what once was called Big Labor by corporations, with support from Republicans and Democrats, have done far more than illegal immigration to produce the staggering level of wealth inequality that is not only tolerated in this country, but celebrated.

Every single day King Donald I exposes the deep cracks and fissures in the foundation of our system, the insane and insatiable desire for wealth and power, the complete indifference to human needs, domestically and abroad, the unbridled arrogance with which America deals with the rest of the world. Even if King Donald were driven from his throne tomorrow the system would stumble on toward the abyss, like a blind ogre.

It was 70 years ago that the British partitioned India. Millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of arbitrary lines. The mayhem and dislocation and violence that ensued was monumental and the ramifications continue to this day.

Fear and intolerance are powerful things.

Trump Declares War -- On Tacos

“That’s the thing about privilege; those who hold and wield it are afflicted by a maddening tunnel vision, an obliviousness to the forces and needs (beyond corporate board rooms) that shape the world.” Oscar Gonzalez

The White House is a grim, unsettled place these days with a lot of nervous, confused and frightened people scurrying around in a doomed attempt to keep up with President Trump’s mercurial pronouncements and splenetic declarations. There are cocky and belligerent folks too, mostly those who spend a lot of time with Trump. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, routinely belittles the White House servants, complains about the food, and threatens to fire any underling who doesn’t jump high or fast enough. Ivanka, even more of a tyrant than her hubby, has already cycled through four assistants; three of them ran out of the White House in tears. There have also been reports from credible sources that sometimes, in the wee hours of the night, the lights in the residence flicker on and off and an eerie wailing from a source unknown can be heard, but, oddly, this arouses no suspicion whatsoever. One source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he hasn’t experienced such a dark, moody vibe in the White House since the last year of the Nixon Administration.

Late one recent evening, President Trump summoned his new Chief of Staff, John Kelly, and his chief political guru, Stephen Bannon, to the Oval Office.

DT: I don’t like seeing those trucks on the street, especially in Washington D.C.

JK: What trucks are those, sir?

DT: Those taco trucks. They’re everywhere, on every corner, on every block, probably operated by illegal immigrants or other bad hombres. They just pull up and start dishing out tacos and burritos and tortas like they own the street, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re dealing drugs, too. I want this investigated right away by the FBI’s best people. The best! Get them on it! Order them to infiltrate the taco truck cartels. I want them wiped from our streets! They’re a grave threat to our national security, like Iran and North Korea. I want to see good, old fashioned hot dog carts, pushed by real Americans. No dark-skinned foreigners. Nothing is more terrific, more American, than a plump juicy hot dog slathered in mustard and sauerkraut and onions. When people complain that there are no jobs we’re going to tell them to get in the hot dog business. Once this taco truck ban takes full effect all across the nation, it will create thousands, maybe even millions of jobs!

JK: I will have it investigated, Mr. President.

SB: Wonderful idea, Mr. President. It dovetails nicely with our ongoing effort to level the playing field for white Americans. It’s about time America had a president committed to alleviating the oppression of the silent white majority by militant and entitled blacks, spics, and Asians. This move will solidify your base of support and most definitely boost your poll numbers even higher, sir.

DT: How high are my numbers now, Bannon?

SB: I located a rare but highly credible poll produced by a small community college in Alabama that pegs your approval rating at 70%.

DT: That’s huuuuuge. That’s real news. Get that in the mainstream media. Call our friends at Fox and Sinclair. I want this covered, wall-to-wall.

SB: Yes sir.

DT: John, how great a job am I doing? Has any president ever done as much as I have in such a short time? Nobody is even close, am I right? I’ve done more in seven months than Obama did in eight years. And nobody is more presidential, am I right? Maybe Lincoln, but nobody else comes close. I walk into a room at the G20 and everybody stops what they’re doing because they know a strong US president is in the house, ready to do business. I walk in and the other leaders wet their pants, they soil themselves. Sad! I sit down with Putin and he knows he’s dealing with a real man. I go to Poland and the people love me because they know I’m not going to take any crap. Huge crowds wherever I go, adoring crowds, women tossing flowers at me, little kids asking for my autograph. The Saudis think I’m awesome. I’m easily the most respected leader in the world.

JK: You’re a very great, man, Mr. President. You’re single-handedly making America great again.

