Target Practice

“More death and destruction will undoubtedly follow as Israeli forces prepare for a land invasion, children will die, the tragic numbers in Israel will be dwarfed by the magnitude of horrifying death in Gaza. Mothers and fathers will weep and young men will vow vengeance. We know this story.” Alice Rothchild, Counterpunch 

Gaza is being bombed, again. 2008. 2012. 2014. How many times can one 350 square mile sliver of land be pounded by advanced weaponry, and how much longer will the State of Israel be allowed to kill Palestinians with impunity? If my memory serves, the UN issued a report in 2014 that concluded that Gaza might be uninhabitable by 2020. As always, the United States pledges its support for Israel’s right to “defend itself.” No mention made of the right of the Palestinian people to simply live. Do the majority of the Israeli people support what their government is doing in their name? Aren’t the Jews doing to the Palestinians what was done to Jews in Russia, Poland, and Germany for generations? Ethnic cleansing. Wholesale theft of land, water, homes. 

The conflict is always depicted in the American media as one waged between equals, which is laughable. The US doesn’t gift the Palestinians millions of dollars worth of military hardware every year, nor does it promote the Palestinian cause in the United Nations at every opportunity as it does Israel. The leader of the Palestianian Authority isn’t invited to address a joint session of Congress as Bibi Netanyahu was a few years ago. 

Why do I care? What does it have to do with me and the price of bread or cheese? What has it to do with the work my wife and I need to do on our new digs? Maybe nothing, but as a citizen of the US, it pisses me off to no end that my government consistently and unquestioningly backs Israel. The journalist Chris Hedges wrote this week, “I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. “ Children are being killed. In the West Bank news reports say mobs of angry Jews roam the avenues looking for Arab targets. Do they want to murder them all? This conflict began years before I was born. I was 8-years-old during the 1967 war that saw Israel take control and occupy Palestinian land in violation of international law. When public health lockdowns went into effect across the US in 2020, many Americans reacted as if all their civil liberties had been permanently stripped away. Well, imagine living under siege and the threat of bombardment the way the people of Gaza do every day. Imagine being forcibly evicted from the house your family has lived in for half a century. Imagine watching Jewish settlers set fire to your olive trees. In this long conflict there have been casualties on both sides, though disproportionately on the Palestinian side. They seem to stand all alone, invisible to the world. A good number of countries are critical of Israel, but as long as Israel is backed by US economic and military power, nothing changes. The State of Israel has been emboldened to take more, and more, expanding ever further. 

What did Martin Luther King Jr. say about injustice? The exact quote slips my memory but the gist of it was that people should push back against injustice wherever they encounter it, because sooner or later injustice comes calling. Wherever one human life is devalued compared to another, deemed less important, less worthy of dignified treatment. Collective punishment of a civilian population is illegal under international law, but of course Israel isn’t deterred by that. By providing cover for Israel to do whatever it pleases my government is complicit in these crimes. 

Too Much Stuff

 

“Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain.” Bob Dylan

= I came across a quote by Thomas Mann that seems to sum up the age we are living in here in the barely united United States.  Mann wrote, “Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.” The batshit antics of the Trump-owned GOP, from the surreal ballot recount in Arizona, which may be ruled illegal if it gets any nuttier, to Trump urging all his sycophants to run Liz Cheney out of her leadership position, to the hundreds of anti-democracy voting bills introduced in Republican-controlled state legislatures. The assault on Liz Cheney, who sits third in the House hierarchy, behind the power-mad Kevin McCarthy and Trump bootlicker Steve Scalise, is an example of the GOP eating its own. Cheney’s transgression? Refusing to carry water for Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, which, let’s not forget, he lost. I haven’t forgotten that Cheney is the spawn of Uncle Dick Cheney, one of the most devious VP’s in recent history; she’s a hard-right Conservative about whom the only positive thing I can say is that at least what she believes is tethered to reality. If it appears that Cheney is standing alone against the Forces of Trump it’s only because the bar for integrity in the GOP is an inch from the surface of the cesspool. McCarthy, McConnell, Hawley, Cruz, Rubio -- this bumper crop of political miscreants -- who daily trade their honor for power, are going to destroy the GOP as a viable political party. Since the Reagan Revolution conservatives have run the table, as dominant as the best Manchester United teams under Sir Alex Ferguson, but they have lost the magic and must be relegated. They’re out of ideas, other than obstruction and destruction. They’re deathly afraid of Donald J. Trump, who sits on his fat behind down in Mar-A-Lago and whines about election fraud, and SAVING OUR GREAT COUNTRY to small crowds of devoted fans and asskissers like Kevin McCarthy. America might benefit from more than two political parties, but at the very least two are necessary, and they must do more than obstruct, undercut, and sabotage each other. We’re headed for a bad patch, of this I am sure. The GOP is too far out to sea to rescue itself. Thanks to Trump, the man incapable of accepting defeat, every election from here out will be doubted, contested, and denounced for impropriety. Democracy runs on faith in shared norms, and rules written and unwritten. Trump always thought, and still does, that no law applies to him. 

=One week in our new digs. First time we’ve ever lived in a house. Still surrounded by boxes in need of unpacking, but we’ve made good progress in a week. Got the cable and the WiFi connected -- after I dashed down to Office Max and bought a new cable modem. Washed our first loads of laundry, ironically the last in our 15-year-old GE washing machine. Blew the bearings the first time we used it in our new home. We bought a refurbished Kenmore for $450 from a man with a side yard full of appliances of every description. Commercial grade stoves, a huge gas range circa1949, refrigerators, cannibalized washers and dryers, hoses and motors. It was like an amusement park of appliances. 

