Cock's-Eye View

“In exactly this way, history is overwritten and redacted, cherry-picked and edited to glorify those with power and to silence those without.” Kali Holloway, The Nation

I’ve remained silent long enough, held back through the madness of these past six years; the tea I have to spill will make me the most famous cock in history, my story matters and it’s about time someone listens to me, after all, I’ve been dangling for more than seven decades between the legs of a Man-Child, forced now to spend my days enveloped in the thick moist padding of his Man-diaper while he wages legal war on multiple fronts and endless war on the Truth. Oh yes, my master, the 45th President of the United States, suffers from incontinence and flatulence, and often shits himself. From time to time he takes me out for exercise, but only after he pops Viagra, because without that magic pill he can’t get or sustain an erection. Despite his endless boasting and bragging about the legions of beautiful women who have experienced his/my prowess and size and girth, the fact is that I’m of average size and heft, nothing all that remarkable, though I suppose I appear massive in his tiny hand. Melania hasn’t touched me in years, and when Stormy fondled me I detected mirth in her fingertips. Now that I’m thinking about it, the last time Melania saw me she pointed and laughed derisively and said she gets more pleasure from her pinky finger. You can imagine how that went over with Man-Child. Threw an entire bucket of KFC on the carpet. When he starts throwing food you know he’s really angry…

Trust me when I tell you that nights at Mar-A-Lago are long. 

I’m trapped down here as Prometheus was on his mountainside, forced to endure endless hours of the Man-Child’s bitching and whining, his lies, boasts -- greatest this, best ever at that, so rich, a perfect physical specimen (this one makes me giggle) -- and constant need for attention and adoration and praise and reassurance. Frankly, it’s exhausting and nauseating. Why so many people in this country fell -- and continue to fall -- for this man’s nonsense only proves that the average man’s cock is smarter than the man the cock is affixed to. I can’t speak for women, except to marvel at those of you who refuse to acknowledge that Man-Child is a pig and misogynist. Are you blind or what? Be honest -- would you allow your teenage daughter to be in a room alone with him? 

I’m shocked at the stupidity of people, in particular people with elite educations, law degrees, every possible credential, and how they continually get Man-Child dead wrong. Why wasn’t it obvious to all of you that Man-Child was never, ever, going to accept the results of the election if he lost? He told you as much more than a year in advance -- the election was fair if he won and rigged if he lost, his usual heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gambit…had he lost by twenty million votes he still would have declared victory and fraud. How many court challenges did he lose, 62 out of 63, a legal smack-down by any measurement, yet he’s got almost the entire Republican Party and millions of people believing his Big Lie. America is certainly Numero Uno in Dumbness. Long live Idiocy!

I’ll let you in on something else that should be obvious: January 6, 2021 was the best, most fulfilling day of Man-Child’s otherwise misbegotten life. I’m serious. Even the birth of his children pales against the high he felt that January day, and I should know because when he saw all those people with their flags and buttons and hats, he/I became fully erect and stayed at attention for a long time, an impressive feat of endurance in my humble opinion. My veins popped and my head turned purple and my nuts twitched, and the only other time this happens is when he fantasizes about Ivanka. Man-Child couldn’t take his eyes away from the TV, he kept saying, “Look at that crowd, that big, beautiful crowd. They love me, they love me.” I remember that a steady stream of people, including Ivanka, who reminds me of one of those robots on Westworld, begged Man-Child to do something, get on TV, order his supporters to stand down and go home. That was like asking Satan to douse the fires of Hell. Jared lurked nearby, too (now there’s a real prick, though between Jared and Mark Meadows it’s a toss up). I know Man-Child is reported to have demanded that he be driven to the Capitol because he wanted to march with his people, but keep in mind one thing about Man-Child: he’s a physical coward, a honest-to-God pussy. Yeah, he talks tough, like a mob boss, but he’s always the first to cut and run when the shit gets real. He ducked the draft, remember? 

You’re not convinced, I see that, you want to believe in the myth, no matter how perverse, maybe you enjoy the spectacle, the chaos created by this supposedly wealthy man who is always asking others for money, the strong man who habitually paints himself as the victim, the tax cheat who trades on his claims of being a genius businessman, the anti-Semite who boasts about being as ethical as a rabbi. Still don’t get the picture? Then you should know that he despises you, all of you, in your red-hats and garish t-shirts, but for now you remain useful to him as props in his reality show. A day will come when he no longer needs you, and won’t you feel stupid then? Who likes to be scammed, conned, tricked, manipulated, used and discarded? Man-Child treats people the same way he treats condoms. Mark the words of this humble old cock! Save your mortal soul before it’s too late. 

Fear of Flying

 “Every creature is made up of both ugliness and beauty, and must be granted the time to manifest in all aspects.” Italo Svevo, A Very Old Man

Traveling by air in the US sucks -- unless one has the money to fly first class. If you sit with the paupers in coach, as I do, it all feels like one continuous rip-off. Cramped seats, endless exhortations to sign-up for the airlines’ credit card, WiFi that should be complimentary but isn’t, limited overhead storage, exacerbated by baggage fees that force passengers to carry their luggage onboard. Paupers board last, after the passengers who need assistance, those with small children, active duty military (our knee-jerk, thank-you-for-your-service obeisance), Platinum, Silver, Gold, or Bronze club members, and, of course, the elite in First Class. By the time paupers reach their seats all nearby overhead storage is invariably taken, which means you have to stow your luggage in a bin in a row behind you, a real problem if you have limited time to make a connecting flight. Good luck retrieving your bag once the plane lands, stops, and the scrum to exit begins; you might as well try to swim against a tidal wave. All you can do is sit and wait, while the minutes slip past and your chance of making your connecting flight fades. 