Melania Trump enters the room, hisses at Bannon and Kelly and gives her husband the finger.

DT: What are you doing, Melania? We’re talking business here, important stuff you wouldn’t understand. I just made a major decision. My decisiveness is unbelievable, off the chart, so much better than Obama’s. I make the best decisions, incredible decisions.

MT: (Looking unimpressed) What decision is that, Donald?

DT: A complete and total ban on all taco trucks nationwide. They will be replaced by hot dog carts. How great is that, huh? How great am I? C’mon, tell me.

MT: Donald, you are an asshole, surrounded by assholes. I’m going to bed. Don’t disturb me when you come up, and if you know what’s good for you, don’t even try to touch me.

Melania exits.

DT: You can see how much she worships me, am I right?

JK & SB: (In unison) Absolutely, sir, no doubt about it.

Gangsta Nation

“In this hour, in this day of conflict, his insights bear repeating, for although some things have indeed changed, we must scream the naked truth that some things remain the same.” Mumia Abu-Jamal on James Baldwin

Who else but Donald Trump could stand before a gathering of Boy Scouts and make a total ass of himself?

That’s the American president, a gigantic asshole who every single hour of every single day demeans the highest office in the land. He is a turd floating in a wading pool. Trump makes war criminal presidents like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush look benevolent and entirely sane.

To be sure, the Boy Scouts of America have always been a creepy, paramilitary organization, designed to reinforce mythical American values, white and Christian supremacy, and imperialism, but the Scouts didn’t deserve that display of madness. Some of those boys may be scarred for life.

And how about Trump’s decree that transgender people will not serve in the empire’s military forces? Anyone willing to be shipped off to fight and die for the cause of American imperialism and hegemony should be welcomed to do so, be they white, black, brown, gay, straight, or transgender. Trump blathered about our military needing to focus on earning a “decisive and overwhelming victory,” but the fool didn’t mention which of our many conflicts this focus applied to. Maybe he meant America’s war on the Muslim world, over which a “decisive and overwhelming victory” isn’t within the realm of possibility. North Korea? Iran? Jamaica? Cuba? A citizen can never be sure with Trump.

Trump is so inept that he would be hard pressed to earn the lowest Boy Scout merit badge. Born with a golden spoon in his mouth and a silver one shoved up his ass, Trump has rarely had to lift a finger to secure his wants and needs, and he’s the last man I would want by my side on a trek in the wilderness. Imagine the whining and whinging, the claims of unfairness when flies and mosquitoes swarm, the moaning about being tired and thirsty and hot and sweaty. Trump swaggers around like a macho man, but it’s clear that at heart he’s a coward; most bullies are.

What a state of affairs. What a monumental cluster-fuck. We raise our glasses in praise of venal men and women, frauds and liars, thieves and perverts. We celebrate ignorance, glorify violence, and pray to a false god. In this climate to think too deeply, to search for and confront the truth is to dearly suffer.  

The black dog comes over me and everything feels very dark and hopeless. I can’t find an antidote. I feel out of step and out of time, weighed down by the stupidity, cruelty and injustice that has been exposed by the emergence of Trump and his band of thieves. I know these traits have always been present, under Obama, Bush, Clinton, Carter, Republican and Democrat, it makes little difference which party is in the ascendancy; from the beginning American rhetoric and American deeds have rarely matched. All one has ever had to do is pull back the velvet curtain and look, see Uncle Sam standing before a map of the world, his hands drenched in blood and his coat pockets bulging with $100 bills.

Fated to Hope

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” Eugene V. Debs

It’s never easy to confront the naked truth. It’s takes a big pair of balls because the truth isn’t pleasant. For instance, to confront the fact that climate change is more serious than even most scientists are willing to admit; that the United States is an immoral and murderous empire; that capitalism is a system of death and destruction. The American corporate media hide the truth behind a solid wall of bullshit and myth, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the reality anyone can see if they but choose to open their eyes.

This is the thought that haunts me: my children are in for a dark and terrible ride and I can’t do much to help them because we don’t have money, stocks, bonds, real estate -- we’re working class -- living on wages, and my son is already in student loan debt, no fault of his own, he just wanted a shot at an education, and sure, he went about it all wrong, but should this doom him to a life of penury? In America, yes, it should, because this is a cruel and heartless nation ruled by oligarchs who live only to acquire more and more and more. There are 101 ways to make the working poor take it in the shorts: fees, usurious interest rates, penalties, rents, co-pays, all described in fine print written by corporate lawyers for the benefit of their masters. No one fights for the working class anymore. The working class -- white, black, brown, queer, trans -- is the carcass the rich feed on.