We have real windows. By that I mean double-windows which slide up and down. Of the many things I loathed about our apartment, the casement windows were at the top of the list. I’ve always wanted a front porch wide enough for a bench or chairs, and now we have one, with a little bistro set my wife purchased from Wayfair or such. (Inexpensive stuff, made in China by human beings who earn very little money, a fact not lost on me.) We have a solid front door. We have nooks and crannies, a kitchen you can actually move around in without bumping into something or someone. We even have a fireplace. Yet this first week we have struggled to adapt to the space, our minds and muscles trained over two decades to a very different configuration of light switches and cupboards and drawers. Waking up one night to pee, I was momentarily lost, not sure where the bathroom was. Long way to go yet, but this is going to be a wonderful house to live in, though I suspect it will be cold in the winter months. Another month, possibly two, before we’re dialed in. 

The move has also been difficult because clutter and disorder unsettles me. I can handle a certain amount of both, but when I reach my limit I get cranky as hell, a problem for my wife and daughter, both of whom tend to hoard. Over twenty years we had simply accumulated too much stuff, a lot of it useless. I counted six upright fans, a big box of board games no one has played for at least five years, a bolt of muslin that I’ve wanted to toss for a quarter century, a broken telescope that belonged to my wife’s father. To me moving day felt like drowning. We loaded box after box into the U-Haul and still there were more. For the first couple of days we climbed over and around boxes and hunted for toothbrushes and Q-Tips and prescription medications. It kind of made me snap, I just lost my shit over the futility of moving all this stuff from one place to another, only this time without a large storage space to put it in. Six plastic storage boxes full of Christmas ornaments, enough to decorate three trees. Rolls of wrapping paper, some sealed, most open, loose, torn. Boxes of shoes. Stuff, everywhere. I’m still looking for a black belt. 

=My beloved Chelsea Football Club booked a place in the Champions League Final later this month, brushing aside a struggling Real Madrid team. This is a stunning achievement for a team that six months ago looked to be going absolutely nowhere. Frank Lampard’s team was bereft of identity and solidity, and some players, like centerback Antonio Rudiger, and wingback Marcos Alonso, had been shunted aside like surplus parts. When Lampard got sacked and the German Thomas Tuchel took over,  it was a reclamation project of the highest order. But Tuchel has been more than up to the task. The hallmark of successful football managers is their ability to make good players great players. Tuchel has a good football mind and very high standards for his team. 

New Beginnings

 “The single-minded pursuit of happiness, with happiness equated with hedonism, wealth, and power, creates a population consumed by anxiety and self-loathing.” Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

Moving day nears. On my 62nd birthday I watch West Ham versus Chelsea and then start packing, focusing on bookshelves. We have a lot of knick-knacks, theater playbills, photo albums. The boxes of books are heavy. While we prepare to move down the street, our son is moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a new job at the SF Opera. He and a friend stop by on their way north, in a 10’ U-Haul truck. My wife hands our son a Trader Joe’s bag full of treats and drinks for the road. When my mother called to wish me a happy birthday she told me that she will also be moving in May. The building she lives in is getting a plumbing overhaul, so rather than deal with daily noise and water outages, she’s moving in with a friend for a month. Strange that we’re all moving. In our case it’s long overdue. One way to tell you’ve lived in the same place too long is by the shadows left on the walls when pictures and mirrors are removed. 

So, I’m now 62. This blog is 17. Why do I keep at it? Why do I toss my words into the endless anonymity of the Internet? Must be ego, or stupidity, maybe narcissism. On the other hand, everyone needs a hobby to keep them out of mischief. 

I’m reading a fine book by William Deresiewicz called The Death of the Artist. It’s about the changes technology has wrought for writers, visual artists, and musicians. From Napster to Netflix, from three major television networks to streaming services that serve very specific slices of the viewing public. TV by subscription, on-demand, available on every one of our magic devices. Like all new technologies, it has made a few people very, very wealthy, but landed many more in precarious financial circumstances. Writers giving work away, spending hours and hours promoting themselves on social media in order to make money. It’s fascinating, and somewhat a downer for me as both my kids want to work in the Arts. 

In the midst of the latest spate of police violence I stumbled across a website called KnockLA and started reading an investigative series about the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. It’s a serious piece tracking fifty years of egregious misconduct against citizens of color by sheriff gangs who went by names like The Vikings and Tasmanian Devils. Unique tattoos were common in these “law enforcement” gangs. They beat suspects mercilessly, shot and killed many, planted evidence, executed blatantly unlawful searches and seizures, and lied in court under oath. What I found more chilling was how gang members treated fellow deputies who refused to go along. I remember reading stories in the LA Times about Sheriff Sherman Block, and Lee Baca, but since LA county is a hundred-plus miles from Santa Barbara, the stories were abstract. Reading this series in light of what is happening between police and citizens of color all across this country feels more immediate. Over 30 years, LA County shelled out some 100 million taxpayer dollars in legal expenses and settlements. I don’t completely subscribe to the Defund the Police idea. I think money definitely needs to be diverted from the police to other public services. Law enforcement is in dire need of consistent standards. Some of the legal protections cops enjoy need to be removed. Not every dime should be shifted-- we need police -- but police trained to respect the laws they swear to uphold, and stripped of the majority of their military-grade hardware. Here’s a link to Knock LA: https://knock-la.com.

62. I stopped drinking last July 31, cut out beer, wine, gin, whisky. I thought alcohol was getting the best of me and that I was reaching for a beer too reflexively. It wasn’t hard to stop. I think I might have a wee drink of whisky this evening, raise a glass to new beginnings and good luck. 

Two Verdicts

 “The number of fans has multiplied, along with the number of potential customers of as many things as the image manipulators wish to sell.” Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow

How to rile up the football world? Have a cabal of wealthy team owners make an announcement that 15 of the biggest football clubs in Europe are breaking away from their respective leagues to start their own European Super League. I began writing about this on Monday, before the whole scheme unraveled with extraordinary speed. Supporters were not having it. Pundits were aghast. Former players reacted with anger. The word “greed” was tossed around in a way almost never heard in this country, where business titans are impervious to criticism. And then the dominoes fell, first Man City, then Chelsea, followed by Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Tottenham. The firestorm of criticism that erupted on social media and swept across the world was astonishing. The greedheads got rolled by a tsunami and lost control of their gambit. What seemed to the moguls a can’t-miss money-making bonanza -- a virtual monopoly over the highest quality football in the world -- ran headlong into the love of football fans for the game and their beloved clubs; ran headlong into traditions built over 100 years or more; ran headlong into the idea that football -- unlike other sports -- belongs to the supporters. The Americans, John Henry, the Glazer brothers, and Stan Kroenke, just found out what love and devotion and tradition really mean. 