Then there’s TSA, that lovely gift from 9/11 and the War on Terror, still part of our lives two decades later. What I most hate about TSA is the inconsistency, and I’ll give you an example. On Saturday at the Portland airport, I was required to remove my shoes and place my Kindle in its own bin; on Sunday, at the same airport, I was ordered to leave my shoes on and keep all my electronic devices in my bag. Is the inconsistency designed to keep the terrorists guessing or just a cruel joke on passengers, decided each day on a whim or by coin flip? The TSA lines in Portland were long, snarled, slow, and maddening.  

I cursed the moon, sun and stars, Portland, all of Oregon, the god-damn late arriving Tillamook bus, TSA and United Airlines. 

The bus from Tillamook, where I went to visit my brother as I have done every September for the past five years, was thirteen minutes late leaving the transit center, and that thirteen minutes proved to be crucial. The bus was scheduled to arrive at Union Station in Portland at three p.m. and my flight to San Francisco departed at four. I knew it was going to be tight and making the flight to San Francisco and then on to Santa Barbara depended on everything coming off just right. I had to catch an UBER from Union Station as soon as my feet hit the pavement, hope the traffic to the airport wasn’t heavy, and get through TSA. As usually happens when you’re in a hurry, everything conspired against me: my UBER driver hit one red light after another and with uncanny skill got behind every slow moving car, bus or truck, and never once exceeded the posted speed limit, which I completely understood from his point of view, but his strict adherence to the law of the road was not advancing my cause. I watched the minutes pass on my phone knowing my chances of getting home were slipping away. I dashed into the airport and headed for the TSA line. When I saw the queue of people waiting to be screened I thought, “Well, I’m fucked.” I had about five minutes to catch my flight and the queue was  barely moving. TSA agents barked commands. There was a snafu with the boarding pass of the man in front of me. When I finally cleared the screening process, I grabbed my bags and shoes off the conveyor belt and hightailed it toward my gate in my socks. Too late. The flight had left. “Oh,” the lady behind the United counter said, “we waited for you as long as we could.” Fuck, fuck, fuck! I thought. Motherfucking fuck fuck. The gate agent re-booked me on a flight the next day, leaving at eight a.m. I sat down in the empty waiting area, caught my breath, put my shoes on and called my wife. It was just after four. The thought of sixteen long hours in an airport wasn’t appealing, but I also didn’t feel like spending money for a hotel room. My wife thought otherwise and said she would do some quick research and call me back. Ten minutes later I was in an UBER headed for the Howard Johnson Portland Airport on northeast Sandy Boulevard. “It looks decent enough,” my wife said. 

On the way to the hotel I saw an abandoned encampment on the side of the road, two pop-up trailers parked back-to-back, amid a bunch of debris, mangled folding chairs, tires, and a red porta-potty with a gaping gash in its side that resembled a lopsided smile. The trailers had been torched. Thoughts of a hot shower, something to eat, and a night of sleep ran through my head, but when the driver pulled up to the HoJo my heart dropped. Sketchy doesn’t do the place justice. The parking lot was full of older cars, some of them with the hoods up and the doors thrown open. The thirty-something woman behind the counter in the office looked like she had firsthand experience with hard-living. It took her a while to check me in because the phone kept ringing. “Well, we need to get her out of 106,” I heard her say. The white walls of the office were dingy, scuffed. “Breakfast Area” read a sign on the wall behind me. My room was on the second floor of Building 3. Up a short flight of stairs, through a metal door with a sign that read, “Keep Door Closed.” When I opened the door to room 231 I caught the sickening smell of stale nicotine. One king bed, nothing on the walls except a flat screen TV, a desk and office chair, mini-fridge, and a dresser with three drawers. The blue-gray carpet was threadbare and drab, the grout in the bathtub dark with mold. One towel was on the floor. I decided against a shower. I pulled the comforter back and examined the bed for bugs, hair, nail clippings, stains. Finding no evidence of any I parted the curtains and slid open the window to let some air in. There were gaps in the rusted chain link fence between the hotel property and the grungy house in the lot next door. A woman’s gruff, pack-a-day voice echoed below. Holy shit, I thought. Where the fuck am I?

I ordered some Indian food and two bottles of beer to be delivered. It was ridiculously expensive, but I don’t eat cheap fast food. It arrived about a half hour later, courtesy of a man named Chris, but when I got back to my room and opened the bag I found no utensils, napkins, wetnaps, nothing, and of course I didn’t have a bottle opener and there sure as hell wasn’t one in the room. I cursed the moon, sun and stars, Portland, all of Oregon, the god-damn late arriving Tillamook bus, TSA and United Airlines. With diligent effort I managed to pop the cap from the beer bottles with my belt buckle, spread a towel over my lap and dug into the chicken and biryani rice, eating it with my fingers like an Afghan sheep herder. 

By eight p.m. I was in bed with the lights out and the black-out curtains drawn, reading Samuel Beckett on my Kindle -- appropriately bleak material given the circumstances. Dull light spilled around the black-out curtains. From time to time voices echoed in the corridor, a door slammed, heavy footsteps crossed the floor in the room above me. The alarm on my phone was set for 4:30 a.m. I figured I’d get up, wash my face, brush my teeth, and order an UBER; better to arrive three hours early than late, and at least I could get a cup of coffee and a scone or muffin. Though I told myself not to, I kept reaching for my phone to check the time. 

9:00. 9:17. 9:53. 10:12. 10:47. 11:28.