Pay attention to the intersection of capitalism, endless war, and environmental deterioration. Connect the dots.

Why do Americans accept that our country is engaged in an endless, futile, stupid war on a global scale? Why? Is it because there are no graphic images on our screens of bodies riddled with bullets or without limbs? Or because we don’t see flag-draped coffins being offloaded from aircraft? Or is it because there isn’t a draft? War is now, by design, out of sight and out of mind, happening elsewhere, far away, nothing at all for us to get worked up about. This isn’t the Vietnam era, college campuses are not seething with outrage; it’s as if our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and Somalia and Syria are not happening at all. And of course we don’t see the innocent victims.

I never voted for endless war.

I never voted for merciless, predatory capitalism to invade every corner and crevice of American life.

I never voted for a government overflowing with cretins.

This American nightmare doesn’t end with the rising sun. American vampires defy all the rules and hunt when the sun is at its apex, suck the blood of innocents in broad daylight, at the base of the Washington Monument, on the battlefield at Gettysburg, and in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. At night the moon over America turns crimson and the stars look like molten tears.

How many can draw a sword and stand before the Truth, willing to fight to the death for the downtrodden, the infirm, the elderly and the feeble? How many will engage in a battle that they know is foreordained to end in their own demise?

The point of no return is far behind us. The Joker and the Jack of Hearts fuck with us for sport. And through the acrid smoke and the screams of the dying, we, the living, are fated to hope.  

When Reality Feels Like Fiction

“If you’re really looking for a scandal, think about that. The United States and Russia, the world’s top two nuclear powers, are both headed by petro-capitalist oligarchs who could give a flying fuck about human survival and who both represent an eco-exterminist system that is choking the life out of the planet.” Paul Street, Counterpunch

I took a break from reading Moby Dick to re-read Martin Cruz Smith’s Tatiana, one in his series of novels featuring the Russian investigator Arkady Renko. The character behind the title, Tatiana Petrovna, is an investigative journalist in the new, post-Soviet Russia, a world of corrupt officials, oligarchs, and gangsters all vying to skim a windfall for themselves. In this nearly lawless world, investigative journalists who expose corruption  become targets for beatings, intimidation, and murder. I was reminded of the way journalists are treated in Turkey under Erdogan, and in Mexico, where reporters who edge too close to the intersection of narco interests and crooked government officials die; and then, of course, I thought about my own country and the way our insane president denigrates the press every chance he gets. Reality feels fictional.

One runs out of things to say about Trump and his gang of incompetent kleptocrats. Crooks. Greedheads. Fucktards. Shitbags. Dickheads. Every day, it seems, there’s another hint of scandal or another batshit crazy Tweet or another absurd statement, like when Trump proclaims that he has accomplished more than any other president after a comparable stint in office. Trump still doesn’t grasp that signing an executive order is not the same as passing legislation. Irreversible damage is being done day after day by Trump and his gang, and by feckless politicians who are more concerned with ideological purity or base opportunism than common sense and the good of the country.

All Trump has managed to accomplish is to embarrass the hell out of the US on the world stage, fan the flames of division on the home front, and make a mockery of his office. As he was a lousy tycoon, lousy husband, lousy father, and all around lousy human being, Trump is a lousy president.

The Russia-Trump headlines, all of them blaring for attention, are now too frequent to be meaningful. All I can say is that if a trail of money can be found, follow it, and it may lead to connections between Russian oligarchs and the Trump Organization. It’s always going to be about money with Trump and his clan, as money is the only thing they really love.

What’s the wealth inequality figure I’m frequently reading about, that 5 or 6 people own as much wealth as the bottom 50% of humanity? Yeah, this is definitely a sign that capitalism is working just fine, lifting all the little boats on a rising tide…of human excrement, Benzene, battery acid, motor oil, and mercury.