Money was the driving motivator behind the ESL. Broadcast deals. Merchandising. Not the good of the game, expanding competition, sharing revenue, or strengthening the football pyramid, that is, all the second, third and fourth tier clubs. Football’s wider ecosystem, where players are developed, learn the game, and move up the ladder. No, the ESL was envisioned as a closed league, an elite league, with no chance of relegation for the 15 founding members. No bumping up against and rubbing elbows with lesser clubs. For the players, among other restrictions, no international duty and its potential for injury. The ESL owners would control their human assets, protect their money-making potential in the same way a racehorse is protected. The owners are interested in profits, first and foremost. An argument can be made that modern football is a business and the owners have every right to make money from their “assets.” But in most countries, football transcends money, and for many supporters the game is almost a mystical experience, as precious as life itself, with generations of fans having grown up supporting a particular club. In England, as elsewhere in Europe, football clubs have deep roots in cities and towns, club and place inextricably linked. Liverpool, for instance, where the relationship between the club and its supporters is long, intimate, intense, and unwavering. Following the fortunes of the club year in and year out gives texture and meaning to the lives of thousands of supporters. 

Do the American owners, in particular, understand the deep bond between supporters and their clubs? Do they care? My guess is no. American capitalists have a long track record of abandoning communities for more profitable pastures. Auto plants, steel mills, foundries, coal mines and factories that gave work and life to towns and cities were sacrificed to the “global” economy. Money has no loyalty except to its own multiplication. When I was a boy the Rams called Los Angeles home; years ago the team’s owner moved the whole shebang to Saint Louis; after the Raiders left working-class Oakland they tried Los Angeles and then settled in Las Vegas. The NBA’s Seattle Supersonics decamped the Emerald City for Oklahoma. There are still a few New Yorkers who remain angry about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. Team owners in America, almost all white and rich, often choose a new home based on the tax breaks they can extort, land they can corner for cheap, and a stadium or arena built for them with taxpayer money. 

I didn’t grow up watching soccer. Back then the sport wasn’t popular in the US, it was weird, foreign, too uneventful for American tastes. I came to the game late in life -- and fell in love. The skill of the players, the passion of the fans, the talk and camaraderie, the global nature of the game -- I fell hard for all of it, in a way I had never experienced. Football brings people together, it brings players from different countries together, it’s inclusive and beautiful and more than a commodity to be packaged and peddled. 

For now, football supporters have stopped the greedheads. 

///

I didn’t follow the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop who murdered George Floyd, because I felt certain he would get off. Despite the overwhelming video evidence, I assumed Chauvin would somehow be exonerated. I didn’t dare believe that Chauvin would be found guilty on any counts, let alone all three. I prepared for a bitter disappointment akin to what I felt when the cops who beat the hell out of Rodney King in Los Angeles walked. I thought of the video of George Floyd’s slow, agonizing death, the smug look on Chauvin’s face as he kneeled on Floyd’s black neck, and how his fellow cops did nothing. 

I would like to think the verdict will mark a turning point, that twenty years from now Americans will look back and see April 20, 2021 as the date the arc of the moral universe actually bent toward justice.

Justice Deferred, Denied & Withheld

 “Classic children’s literature is full of racial, ethnic, class, and gender stereotyping, and the outdated language that goes along with that. Some of that can’t be fixed with a few cuts.” Katha Pollitt, in The Nation

Another young unarmed black man is gunned down by a police officer; his name, Daunte Wright; the officer’s name, Kim Potter. He was 20-years-old. She’s a 26-year veteran, an experienced, trained officer who mistakenly pulled her pistol rather than her taser. To some this fact pattern is incredulous, Potter’s excuse as flimsy as tissue paper. I’ve read that the taser is holstered on the left side, for a right-handed officer, the pistol on the right. After carrying a weapon for 26 years you might assume Potter would instantly feel the difference between her pistol and a taser. The day after the killing, Potter, along with the police chief, resigned. She’s been charged with second-degree manslaughter and is free on bail. Was it premeditated? Hard to say. More likely a mistake in the emotion of the moment. Was it a mistake based on false assumptions? Did Potter assume Wright was armed, that he posed a deadly threat? Will we hear that Wright was “non-compliant,” whatever that means? What, I wonder, is going through Potter’s mind now, and what was going through it when she drew her weapon, pulled the trigger and ended Daunte Wright’s life? Incapacitating force versus deadly force; if Daunte Wright were a 20-year-old white kid would he be alive now? I can’t remember another shooting involving a female officer; it’s usually a male, not that it matters. Daunte Wright is dead. What’s it like to wake up the morning after you ended a human being’s life? A human being who hadn’t posed a threat to your life or committed a serious crime. What does that feel like? And what does it feel like to wake up in the morning and know your son is gone, his life snuffed out?

I don’t know what to think any more other than the pedestrian observation that this country is violent, cruel, and disdainful about the lives of black people and others of darker pigment.  I don’t know if Kim Potter is a racist, but it’s possible she is and has been her entire career. The usual rituals will be performed again: the grieving, distraught family, the protests, the speeches, the social media tributes, the bland official statements and easily forgotten promises of reform from elected officials.Then many Americans will switch over to Fox News and listen to Tucker Carlson riff about The Great Replacement being engineered before our very eyes by Democrats (as if modern Democrats could engineer anything successfully), who are inviting millions of non-white foreigners to become citizens and thereby swell the ranks of Democratic voters. Because, you see, Tucker’s theory is that all brown-skinned immigrants are bleeding heart liberals who will always and forever vote for Democrats. Carlson’s the sort of smug white asshole that makes America hospitable to white supremacy, and he gets plenty of aid from the Murdoch media empire. All those brown-skinned people desperate to cross the border are incapable of thinking for themselves, in Tucker’s estimation, so once safely inside with feet firmly planted on this fruited plain they will do exactly as Democrats say to the detriment of salt-of-the-earth, real, honest-to-Betsy-Ross white Americans. 