I didn’t sleep at all, I just lay there with my eyes shut, listening to the noises. Around midnight a pattern emerged that would continue non-stop for the next three hours. First a door in the corridor creaked open and then banged shut, followed by the sound of someone in flip-flops slap-slap-slapping down the hall, through the metal exit door, which banged shut after them. Only minutes later this pattern was reversed, the exit door creaked open, slammed shut, the flip-flops slap-slapped, and I heard the beep of a magnetic key opening a room door and then slamming shut. I could have peered through the peephole to see what was going on but decided it was better not to know. Over and over I heard the same pattern of sounds, punctuated occasionally by a woman’s voice, and once by a man’s. Around three-thirty a.m. I heard three rapid bangs echo from somewhere outside the hotel, but I couldn’t tell if these were gunshots or a car backfiring, nor if they were near or far away. Shortly thereafter I heard a siren in the distance, then another and another, all which seemed to be growing closer and converging before fading away. I resumed resting with my eyes closed.

I was up before my alarm went off. I packed my stuff and ordered an UBER. The car would arrive in twenty minutes. I tracked the car’s progress and left my room when it was five minutes away, plenty of time to get to the pick-up point near the office. When I left my room the corridor was empty and silent, but once I exited the building I found myself in an active police crime scene. Red and blue lights flashed from half a dozen Portland police department vehicles and a large crime scene lab truck, and the entire hotel property was criss-crossed with yellow and orange police tape emblazoned with Police Line Do Not Cross. Cops were milling around in twos and threes, talking. Police radios crackled. My driver was due to arrive any moment and I couldn’t see a way off the property, so I stepped over the tape and hailed two cops by waving to them. “You have to go all the way around,” they said. All the way around where? I thought, starting to panic that I would miss my ride and be stuck in this Twilight Zone of a hotel. I finally made it out to the street and saw the red Tesla driven by Ivan. Salvation.

While I was waiting for my flight to San Francisco I Googled Howard Johnson Portland Airport. While there was nothing about that morning’s incident, I did discover that there had been a stabbing at the property in 2011, and that for months it had been a temporary shelter for the homeless, which explained the junk cars and downtrodden types I saw hanging around. A couple of stinging reviews described open drug dealing and prostitution, brawls and filth. The complimentary breakfast advertised with such fanfare on the hotel website was derided as a piece of dry white toast. 

I think I will stay close to home for a while. 

No Comparison

 “Whether you are the criminal or the captive, there are few things more disconcerting than learning that the rescue crew is in on the plot.” Sarah Kendzior, Vanity Fair

The way Donald Trump evades accountability for his many transgressions is astonishing. Whether this is a result of Trump’s evil genius or simply the weakness of our institutions and the people who sit atop them, I can’t say, though I imagine it’s a little of both. That the people who write and administer the laws are rarely held accountable by them, even after swearing an oath to faithfully obey and uphold them, is a maddening axiom. Maddening because average people have no capacity to play hide and seek with the law; average people can’t ignore subpoenas or demand that their case be heard by their own hand-picked judge. Only the wealthy and powerful and politically-connected are allowed to play the legal game this way. 

I sounded the alarm about Trump early and often on this blog, my long-running vanity project that resides on the fringes of total anonymity. One small voice drowned by the noise of the world. I had been aware of Trump for many years and considered him an obnoxious buffoon, the worst kind of rich asshole because of his insatiable insecurity and blinding need to always be the center of attention, even as he failed at one business venture after another. Bright lights, glitz, famous people, and braggadocio was what Trump had, and it was enough for the New York real estate world. But Trump was never the business whiz he claimed to be; you have to be a particular kind of fuck-up to run a casino into the ground. It’s telling that the only thing Trump excelled at was the make-believe of “reality” television, where he controlled the script, the lighting and camera angles, final edit approval, and all the make-up and hair people he needed. When he entered politics in 2015 he did so on the wings of television which he understood how to manipulate better than any other figure, perhaps any American, ever. The Republican field was crowded but weak in 2016, and none of the candidates knew how to deal with someone like Trump, who lied and exaggerated and accused and humiliated others as casually as a bully on an elementary school playground. The corporate media -- ABC, NBC, CBS, and the cable networks -- aided Trump, of course, because he was good for ratings and strong ratings juice ad revenue. Trump had the full-throated backing of Fox News, whose on-air “personalities” and performers rushed to defend, explain, excuse, and interpret him for its viewers nearly all day, every day. Trump was making money for the media CEO’s, so it’s no surprise that they stayed seated for the ride. After Trump’s shock victory by way of the absurd Electoral College the same media outlets bent over backwards to normalize Trump and treat him like a serious man -- like he had a clue about what being President of the United States meant. 

He didn’t. All Trump knew was that he was going to have a lot of power. 

With great solemnity many pundits predicted that the office would change Trump, temper his baser instincts and coarse behavior, but the opposite happened; Trump turned the office into a burlesque, an extension of reality television, complete with wicked villains (Democrats, the Deep State, Hillary Clinton, anyone who opposed him or said unkind things about him) and outrageous claims of his own greatness, omniscience and popularity. Better than Obama, always, because Obama was bad juju for Trump, the one man Trump couldn’t cow, bully, humiliate or denigrate. He tried to erase as many of Obama’s accomplishments as he could with his executive pen, but largely failed. There’s no comparison between the two men: one is a successful human, the other a sociopath; one is respected for his calm mind, intelligence, eloquence and reason, and the other spews outrageous lies like a busted sewer line; one possesses a moral and ethical center, the other is amoral and only admires raw power. Despite laws and norms, precedent and tradition that existed to prohibit such behavior, Trump set out to profit from his office, to monetize it as much as possible, only in scale and technique different from the kleptocrats of the former Soviet republics. Trump had no concept of being a servant of the people or the American state: he was the state, and the people were his subjects. The system of laws and norms and precedent and tradition failed to stop Trump, and once Trump saw how porous the guardrails were he knew the field was wide open. Start with relatively minor stuff like blatant violations of the Hatch Act and the Emolument clause of the Constitution, and if no alarm is raised, go further; if alarm is raised, issue a flat denial, accuse the Democrats of what-aboutism, and attack the accuser. This works very well if you have a massive social media following and a cable network willing to carry your freight. 