I’m trying to stay sane and keep my head above the waterline as I watch my country slide down the drain. I want to live in a country that isn’t insane, that isn’t an empire, and that isn’t the single greatest instigator of violence on the planet. Is this too much to ask? Why don’t we give the idea of doing no harm to other countries and the planet a try? Why not give sustaining rather than destroying a go? Would cooperation rather than competition bring on the apocalypse?

What to do, what to do? Where to seek shelter from the gathering storm?

 

Meanderings

“Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they’ve always bought.” Matt Taibbi, Insane Clown President

>America’s Afghanistan Scorecard (Courtesy of Robert L. Borosage):

Cost of our 16-year-long war: $117 billion (No wonder we can’t afford free tuition at public colleges!)

Americans killed; 2,400

Americans wounded: 20,000

Cost of equipment for the Afghan Army: $11 billion

Afghan casualties: 225,000 (but who’s counting and who cares?)

>Every time I buy something from Amazon I feel guilty. I hate contributing to Amazon’s dominance, making the company bigger, more profitable and influential because I know how ruthless Amazon is, how bad for manufacturers, book sellers, and workers. It’s the same feeling I get when my son comes home from H&M with a bag of clothes made in India or Vietnam. He sees affordable garments; I see young women chained to sewing machines. I am a participant in a deadly system. Fuck!

>Trump in Poland, protected by bulletproof Plexiglass, banging on about how Western civilization is under attack and in danger of being overwhelmed. By whom, exactly? Anyone who isn’t like Trump, white and ostensibly Christian? Pure Steve Bannon horsehit. Disturbing echoes of the Nazi party too, but apparently music to modern Polish ears. Build walls, hunker down, lock and load, drive out any person who looks, acts, or seems different. Here’s what I know for sure: I’m not worried about Western civilization, I’m worried about civilization, period, and Donald Trump is a real and present threat to civilization.

>When Trump and Putin sit down for a chat perhaps Putin will school Trump on how a real strongman crushes the media.

>The water canons, drones, helicopters and stun grenades came out early for the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. Pesky protesters! The world’s economic masters will show them who’s boss.

>Never forget that the elites who rule and run the world have a dim view of democracy. Too messy, too unpredictable. Coming out of the 1960’s, America’s wealthy decided that the hippy freaks had had their day and it was time for corporations and the business community to reassert and reaffirm that the business of America is business, profit-making, unfettered capitalism. For the elites, exploitation of people and natural resources was their birthright. While hippies and Flower Children faded into the mainstream, and the Democratic Party began to abandon its core constituents, the right wing of the Republican Party started staging a corporate coup, now largely complete. Keep an eye on Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State and head hitman on Trump’s absurd election commission. Kobach is a master of voter suppression and he wants to do for the entire country what he did for Kansas, namely, kick eligible voters of color off the voting roles. Journalist Greg Palast has done some good reporting about Kobach. Where does the GOP find these scary fuckers?

>The things he left behind. Six steel tape measures of various lengths. A coffee can full of nuts and bolts. Fishing tackle. Three circular saws, a jigsaw, two portable drills, four socket sets, a telescope, myriad hand tools, pocket knives, safety goggles, two metal toolboxes, a small American flag, a walking stick, an underwater camera, fins, rubber booties, an air compressor, a snake for unclogging pipes, a pair of orange traffic cones, and more, bits and bobs, odds and ends, but none of it told the complete story of the man, my father-in-law, an immigrant from Mexico.

Something Dark and Sinister This Way Comes

“If we cannot respond with swift compassion, this is the beginning of our decline and fall.” I.F. Stone

My wife and I talk about life in TrumpLand, and the strange, vertiginous feeling that although little in our own lives has changed since Trump assumed power, there is something dark and sinister hovering in the background. We know a shock is coming, just not what it will be or when it will hit. It’s like waiting for an earthquake, the Big One.   

It’s difficult to ignore the daily outrages perpetrated by Trump -- his idiotic and juvenile tweets and incoherent statements about serious issues he clearly knows nothing about that send the corporate media into a frenzy -- but it’s far more important to look past Trump at what the people around him are doing, like Scott Pruitt at the EPA, Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department, and Ryan Zinke at the Interior Department. Real damage is in the offing. Long term damage that will be difficult to reverse, damage to the air we breathe, the water we drink, to voting rights, mass incarceration, and on down the line.