White supremacy is out in the open again, promoted by a social media megaphone rather than a politician’s racist dog whistle. The changing demographics of America doesn’t trouble my sleep, it’s disturbed by visions of violent right-wing extremists. Even if they don’t realize it, white folks have more consequential problems to worry about than perceived losses of status and power, like climate change, living-wage jobs, and grotesque, destabilizing wealth inequality. As an idea and organizing principle white supremacy makes no sense to me. My skin is lighter than yours therefore I’m smarter than you, more morally evolved, superior and more deserving. Crock of shit. Power is what it boils down to. 

White folks want black and brown people to stay in their lanes, in their ghettoes, emerging only to mow lawns, mop floors, fold laundry, empty bedpans, and fetch artisanal cocktails at trendy farm-to-table restaurants. 

How long can simple justice be deferred, denied, and withheld? 

FRESH OUT OF LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY

 

“Like all living organisms, trees die. But what is happening here is not normal. Large patches of trees are dying simultaneously, and saplings aren’t growing to take their place.”  Emily Ury, The Guardian

America, America, America, turning into an open air prison, building Walls, turning public space into private, patrolled space, installing cameras and motion sensors, armed security guards. Angry country, as evidenced by mass shootings and slow deaths of despair. We draw the boundary lines and designate what tribe controls what. Won’t be long before states with fresh water supplies fight against states in the grip of drought. Hard to imagine the next decade being anything but a major downer, a clusterfuck the likes of which we’ve not seen. One day some people will look back and say, You know, it wasn’t that bad, even with Covid and the takeover by Christian Fascists. We got along alright. We adapted. Of course some got along in more style and comfort than others, this is America, after all. Trust, but verify in the age of Fear; Hunter S. Thompson called it the Kingdom of Fear -- a decade and a half ago. Evidence of the losing streak we’re stuck on. Too many guns, too few people able to consistently cast a ballot, too much injustice and inequality, too many needy, hungry, and broken. What manner of madness have we created here, on this once fruited plain? Of course that’s not true, either. If ever it was fruited, it was only for some, not all; there was plenty, but little equality. Riches for some, subsistence or slavish struggle for many others. 

Accept and normalize. Democracy may die with a whimper. New doors have opened, new ways to suppress the vote of some, magnify that of others, new ways to deny the popular will. The Would Be Lord down in Mar-a-Lago pointed the way, showed how pliable institutions are, how corrupt and complicit, from the Florida congressional district that barfed up Matt Gaetz, to the waste of an elite education represented by Josh Hawley, to Trump’s idiot children, and that insufferable prick Jared Kushner, to Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio. What a fucking joke. Stephen Miller. All this performative politics, this grotesque American theater, the ineptitude we saw close-up and nationwide when Covid hit and key institutions failed, faltered, fabricated and fucked up, with almost all the death and fear and distrust down to Donald J. Trump and his loyal enablers in the Republican Party. 9/11, Katrina, Trump, Covid. Party over country, and power over principle, year after year, that’s the GOP’s bread and butter power. Trump accelerated our slide to the bottom, Biden’s trying to slow it down. John Boehner is out with a book longing for the good old days of the GOP, the Tea Party days, when the entire party wasn’t beholden to a moron. Boehner’s on the rehabilitation tour now, looking for broken pieces he can collect, use as collateral to wield some influence, maybe rake in a bit of coin in the process.

Meanwhile, we sit in our homes, apartments, cottages, penthouses, basements, suites, condos, duplexes, tippees, or tin-roofed shacks, if such are still around in this day and age. I suppose they exist, in other places, where the cost of land isn’t as dear, places far from the cooling ocean breeze and red-tile splendor of downtown, out in the arid hinterlands where the heat shimmers and dust storms erupt. If we’re among the lucky we sit and wait for GrubHub to deliver dinner. Material wants and needs satisfied with ease on our phones, through the almost instantaneous transfer of funds. That’s some impressive shit, when you stop and think about how quickly we can turn a want into reality. Dropped on our doorstep by a chunky brown-skinned man in a blue Amazon van. Amazon is where we get our food and medicines, our toilet paper, our tampons, our pots and pans, our slow cookers, our tablets, our dildoes and scented lubricants. Amazon for everything, even, sooner or later, XXX porn. Yes, one day King Bezos will figure out a way to make huge profits from porn, he will control the pipes that carry the images, movies, whatever you fancy and are willing to pay for. Any sensible person can figure out the problem with monopolies and the people who own them. It’s pretty simple. Too much ends up in too few hands, and by too much I mean the obscene wealth of men like Bezos, Gates, and Musk. Pick your favorite plutocrat. We can have such people, but we cannot have democracy, too. Even limited democracy is difficult when so few control so much. But I get the frustration with democracy, it’s a slow, time-consuming, at times enervating process, and building any kind of political consensus with staying power is long game work. Social movements that stay in the game, on mission and message, that are adaptable and relevant, that avoid internal corruption and external co-optation are hard to build. Autocracy, on the other hand, can be speedy and decisive -- and disastrously, murderously wrong. Pick your poison. 

Is it better to toil in the gig economy than to work the line at General Motors under the United Autoworkers banner? Unions help working people and that’s why the political right has waged war on unions since Reagan broke PATCO. Look it up, younger readers. That broke the dam. But unions have problems of their own, no matter how much they profess to be “member run” and “democratic.” Power does things to people. A guy starts out in the union battling the tight-assed owner in cover-alls and boots, and sometimes ends up looking like a mirror image of the hated boss, and not only in dress and manner and speech, but in the way he acts the closer he gets to the center of power. Power is corrosive and has to be checked. It’s a diabolically difficult balance. 