When Barack and Michelle Obama’s official White House portraits were unveiled this week I thought again of the contrast between Trump and Obama, the criminal narcissist and the half-black man of immense cool and class. Now, I was very critical of Barack Obama -- during the first half of his first term in particular -- that two-year period when he had congressional majorities and could have acted boldly and instead tried to play the game with the GOP, which wasn’t interested. Obama had it rough, especially after the 2010 midterms. I still think that not going after the CEO’s of the big banks for their role in the financial crash hurt him with Americans who lost their homes, jobs, health insurance, and hope. His foreign policy always disappointed me as it was in alignment with the Council on Foreign Relations, though he managed to sound more conflicted about the deployment of US power than his predecessor, the faux cowboy who plunged the US into a disastrous, stunningly stupid War on Terror, never ending, and ever changing. What I more clearly appreciate in retrospect is how skilled a politician Obama was, and how much abuse he endured. There’s more class in Barack Obama’s pinky than in all of Trump’s bloated body. 

The ground for an unscrupulous someone like Donald Trump was prepared over many years. The GOP has long harbored anti-democratic, racist, white supremacist, misogynistic and authoritarian figures, Christian nationalists and rabid anti-Communists. This is the modern GOP’s DNA, what they believe. Trump gave the entire party permission to unfurl and wave the MAGA flag of hatred. 

Letter to my Brother

It’s August 28th, a sunny Sunday in Santa Barbara after a morning when the marine layer lay thick and heavy on the town. Five days ago we -- me, T, and M -- landed in Philadelphia, PA at 1:00 a.m. Twelve or so hours later, we were moving M’s belongings, the contents of four suitcases and a load of stuff we picked up from Bed, Bath & Beyond, into a dorm room at the University of the Arts. Room 401 at Furness Hall, which your niece was going to share with three other girls, is in an old building of dark brick, perhaps a factory or warehouse in the past. The weight of what we were doing hit me about now, the theoretical becoming material, when I imagined my 20-year-old daughter living in this space with two narrow beds and two wooden dressers, a couple of wooden chairs, and a large skylight overhead. No AC as we quickly discovered. It was a sunny, muggy afternoon in Philadelphia, and the air in the room was stuffy and warm. The AC unit was in the other room, which had already been claimed, occupied and furnished by a quiet Chinese girl and an African-American with her bleached hair in long, intricate braids. Not exactly an equitable division of space, but we did our best to keep the vibe as positive as we could. We unpacked, made our daughter’s bed, helped her put her clothes in the dresser. When we finished we went in search of lunch. One of the people working the orientation line told us to try 13th Street. We crossed Broad (also called the Avenue of the Arts) and walked a block or two until we found 13th. I was expecting some kind of restaurant row like in Mexico City, or even here on a smaller scale in Santa Barbara, but that wasn’t the case. A couple of places were closed. We walked on, thinking we’d find something further on, but didn’t even stumble across a coffee house or a Starbucks. The part of 13th we were on was dead. Off Broad Street we found a narrow cafe with only four stools. I saw some soccer paraphernalia on the walls and immediately got a good feeling in my chest. Tuscany, I think the place was called. The man and woman behind the counter were friendly. I talked football with the man. Over large, beautiful tuna salads our daughter was spilling large, anguished tears. The room situation had unnerved her and now she was sobbing. 

That’s elite white-collar crime for you, right there; it’s conducted as an endless back and forth between lawyers for the parties. The fact that the crime itself is negotiable is mind-boggling. 

The main lesson raising two children taught me was how insignificant my role in their development has been. I never imagined that either of my children was in my control; though I have always been involved in their lives, my role has mostly been that of a bystander. It’s more like I’m here in case they need me. My daughter needed us now to help her figure out what to do, who to talk to, and how to frame her request for another room. After we finished eating we walked back to the school. Orientation was almost over, but all the school staff were still sitting at long tables. Your niece went to talk to the man at the Housing table, and within half an hour we had keys to another room on the second floor, which until Thursday was vacant. We grabbed a large plastic cart like the ones they use in Post Offices and went to recover our daughter’s stuff from Room 401. I swear it felt like we were breaking out of prison. Old Furness Hall has some funky corners and odd hallway configurations, and after some fruitless wandering we had to ask directions to Room 212. Once inside, however, we knew this was going to be a major improvement. There were four large windows in the main room, three desks, a small kitchenette, a closet, and a bathroom. A wooded courtyard where students hang out was visible below the windows. We could see the laundry room across the courtyard and walls of dark brick. There were three beds in the bedroom, a large closet, and three dressers. One tall window with an AC unit, old, but still emitting cool air. Relief.

We found a CVS nearby and spent $200 on milk, water, canned soups, cleaning products, batteries, a shower curtain liner, paper plates and bowls. M has everything she needs, and when all the stuff her mother ordered on Amazon arrives, she’ll be set. Her name will be well known in the school mail room for a week or two. By the following day when we left, I felt a lot better about the situation, though tears flooded my eyes when I watched my daughter enter the building and disappear from view. 