I’m astonished, as I have been since it became law, at the GOP’s hatred of the Affordable Care Act, and not because I think the ACA is wonderful, I don’t, but because the Republicans  know that the framework for the ACA was a product of a conservative think tank, and that the law maintained the profit-making position of the private insurance industry. If a Republican president had been the one to sign the ACA into law do you think the GOP would be clamoring for its repeal? The actions of the detestable Paul “Wonder Boy” Ryan in the House, and the callous machinations of Mitch “Turtle” McConnell in the Senate merely expose the pathology of the GOP. All the sound and fury coming from Washington has little to do with health insurance, next to nothing with health care, and everything to do with delivering a gigantic tax cut to people who already have more money than they know what to do with. It’s immoral, obscene, cruel, heartless, and stupid. In short, it’s America, right here, right now.

The only sensible, sane, and moral system of medical care in a complex society is Single Payer. Start with the premise that access to health care is a basic human right, realize that every last human being will, at some time, become sick or injured or disabled and require medical care. Not insurance coverage -- medical care. Give up the perverted fantasy that medical care must be a capitalist enterprise. As anyone with medical insurance who goes for treatment and then receives a bill knows, insurance is one thing and actual care another. Too many people with medical insurance still find themselves saddled with enormous bills, with co-pays, with procedures or drugs that either aren’t covered at all or only partially covered. Insurance companies add zero value to medical care; they are blood-sucking parasites who make money by denying care.

I’m re-reading Moby Dick. It seems appropriate for the times; America is the Pequod.

Back Where We Began

“But the truth is that no one is exempt -- the system that crushes one will crush all.” Emily Temple, review of Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery.”

Disturbing days in TrumpLand. My anger isn’t burning as hot as it was a few days back when I wrote and posted “Poet in a Bad Mood,” but I am plenty mad about all the shit going down in this failing nation. The cop who killed Philando Castile will stroll, free, as if he had gunned down a coyote or a rabid dog. Castile, like all the other unarmed black men murdered by state agents, doesn’t matter enough to warrant the prosecution of his killer. What does it take for a police officer to be held accountable for killing a black person in America? Video evidence brings the crime into the light but rarely seems helpful in securing an indictment, let alone a conviction. As Ronnie Dunn noted on Counterspin, all a cop has to do to walk away unscathed from one of these fatal shootings is claim he feared for his life. For a cop who guns down a black man, them’s the magic words.

I was reminded of the racist reality of America by a segment Bill Moyers did on the Big Lie that got Donald Trump on the national stage and then into the White House: the Birther Lie. The birther lie, in case you’ve forgotten, was the proposition put forth in 2009 by right-wing cranks, and then Trump, that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Trump was all over the corporate media back then, spouting this bullshit that our first African-American president was not actually an American, that he was born in Kenya, educated in a madrassa, raised a Muslim, in other words, foreign, suspect, illegitimate. On and on this went. It was a minor story that should have flashed across our TV screens and vanished, but Trump and his ilk kept it alive for several years. Bill Moyers interviewed four distinguished historians, three of them African-American, one white, about how the Big Lie placed Donald Trump in a perfect position to benefit from the white electorate’s pent up hatred of our African-American president. If not for Obama, it’s unlikely Trump would today be in the White House doing everything in his power to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, from undermining the nuclear agreement with Iran, to sabotaging the Paris Climate Accord, to replacing the Affordable Care Act with an even less effective, and far crueler, alternative. Trump is in many things ignorant, lazy, unhinged, idiotic, and bigoted, but, like every demagogue, he senses what a particular group of people want to hear, need to hear, either to give them hope that their power and privilege isn’t waning, or to give them a scapegoat for their own failure. The problem isn’t you, white America, it’s the liberals, it’s political correctness, it’s multicultural studies, it’s Affirmative Action, it’s feminism, it’s the LGBT people, it’s Muslims, it’s Mexicans. It’s the destruction from within of “American Values” by all these other, non-white undesirables.

It’s all the fault of the black man in the White House who doesn’t deserve to sit at the apex of power in White America.  

Racism is the stain on the American soul that cannot be erased, whitewashed, painted over or scrubbed away. It was present at the beginning of our history, present during and after Reconstruction and during the long struggle for civil rights, through lynchings, beatings, fire-bombings, terror campaigns, sit-ins and marches and boycotts. Every time we get to thinking of how far we have come, we turn around to find we are back where we began.