In a jam, back to the wall, and fresh out of lawyers, guns and money. What’s a man with no property to do? Whose flag does such a man rally around? Where does such a man find like-minded souls? Down at the Fool’s Cafe where the patrons recite poetry and throw knives, and chant to bring about the brotherhood of man. This world’s crazy. It’s upside down and inside out. Thinking too much about where we go from here could be hazardous to your health. 

Suitcase Full of Memories

 “We can, and must, tax the rich. But not because we can’t afford to do anything without them. We should tax billionaires to rebalance the distribution of wealth and income and to protect the health of our democracy”. Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth

Write utter gibberish I tell myself, howl at the moon, nobody cares and it will cause no harm. I call my friend G in Michigan who just turned 60 and is legally blind and learning how to live as a sightless person. Lost his sight suddenly and for no cause a pack of MD’s could determine. He tells me about a place called Blind University, where blind folks are taught to navigate in the kitchen and out in the world. We talk about once a week, exchange text messages in between, usually about what’s happening in the news, with Trump and the balless, soulless, witless assholes, male and female, who ride with the GOP. G lives in a town full of Trumpers, with several of his nearest neighbors included. They don’t talk politics. G owns a firearm and often schools me on the lethal power of today’s weapons. His son’s in the Army, based at Fort Hood in Texas.  His oldest child, a daughter, is in the process of becoming an MD.  We met thirty years ago here in California and have kept in touch, with just one gap of a decade or so, since. 

We signed the lease on the house a block south from where we live now. Money will soon change hands, and that will seal it tight. Have also given my landlord notice. My family is excited about this move,  as am I, but I also find myself thinking of all the major moments we’ve had in this space, birthday parties, graduations, Thanksgivings, Christmas mornings, then too the screaming fights, slammed doors, arguments, the time I wanted to strangle my son for locking us out of the house, and all the sweet everyday moments. Many nights I felt very lucky to tuck my children into clean beds with a roof overhead and none of us hungry or sick. Too many people take this luxury for granted. I happen to believe that the walls of houses, especially old houses, hold memories, stories, mysteries and miseries; certain spaces just speak to us, give us an immediate sense of familiarity and safety or a shiver of disquiet. I find what I’m feeling surprising, unexpected, because on the one hand we are ready to go, but on the other, I feel a certain reluctance. We had a great run here, and for many years we paid the rent on time and the landlord let us be. Only in the past few years has he become Mr. Grumpy, hunched and haggard-looking, a man carrying a weight he can never unload. 

Time to pack our memories away. 

I finished reading Dalva by Jim Harrison. The main character is a tough, resilient, physically attractive and intelligent woman, independent and confident of her own judgment. She’s the kind of woman who will see a man she wants to sleep with and go after him through the front gate. A woman of many lovers but few loves. Her father was killed in the Korean War. She had a baby with her half-brother. A major thread of the novel is about the American West and the many ways white people ousted the native tribes. There were fortunes to be made on the frontier (and nothing mattered more than that), towns to found and consecrate, railroads to build, and Indians to dislodge. It’s an ugly, brutal story. Millions starved during the harsh winters. The native people fell victim to the white man’s diseases, and succumbed by the thousands. I remember watching westerns on black & white TV when I was very young, the Indians always portrayed as one-dimensional caricatures, murderous barbarians speaking in strange dialects. Americans forced them off the lands they had roamed and survived on for millenia. The native people, far more sophisticated than white people gave them credit for, took what they needed from the land to survive, but they don’t appear to have devoted their lives to squeezing the Earth of everything it had to give. Americans drove the indigenous off, stole the land, rivers, creeks, and streams out from under them, and the American government never made a solemn treaty it didn’t later break. Killed the buffalo herds. Hunted down and Killed Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and all the rest. Americans treated all the tribes as one monolith rather than many distinct groups, a mistake America has since made in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. We didn’t see the native people as being worthy of a share -- and still don’t. There’s a swath of American history I don’t know as well as I’d like, specifically the period from the Louisiana Purchase, around 1804, to 1920. That was a consequential period, great fortunes were made harvesting timber, gold, iron ore, silver, and water. Canals and railroads were built, commerce expanded. The US Congress was corrupt. Manifest Destiny and all that imperial thinking took hold of the American imagination. 

I’m also reading a quirky, wonderful history of Los Angeles by Mike Davis called City of Quartz. I have never understood how Los Angeles became the jumble it is today. LA has always seemed to me a city without a center -- or perhaps too many centers, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Echo Park, Century City and Hollywood. I knew little about LA history, and the few times I went to LA as a child felt more menacing than enthralling. LA was where I was sworn into the United States Air Force. Davis gets under the surface, exposes the major players, the money, the movers & shakers, the politics and the racism against the non-white population. LA was imagined, then sold, as a sunny American Dream, a city safe for white people. 

Poor Matt Gaetz, GOP congressman from Florida, big hair, media whore, rich family, great ally and ass-kisser of Donald J. Trump, a born used car salesman if ever there was one. But wait, there’s more, and it’s salacious and the media is eating it like cake. Gaetz is going down on the spike that has dynamited many a man, many a career, many a marriage, many a reputation: the taste for young flesh. 17-years-old if media reporting is accurate. Gaetz splashed the cash on his underage queen, or queens, (who knows what details will emerge), and now the media glare is hot and uncomfortable. Many Republicans are having a ball watching this punk squirm, and it will be absolutely delicious if he is indicted for transporting underage females across state lines. Live by the prick, die by the prick. I’m astonished whenever I consider how some of the so-called prestige schools in America -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton -- have given us nitwits like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton. I don’t know where Gaetz went to school, though I imagine he never fretted the cost or worried about how he was going to afford tuition and food. Matt strikes me as one of the pampered, a fuck-up with a gilded safety net beneath him. Makes it easy for him to spout horseshit about self-reliance, hard work, and the Christian God who smiles on the wealthy and spits on the poor. At least Gaetz has Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene in his camp. 

Anyone surprised about Republican-led efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters? What happened in Georgia will be used as a template. The Republicans can only win elections if they cheat, it’s that simple. I wonder if John Roberts still stands by his decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. The root cause of these shenanigans is Fear, unfounded fear, of the dark-skinned Others who lurk in the shadows, waiting to rape white virgins. America is a fearful nation, armed to the teeth and frightened of the dark. 