I remember feeling homesick for Santa Barbara when I joined the Air Force at 18 and was posted to Japan. Feels like a century ago, a strange time, decades before the Internet, social media, Facetime, YouTube, Amazon, UBER, and the iPhone. We wrote letters in those days, and waited expectantly for letters in return. I missed the mountains and the ocean, the view from the Riviera, but once I began my job I was too occupied for homesickness to linger for long. You just get on with it. I hope your niece will find that her courses and social life will do the same for her. She’s a sensitive girl, but she’s got strength in her, more than she knows. She’s all out of her comfort zone at the moment, off balance, far from everything and everyone she knows. She calls frequently, we Facetime, text. She cries, we offer encouragement, and try to reframe the conversation as part of the normal course of leaving home for the first time. All we can do now is encourage her to stay in the moment, breathe, and try to enjoy the experience. She’s in a hurry to be done because she can’t at the present see how she can be there for the next few years. I joke that she’s not serving a prison sentence. She sends me a sad emoji. 

Humbling, man. 

I’m trying and mostly succeeding in limiting my exposure to social media, primarily Twitter and YouTube, endless political news, in particular about the latest Trump doings, all the unfolding drama and laughable excuses being offered to explain Trump’s leaving Washington with thousands of official records, many of them classified, and some highly classified. People seem surprised by this; I never was. When the news broke around 18 months ago it made perfect sense to me. Of course Trump took state secrets with him. Think of a career thief sitting in a room with bundles of American dollars. No guard. The thief is loyal only to himself and a select few around him, he has no sense of a higher duty to the United States, so why wouldn’t he take a few bundles on his way out the door? That’s Trump. Information is valuable, useful for business, blackmail, currency for favors. The “noise” on social media is all about the tedious mechanics of the law, Trump’s reaction, speculation about Trump’s legal strategy, and running prognostications about Trump being indicted or the DOJ giving in to fear and precedent and letting him off the hook. Trump should be arrested for what was already recovered since he wasn’t authorized or entitled to any of it, but American justice, at least in the case of financial and political crime, works differently, when it works at all. I’m not optimistic. Imagine the back channel dealings between Trump’s lawyers, such as they are, and lawyers for the DOJ. That’s elite white-collar crime for you, right there; it’s conducted as an endless back and forth between lawyers for the parties. The fact that the crime itself is negotiable is mind-boggling. 

Other than that, we are well. Water runs as normal, the power stays on all day and night; we have plenty to eat and drink; no shortage of distractions; war isn’t raging around us and the streets aren’t filled with murderous zombies. Bicycle thieves, yes, but no Zombies, yet. An acquaintance of mine rode a Specialized for 20 years, to and from her job downtown, to the store, everywhere she needed to go as she doesn’t own a car. She went into the main branch of a bank on Carrillo Street and when she came out less than five minutes later her bike, lock, panniers, were gone. A painful reminder to me of the December night when my Diamond Back was stolen from our downstairs storage unit. Bike thieves are like horse thieves in the old days, lowest of the low. You steal a bicycle and you steal a person’s way to get around, to a job or school. 

I’ll see you soon for our annual get together. 

Is Trump on the Ropes?

 “It was the same set of tactics that the KGB recommended to agents under investigation: admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.” John Lanchester, London Review of Books, 4 August 2022

I was not the least surprised when the news broke more than a year ago that Donald J. Trump had fled Washington with several boxes of official documents, some of them known to be classified. After nearly six years of Trump, considering all his crimes, misdemeanors, lies, and blustery incompetence, why can’t people understand that there was no possibility that Trump was leaving DC without something he could leverage or sell, including our nation’s most sensitive intelligence from our most secret and delicate sources. Hell yeah, Trump is selling that, are you kidding? That stuff is worth big money to any number of parties, but particularly the Russians, Chinese, or the ruler of Saudi Arabia. Trump wouldn’t think twice. Understand his sociopathic mind: he’s in the game for himself and no one else. Collateral damage doesn’t matter; only loyalty to Trump matters. As the Trump edifice begins to tremble, as the first cracks appear, Trump will become ever more paranoid and distrustful, and more obsessed with loyalty; he’ll start purging anyone who isn’t 100% on his side no matter what he does or how idiotic the stuff of his pronouncements. You can take it to your bank that if Trump slips the noose again and somehow regains the presidency, he will reconfigure the Department of Justice to his aims and against whoever he tells it to target or harass.  

If you doubt that Donald Trump would sell America out for money, you simply do not understand the essence of the man. 

Back in November or December of 2016, soon after the horrifying idea of Donald Trump becoming President of the United States fully sunk into my brain, I wrote on my blog, Shouts from the Balcony, the following: “Frankly, I’m afraid of the damage the Trump gang might do, at home primarily, but also abroad;” I just assumed that Trump would lay a hurt of the country that would require years to recover from, like a devastating natural disaster, and he never disappointed; in that sense, and only that sense, he was consistent and reliable. No matter the situation, the law, or the norms and agreements followed by American presidents, of either party since at least the 20th century, Trump invariably snubbed, ignored, trampled, disobeyed, mocked, or violated them.

What has surprised me, pleasantly, I might add, during the last week is confirmation that the US Department of Justice is indeed deep into a multi-pronged investigation of Donald Trump. I was one of the many people on the left becoming very discouraged at what appeared a lack of action on the part of Merrick Garland and federal law enforcement with regard to Trump’s failed coup attempt, as well as his other crimes, including those related to his mishandling and misuse of classified information that had no legitimate reason for being in his possession at Mar-A-Lago. I’m delighted that Garland has proved me to be overly pessimistic and cynical. I never doubted that a case against Trump would take time to assemble and validate, I only wanted some reassurance that a case was underway -- because, to my mind at least, time is of the essence. 