Menace

 “At some time or other in life, everyone finds themselves at an important crossroads and must tackle their fate head-on.” Varlam Shalamov, Sketches Of The Criminal World

Menace is at my feet this evening. That’s not the puppy’s real name, not yet, though it would be appropriate. Since my mother-in-law bought her from a woman in LA, the Shih-Tzu pup has answered to Martini, Chula, Cali, Calliope, Xochitl, Sweetums, Lil’ Mama, and Jessie, the latter being my mother-in-law’s choice, which she’s sticking to even though the entire family hates it. Not long after getting the pup Mother-in-Law had to have hip replacement surgery and that curtailed her ability to care for her new charge. We have the baby. I call the puppy Menace because she’s always getting into things, gnawing on power cords, having the occasional bodily accident on the rug. She likes to eat her own shit and will wolf it down in the blink of an eye. Menace has learned that people often drop food in the kitchen, little morsels, crumbs, and if quick enough she can snatch a treat. At this very moment she is sitting by the open back door, chewing on one of my Adidas slides. Tipping the scale at about two pounds, she’s a playful, schizophrenic ball of brown and white fur. The tip of her tail is white. We’re all infatuated with her, though I will be glad when she stops nipping at my toes.  

How can people be happy when life’s so shitty for so many? How can life be so beautiful and so ugly at the same time? Dealing with contradiction is part of the human condition. The cruelty of America often stuns me, though it shouldn’t because our history as a nation overflows with it. We’re not unique and hardly exceptional, except when it comes to the number of savage gun deaths we tolerate year after year. Atlanta and Boulder have joined the club. Columbine, Las Vegas, El Paso, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Orlando, Parkland. Too many places to list because in this American culture mass shootings happen so often they no longer shock. The motives for the killing sprees in Atlanta and Boulder are not entirely clear; young men with serious problems and easy access to killing equipment. 

To operate motor vehicles in this country we require that people have drivers licenses and insurance in case they hit something or somebody. There are tests, written and performance, and fairly strict rules of the road that must be followed after the license is issued. Licenses can also be revoked. This system works reasonably well, although an argument can be made that too many people still die each year in automobile accidents. But the point is that collectively we accept drivers’ licenses as a necessary, reasonable method of ensuring we can all enjoy the privilege of driving with a measure of safety. But when it comes to guns we require very little. Why? Well, one reason is that gun ownership has become -- was deliberately made to be -- a deeply contested, hot-button political issue, a litmus test for conservatives. The GOP and the NRA were a marriage that worked to make gun ownership a third-rail of American politics. After every mass shooting that I can recall, the NRA immediately mobilized its might and pressured Congress to do nothing -- and Congress complied. The 2nd Amendment has been twisted like a pretzel, out of all proportion to its meaning and the context of the time when it was written. The men who wrote the Bill of Rights could not have imagined the lethal weaponry ordinary people would one day find easy to get their hands on. Semi-automatic pistols, assault rifles with extra large magazines. My friend in Michigan knows firearms better than I do, and can quote make, model, velocity, types of ammunition, the whole catalog. I don’t own any firearms, never have, but I respect my fellow citizens’ right to own rifles, pistols, and shotguns, whether used for sport or protection. I have no problem with people owning firearms for these purposes. But I think buying and owning a firearm should require some effort, a few hoops to jump through before a permit to purchase and own is issued. Is a background check or waiting period that unreasonable? Guns are a public safety issue and only the State has the power to regulate them. Regulation isn’t foolproof or failsafe, nothing ever is, and as soon as the government declares something illegal, whether alcohol or heroin, some enterprising, cunning people will find a weakness to exploit and make money supplying the forbidden to willing buyers. 

The gun manufacturer’s lobby is another reason no real action is ever taken; the making and selling of firearms is big business. 2020 was a record year for gun sales. 

The NRA isn’t the potent political force it once was, mired in corruption and bankruptcy proceedings, but the arguments it pushed remain articles of faith among many conservatives, and the likelihood of any sensible legislation emerging from Congress is slim. Republicans will employ the usual scare tactics, accusing Democrats of wanting to take away everyone’s guns. Debate will run in circles and no matter what measures are proposed, they are certain to die on the floor of our dysfunctional Senate. This sick process will repeat after the next mass shooting. Our political “leaders” protect the right to bear arms more vigorously than they protect the welfare and safety of citizens. 

In national polls a majority of Americans favor stricter gun controls, a trend that has been consistent for years. But if there’s one thing our political system excels at it’s ignoring the will of the majority. The next mass shooting is coming to a city, town or hamlet near you. Ready your thoughts and prayers. 

Sailing Under the Black Flag

 “White supremacy is ravenous and vicious. It is America’s embryotic fluid. America was born in it and genetically coded by it.” Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know

The other day I learned that my dentist died. I last saw him six months ago. His practice had slowed down due to the pandemic, but he was managing to keep two hygienists and his office manager employed. All three had been with him for years, decades in one case. Good people. The office had a friendly vibe, a treasure chest for children, family photos on the walls. This man cared for my teeth for thirty years. Two or three root canals, a couple of cracked teeth, crowns. He was five years my senior, but our children -- one boy, one girl apiece -- were about the same age. The news of his death hit hard because it wasn’t preceded by an accident or illness, his time was simply up, his existence claimed by natural causes.

The back end of life isn’t an easy victory lap. 