In the excellent book, Surviving Autocracy, journalist Masha Gessen writes, “In the United States, proximity to political power is certainly not the only way to become rich. But political power does translate into wealth, and vice versa, and this is the feature of the system most salient to Trump and Trumpism.” 

If you doubt that Donald Trump would sell America out for money, you simply do not understand the essence of the man. 

In boxing parlance, the last four of five rounds have hurt Trump, hurt him badly; he’ll keep coming off his corner stool, but his punches will be wild and weak, easily avoided and countered. The Menace of Mar-A-Lago is ripe for a knockout. 

Shameless and Lost

MAGA world is outraged about the FBI’s search of Mar-A-Lago, Donald J. Trump’s Florida home. The usual blowhards and cretins are calling it a raid, insisting that the FBI planted incriminating evidence, and that Joe Biden’s aging hands are behind it all. In less than 24 hours, the entire right-wing media apparatus is whistling the same tune, doing everything it can to discredit the FBI and DOJ, and distract from the issue at hand: that the FBI doesn’t just decide to search the residence of a former president without lawful cause and a legal warrant signed by a federal judge. The bar for a search is high to begin with, the evidence must be solid and compelling, but imagine how sure the DOJ, FBI, and the judge had to be that crimes had been, or were about to be, committed by Trump. The Feds wouldn’t go after a former president unless they had iron-clad confidence in their evidence. 

 Trump could dispel the mystery by releasing the search warrant to the press, but that would torpedo its propaganda value as well as its usefulness in duping the gullible out of hard-earned cash. Isn’t it odd that Trump, who loves to boast about his wealth, is always begging people for money? Within hours of the lawful search, supervised by one of Trump’s lawyers, and known to the former president, his Secret Service detail and others in advance, Trump was blasting email solicitations for cash. 

Like the lies, the grift never ends. 

Trump left the White House nearly twenty months ago, after his coup attempt failed. Soon after, the story broke that Trump had taken fifteen boxes of official documents, some of them containing classified information, on his way out the door, in violation of law, practice, protocol and routine. The National Archives asked for the documents to be returned in the usual manner, by having its lawyers “negotiate” the return with Trump’s legal team. This is typically how elite white-collar crime is conducted, by lawyers going back and forth and quibbling over small details and obscure points of law. All very civilized. In response Trump did as he always does, by delaying and dragging his feet, objecting, and claiming non-existent authority and privilege. Defying authority, and the law in other words, because, as any sensible person can see, Trump believes that no law, rule, regulation or edict applies to him; he alone stands above it all.  

Remember how the GOP soiled itself trying to nail Hillary Clinton for using a private email server for official business, and how it painted what happened in Benghazi, Libya as the Crime of the Century? Frothing, fulminating, bellowing, and caterwauling for months on end, wasting millions of tax dollars on pointless and fruitless investigations that proved nothing, all of which they’ve forgotten in a tidal wave of hypocrisy. Trump owns them, and they know it, so McCarthy and Rubio and even Mike Pence attempt to defend the indefensible and stand behind their Dear Leader, who is currently under investigation in New York, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. 

Do you honestly think Trump would hesitate to sell state secrets to the highest bidder? For the right price, Trump would sell Ivanka or one of his idiot sons. If he could turn a tidy profit on Melania he’d ditch her in a heartbeat. 

On his program, Background Briefing, journalist Ian Masters speculated that transcripts of Trump’s conversations with Vladimir Putin might be among the documents Trump was trying to prevent the National Archives from getting its hands on. I don’t know about this, but it sure is amusing to watch the Cult of Law & Order rise to the defense of the most vile, corrupt and criminal person to ever occupy the White House. If hypocrisy were a chicken bone, the GOP would choke to death. 

Use the Damn Word

 “An unimagined catastrophe now characterizes how American education is being shaped by far-right Republican Party politicians.” Henry Giroux, Counterpunch

A large truck rushes down Milpas Street, gears grinding. Breaks my chill. It’s sunny and warm in Santa Barbara, the second day of the annual Fiesta celebration. My wife and I are both SB natives and have seen numerous Fiestas come and go, and like a lot of old-time locals we stay away until all that remains is confetti from cascarones. When our kids were small we always took them to the parade, and one year, Gabriel’s preschool was in it. But it’s been a long, long time since we drank our way down State Street, and rubbed behinds in the tourist circus. 

The word I want more Americans to study and use is fascism. I cannot remember seeing and hearing so many political voices uttering, amplifying, and repeating authoritarian language or proposing, and in many cases during the past few years, passing into law, more and more extreme measures designed to make it even more difficult for people to reason for themselves. The rights of women to control their bodies, to make their own decisions about giving birth, exercising that autonomy, naturally garners a lot of attention. I’ve no beef with that. What I’m watching is what despicable motherfuckers like Ron DeSantis in Florida, and Greg Abbott of Texas, are doing to transform public education into party-approved doctrine and dogma. This goes way beyond telling little fibs and huge lies about the causes of the Civil War and its aftermath, and protecting the delicate sensibilities of white children from the facts of their country’s history. I’m talking Nazi Party levels, people, or if that analogy bothers you, the Soviet communist party under Stalin. Ever heard of Stalin’s purges? If you didn’t toe the Party line you got a bullet in the back of the head. The Republican Party at this moment is functioning in much the same way, but using ostracism instead of bullets. Cowards are still afraid to cross Big Daddy Trump, so they slip their resolute masks on and fulminate about election fraud and call into question Biden’s legitimacy, even as evidence mounts and mounts that Trump attempted to overthrow the US government. People who watch too much Fox News or too much MSNBC are equally deluded. We’re watching a power grab, an authoritarian one. Get it straight: Trump’s desire, his fixation, is to become the American state, as Putin is the Russian state. Trump loves putting his name on things. Why not an entire country?