My dentist’s sudden death made me aware of the passage of time and the precariousness of all the things we think of as solid and lasting. I believe a reckoning is coming that will make the Covid pandemic look minor by comparison. Much of what’s coming I can do little about: shit’s going to happen to me and those I love, to my city and state, my country, the world. Some of it will be wrenching, of that I have no doubt. As I was skipping rope the other day this thought flitted across my mind: am I training for the apocalypse? Am I trying to be physically ready for whatever comes? Maybe. The training regimen I’ve created for myself has become a lifestyle. Funny how that happens. What we do consistently, we become some version of. The women from my mother’s side of the gene pool live a long time, several of them into their 90’s. My mother’s older brother, my last remaining uncle, is 87, still mentally sharp, a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan. With good fortune and smart choices I could live another twenty years, a thought more unnerving than exciting given the state of the world. I think of the film Nomadland and remember that in this soulless consumer Potemkin Village called the United States, it takes very little for people to lose their grip and freefall. Lose a job, health insurance, fall behind on the rent -- name a calamity -- and it could mean living on a rectangle of concrete under a freeway overpass. When I was a boy back in the 1960’s and 1970’s we thought of “hobos” in romantic terms, riding flatcars from state to state, heating Dinty Moore beef stew over an open fire, free to ride the breeze and laze around while others toiled. To my young eyes the world seemed more hospitable. Of course, it wasn’t hospitable then and isn’t now.  There’s nothing romantic about homelessness and poverty. 

Our politics is a cynical, empty circus of bullshit, and our citizens are easily duped by fools and charlatans. 

Every morning on my ride to the office I see the same three vans parked near the Armory. People live in these vehicles. They migrate around the block, at times parking on Nopal Street, other times on De La Guerra. It has to be hard living, cold at night when the temperature drops, cramped, and under constant threat from the authorities to move along. After watching the film Nomadland I can’t look at these vans the same way. They’re emblematic of a serious curse that afflicts working people across America -- a shortage of decent, affordable housing. The roots of this problem are long and run deep beneath the bedrock of our capitalism-gone-haywire era. In the words of Matthew Desmond, the author of Evicted, without adequate housing, lives fall to pieces. I think the same can be said of the absence of health care, which in America is a feature of our fealty to the Market God. We can’t have Medicare for All because the idea of a collective system provided by the government runs counter to our faith in Markets, and would brand us as Socialists, which might bring on a permanent eclipse of the sun and the end of the world.  In America our one and only choice is to sail under Capitalism’s black flag. Better to let people suffer and die without health care than to imitate the Europeans or Japanese. 

We live in serious times, but America isn’t a serious country. Our politics is a cynical, empty circus of bullshit, and our citizens are easily duped by fools and charlatans. We long ago stopped teaching civics. Americans don’t appreciate the effort that rule of the people requires, and those in power seek to keep it that way. A dumbed-down polity is easier to manipulate and control. So, facing a rabid movement of white supremacists who would rather burn it all down than share power with black and brown folks, we argue over Mr. Potatohead and Dr. Suess. America has been trapped in a downward spiral of dumbness for a long time. The pandemic exposed America’s crumbling facade, its utter hypocrisy and idiocy. Drink bleach. Fuck masks. Ignore science. 

What shall be done? The eternal human question. Either we renew our commitment to democracy or we accept authoritarianism, there’s no third way or middle ground. 

I will miss my dentist. He was a decent man who cared about others and used his skill to make their lives better. 

Freedom to the Winds

“Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons?” Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

It hailed in Santa Barbara this week. My wife got some lovely photos of the courthouse lawn, green streaked with white, and a bed of succulents covered with ice. I can’t remember the last time it hailed here. As little rainfall as we get a hailstorm, no matter how brief, is notable. Lake Cachuma still looked pretty sad the last time we drove past on Highway 154, but our area isn’t in a severe drought. Not yet. The weather’s kind of unpredictable now, a result of our endless meddling in Mother Nature’s business. Do I think human beings are killing the planet? Yes. Will we adapt to it like we have adapted to Covid? Probably. And once we adapt, is there ever any going all the way back? Covid, or something like it, will be with us from now on. 

When I ruminate on our changing climate and the obscene disparities of wealth and power in most places, I figure the wealthy can buy many kinds of protection to give them the best chance of long term survival when the rule of law becomes the law of the jungle. Not hard to imagine a world where the wealthy hoard the resources needed to sustain life, and defend their control of those resources to the death. Grim. Has wisdom and justice ever prevailed in human history? Has decency and kindness ever ruled?  Not to my knowledge. Someone always winds up having more power over others than any human should. Life and death power. 

I received the single dose Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine in my left arm yesterday. This morning when I woke up I felt fine in every respect, but around ten o’clock I began to feel a little dull, a touch fatigued. It wore on as the hours in the office passed and I had to skip my usual Friday evening training session. It’s the one time each week when I feel like working in a higher gear, just because it’s Friday and I can recover the following day. I took a nap instead. My son came up from LA to file his taxes and is staying with us, and I could hear him and his sister sniping at each other in the next room. Non-stop insults, brutal sarcasm, obscene putdowns. The bickering hits a lull and then flares up. The problem is the lack of space, we’re crammed together, four adults now, much different from two adults and two children. I think we’re another month from moving. Our harried and haggard landlord continues his renovation project below us and in the backyard. Our “stuff” is scattered around, piled high, covered with concrete dust. Every day when I go downstairs my training gear has been moved; I stubbornly move it right back to where I can get to it easily. I try not to let the lack of control bug me but it does. We never amassed enough money to buy a house here in our hometown and likely never will. That vessel sailed long ago. This bothers me far less than it once did. I don’t see us becoming as rootless as the people in the film Nomadland, but nor can I see that we will ever own the roof over our heads, which means we will be subject to other people’s rules and bullshit. Money buys many kinds of freedom. 

Should we get used to the idea that we’re going to extinguish all life on this planet one day?That’s cynical and defeatist and hopeless, isn’t it? Yes it is. I’m trying to remember if I felt more hope before Covid hit and gave us a glimpse of the future than I do a year later, after 500,000 Americans have died and the lives of millions more have been forever altered. There are stories from the forgotten and the ignored that we don’t hear about. I’m lucky to have a speedily created vaccine in my arm that I paid nothing for directly. It’s not that I lack hopes and dreams and desires, I still have some. I definitely want to travel more, see places and people, watch a football match in Spain or Italy or England. I’d love to get back to Italy. I liked the vibe there. I’m cynical, yes, but perhaps not entirely faithless because I believe there are many people like me, neither rich or impoverished, who are very content to live and let live, who are opposed to violence as a national ethos, and who think justice is vital to insure long term peace. The big middle, that’s us. We’re rarely consulted about anything except what our money can buy. Money never excited me enough to chase it with all my heart. I read Henry Miller and other sages carefully and they spoke to me about life, what has value, what’s eternal and good in the human species. People go to incredible lengths to help one another survive. Covid has shown us the best and worst in ourselves. 