Authoritarianism is a potent aphrodisiac in a time of drastic change and social upheaval, of endless war and extreme wealth inequality, of suffering and privation for the many and opulence for the few, and of nostalgia for a golden age that never was. Nationalism. Even better, Christian Nationalism. Us against them, good versus evil, all nice and simple, little individual thought required. If it takes wiping the historic record clean, burning all the books, arresting those who disagree to maintain purity of the group, party, race, so be it.

This is scary shit, political monkeypox, and a virulent strain, so don’t sugarcoat it or refuse to call it out by name; fascism has gradations, shades and degrees, like most things in life. And one more thing, never underestimate the role that unregulated capitalism plays in causing the tremors that shake us to our skeletons. What happens when capitalism refuses to address the needs of the masses for basic necessities? Authoritarianism, social control, crackdowns to maintain order, and more and more extreme tests of loyalty to the Great Leader or the Party, which is usually one and the same. It doesn’t happen overnight, like flicking a light switch, it happens more gradually.

Authoritarians appeal to people who are scared of losing their privilege or place. The Gospel of Bigotry and Resentment plays well in times of uncertainty, and there is no shortage of messengers appealing to the aggrieved. We need to chill and think, but our little digital devices demand constant attention. We fucking killed silence and made contemplation a dirty word. 

The Ship of Fools

 “The powerlessness many will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist beliefs in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. The Christian right provides a haven for this magical thinking.” Chris Hedges

We were warned about climate change, provided with predictions of how it would unfold once the tipping point was reached, and of course moneyed interests and their political servants ignored the warnings altogether or used all their resources to discredit them. Parts of western Europe are withering, fires blaze across France, Spain, Portugal, and yet again there’s a destructive fire burning in my home state. Key water sources like the Colorado River are drying up before our eyes. Crop yields fall, the risk or reality of famine rises along with prices for basic foodstuffs. Most Americans grumble, yawn, and order Alexa to change the channel to something less disturbing and unsettling. 

It’s happening, the cataclysm I mean, and at a moment in this country when the political system is stymied by partisan battles for power and denial of reality is the order of the day. Greed is going to do us in, greed and stupidity. The shadow cast across America by the disgraced, treasonous former president looms over everything, obscuring whatever light we can muster. 

I take a walk up Garcia Road, along APS, and down Jimeno. I notice that several homes are for sale, while at least three are undergoing renovation. This is big money territory and I still can’t for the life of me understand how people crack the nut. Mortgage, insurance, upkeep, taxes -- how do they pull it off, where does their money come from? I recall that even as a child I distrusted wealthy people, never felt comfortable around them or their privileged offspring. My dad, who was working-class to his marrow, and leaned toward money making by gambling on cards, horses, football, and even for a time was a cog in a low-level bookmaking operation, told me once that money was the ticket to doing whatever you want, whenever you want. By the age of 57 he was dead, a casualty of alcohol and cigarettes; he left nothing but an old Oldsmobile and some clothes. I sometimes wonder what kind of grandfather he might have been. 

As I walk down the hill, the ocean moving in and out of my view, my thoughts return to the mysterious hold Donald J. Trump has over millions of Americans. The hold makes even less sense to me now than it did in 2015 because Trump proved to be incompetent in office, a stone criminal who disqualified himself from seeking and holding any position of public trust ever again. Something in this country is completely out of whack -- a sense of shame is missing. Any president who tried to mount a coup against the government should be forced by public condemnation into exile, never to be seen or heard from again, stripped of all privileges. But not here, not with Trump. What happened to us? Have we always been so dim-witted and cruel, such easy prey for a loud-mouthed con artist who can barely read? Is it any surprise that clowns like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have risen from the muck, all of them raised on reality television, Jersey Shore comes to Washington? Decorum, ethics, rule of law, when these ideals are eroded by a steady stream of corruption, what remains is the law of the jungle, of raw power, coercive and unjust and arbitrary. 

It’s somehow appropriate that one of the books I’m reading now is The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. “You flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools.”

Collision Course

 “As a result of climate change, as many as 200 million people may be driven from their homes by 2050.” Ursula Lindsey, New York Review, July 21, 2022

I’m at the saturation point when it comes to bad news and dark portents. Galloping Christian theocracy, endless gun violence, the radical and rogue Supreme Court, and the ongoing, interminable case of Donald J. Trump and his failed coup attempt. The content in my Twitter feed pisses me off, and the YouTube videos I view are too full of conjecture and hearsay to settle my uneasiness. It seems that the rusted and rickety wheels of American justice barely turn when it comes to white collar and political crime, and more than ever I’m convinced that when push comes to shove, Donald J. Trump will skate. The United States Department of Justice doesn’t need a congressional referral to indict Trump or any of his co-conspirators, and even if a referral is delivered to the DOJ on a golden platter, the agency is under no obligation to act upon it. Attorney General Merrick Garland would have tipped his hand by now if he had any intention of indicting Trump; we would have had some sign, a leaked memo or something, a clue. Garland has largely maintained radio silence regarding the disgraced former president as he, Garland, seems terrified of being tarred as politically motivated. Can’t set that precedent for the DOJ, though when Trump regains power he will corrupt the DOJ and use the agency for his own ends. My guess is that Garland will duck, dodge, delay, defer, and dither in the hope that January 6 simply vanishes from public consciousness. When he’s forced to announce his decision not to indict Trump, Garland will go to ridiculous and tortured lengths to justify and rationalize his inaction. 

Fear and cowardice are powerful things. 