Joe Biden and the Democrats shepherded a Covid relief bill through Congress. No Republicans voted for the bill but many of their constituents stand to benefit from the legislation. Now Biden has to sell this accomplishment to the public, explaining and highlighting what it will do for working people, small business owners, and children. The Democrats cannot take for granted that the voting public will remember come 2022. Meanwhile, the GOP continues to bow to Trump, who is being hemmed in on all sides with lawsuits and investigations. America is much quieter now that Trump is off the main stage. The danger the Republic faces is still present, make no mistake about that, and what emerges from the investigation into the January 6th Insurrection will be important. How close to Trump will that probe get? How many of those charged will flip for leniency? What was Roger Stone’s role? Stone is a weird fucker, the kind of villian Made in America, something he shares in common with Donald Trump. 

A Year of Covid

 “The other wing of the neoliberal establishment, the one represented by the Democratic party leadership, fears that exposing capitalism in this way – making explicit its inherently brutal, wrist-slitting tendencies – will awaken the masses, that over time it will risk turning them into revolutionaries.” Jonathan Cook

As we near one year of life in a pandemic I think of The Plague by Camus which I re-read last Spring. I remember the first lockdown, when the streets of Santa Barbara were deserted, eerily silent, except for the sound of the breeze in the trees; I remember walking to the grocery store with my wife, standing anxiously in a long line to pick-up some basic foodstuffs, hoping to find eggs, milk, beans, and toilet paper; I remember a Saturday morning at Smart & Final, staring in near disbelief at empty shelves, like I was in a tale from the old Soviet Union. It all looked and felt so strange, like the end of the world. 

Last March and April I felt certain the pandemic would get worse before it got better, and sure enough, primarily because of the criminally negligent response of the Trump gang, the death toll from Covid-19 rose steadily. When it surpassed 100,000 I was stunned. How could this happen in the United States? It was a question easily answered: a broken political establishment headed by Trump, a cruel ideology hostile to knowledge, science, common sense, and expertise. Trump treated it like a PR opportunity. Day after day he stood before the people and lied out of his ass. I started a series of reflections titled, The Isolation Diaries, which became, after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police, The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries. 

The rebellion for racial justice was short lived, as Charles M. Blow notes in his latest book, The Devil You Know. Blow writes, “And in the end, however protest is performed, for what motivations, it will eventually wane. Outrage is an expensive emotion. It consumes energy like a blaze. At some point, inevitably, the fuel is exhausted.” Our collective attention moved on even as other black men were murdered by trigger-happy police officers. 

I don’t know what being “woke” really means. I was awake to the reality of race in America long ago, by virtue of reading and reflection, and I recognized my unearned white privilege for just that, a privilege, a passport to move about freely without a thought of being targeted by law enforcement, or regarded by society as an existential threat. With very little effort I could live in peaceful anonymity. This privilege fell to me by virtue of my birth. By my whiteness I could enjoy first and second chances. I got this white ticket by sheer blind luck, by being born to my French-Canadian parents. I didn’t earn the privilege, it was handed to me. Do I fully understand what it’s like to be an Other? No. Can I imagine what it’s like? Yes. If you sit long enough with the truth, you can get to that place. 

My mind is a contradiction, full and empty at the same moment, fatigued but antsy. I wonder if the Democrats will compromise away their chances of expanding their slim majorities in 2022. If the past is prologue, it’s almost guaranteed they will. Angry, frustrated voters will take it out on Democrats in 2022. To make sure they win, the GOP will depress turnout using all their anti-democracy tricks; if the GOP retakes one of the chambers, or both, I don’t see how the nation remains “united” in anything but name. At that point, faced with permanent minority rule, the so-called Blue states should secede. Sounds crazy, but is it any crazier than a handful of white, male senators from sparsely populated states blocking any and all legislation that might better the lives of the majority? Is denying majority rule not a form of craziness? Too many elected officials believe democracy is a nuisance and the oath they swear little more than a mild admonition, completely optional. As we careen from crisis to crisis we need a functioning federal government. Why? Because no other entity can manage a crisis on a nationwide scale. No other entity has the resources. No other entity can do what needs to be done to keep climate catastrophe, of which pandemics are part, at bay. Sorry, Texas, you proved the case for the regulation of core common resources, which include electricity and water. 

I worry for my children’s future, especially my daughter. Does she have enough grit? Have we coddled her too much, let too many things slide and been too easy on her? The near future will see climate refugees as parts of the planet sink under rising oceans, food production becomes impossible, and entire regions burn. I don’t imagine life will be easy, especially for the masses of people in the Have Not camp. As life is constantly upended, made inconvenient and then uncomfortable, our fears of one another will grow. If our laws are not fairly executed by honest people, if there is no accountability for the wealthy and powerful, if a new appreciation for the commons that we all depend on isn’t nurtured and supported by the people, another Trump-like figure will rise. 

It’s a crazy world, as beautiful as it is horrid. People fly in private jets over concrete bridges under which people live. The chosen and the rest. The royal family. The cardinal and the pope. The landed gentry and the golden aristocracy. The plutocrats. The oligarchs. The Supreme Leader. The Czar. The Fuhrer. The President for Life. The General. The emperor. Who rules? Who says how the pie is to be divided and among whom? How can you live free if you’re burdened with debt, suffer a chronic illness and have no medical care, and work two or three crappy soul-killing jobs to make what one job once paid? Who has the money and power? How do they get it, hold it, expand it? 

A year of Covid, a changed landscape. The outdoor eating areas on State Street look fancier and more permanent all the time.