I’m old enough to remember the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980’s, the televised hearings, the Tower Commission, and the Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh. Some of the miscreants in that sordid affair, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger among them, received presidential pardons from George H. W. Bush in 1992. Ronald Reagan was criticized but of course escaped punishment. It’s easy to imagine the same thing happening with Trump should he be indicted and convicted before the 2024 election. The next Republican president, like Ron DeSantis, will, with great fanfare, immediately pardon Trump and his entourage. The only people who will pay any price are the misguided slobs who stormed the capitol and spread their feces on the walls and maybe a few bit players a rung higher on the ladder. But none of the major conspirators will be inconvenienced; they will continue to appear on cable news gabfests, pen op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post, run for office, and write books. To expect another outcome is to believe in magic and make-believe. America is nothing if not entirely predictable. 

Trump is the current figurehead for American fascism, but what’s happening in the country is bigger than Trump and more insidious. The political and cultural and factual divide is real, and closer than we realize. If it’s not in your city, it may be in your county or state, in pockets and clusters. It’s a divide that cannot be bridged by appeals to facts, reason or logic, it’s emotional and tribal and as combustible as a gas leak in a match factory. Christian churches and Fox News and right-wing radio propaganda are heavily implicated in exacerbating the division, in drawing the lines and naming the enemies. Democrats bear responsibility, too. Fascism needs an enemy, and just about any enemy will do: Muslims after 9/11; immigrants; Antifa; Black Lives Matter; Critical Race Theory; transgender folk. The unholy alliance of evangelical Christians and the Republican Party, the Bible and the Stars & Stripes, the gun and the cross, is producing its angry fruit. Florida and Texas are fascist laboratories. Follow the bouncing ball of authoritarian ideology as it bounces around the red states; look at states like Wisconsin where Republicans control the legislature but the Governor’s mansion is inhabited by a Democrat. Democrats in Wisconsin represent more citizens and win more votes overall, but have less representational power because the GOP plays by the dark arts of gerrymandering and voter suppression, as well as stacking state courts with partisans, and capturing or neutering the regulatory apparatus. The party has had plenty of help from the Supreme Court led by John Roberts. The Citizens United decision, which allows dark money to flood the political system, and the gutting of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby case in 2012, has paid major dividends to the religious/political right in its quest to prop up white supremacy and take the country backward. The GOP controls 60% of state legislatures, more than enough, with a little help from the Court in regards to election law, to own all three branches of government for a decade or longer. One party rule is America’s destination. Next term, just in time to be useful in the 2024 election, the Court will hear a case out of North Carolina called Moore v. Harper, which revolves around the authority of state legislatures in regards to federal elections. If the Court rules as many expect it will, a GOP-controlled state legislature could use all manner of tactics to overrule the will of voters. It would play something like this: Biden wins the popular vote, but the Legislature awards the state’s electors to Donald Trump. No legal challenge is allowed by law. Done deal.

Here’s another thing that is happening that exacerbates the American divide: the balance of power, propelled by the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, is shifting to the States at the same time the power and legitimacy of the federal government is declining. 

Despair and contentment sit side-by-side on the same shelf. For me optimism is fleeting and hope is almost always out of reach. The world is fucked, and yet there is beauty and peace in it that seems contradictory. California is drying up yet all day long hummingbirds swoop across our patio to drink from the feeder. Babies are born, weddings happen, young men play pick-up soccer in Ortega Park, children run into the surf at East Beach, fully immersed in the here and now, shielded by their innocence. Families go out for ice cream. Young lovers stroll hand-in-hand thinking their love is unique and fixed forevermore, locked in time, as bright as the new moon and capable of enduring whatever comes. Have I become cynical about love, too? Maybe. I cannot seem to stop myself from looking to the shelf where despair and contentment sit side-by-side. I must find the balance point between the two, but some days, when the black dog of depression follows close on my heels, I can’t find that point to save my ass. I feel powerless and insignificant, impotent and invisible, with too few resources to hand. It was in this state of mind I came across an essay by Albert Camus that contains this: “Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything.”

That made me feel better. Temporarily. 

Spare Me: 4th of July 2022

Spare me your red, white and blue claptrap

I don’t want to hear it this year

not in 2022,

when theocrats in dusky judicial robes

strip our rights away

by twisting the law to impose their 18th century notions

on the rest of us;

Spare me myths of wise Founding Fathers, 

George Washington was a greedy land speculator,

and the sage of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, had a yen

for Negro flesh and spread his pale seed among the people

he owned,

never once believing that 

all men are created equal;

Spare me tales of divinely inspired destiny,

wave your blood-soaked stars & stripes someplace else,

because no moral God could condone centuries of chattel slavery,

Black men, women, and children bought, sold, traded, 

insured, mortgaged, beaten, whipped, 

raped,

burned alive and lynched at will;

atone for that and we can speak of Liberty

and Justice for all; atone 

for genocide on the plains, for the Trail of Tears and

Wounded Knee, 

for the invasion of Haiti

Mexico

the Philippines and 

Guatemala

for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for Afghanistan and

Iraq;

Spare me your fireworks until Donald Trump 

is held to account for attempting a coup;

every minute the sociopathic former president 

and his traitorous retinue walk free

they mock the rule of law

and make the Department of Justice a euphemism;

Spare me your patriotic speeches and odes to democracy

as long as Mitch McConnell

runs the U.S. Senate like his personal kingdom;

Spare me your 4th of July sales, deals, discounts

I’m not buying;

Spare me your backyard BBQ’s and all-American BS

as long as white Christian fascists

care more for the unborn than they do for the living,

and venerate their guns more than their wives,

sisters and

daughters;

Spare me, America, until you muster

the moral courage to look in the mirror

and not flinch at the 

reflection

that makes you so

uncomfortable and afraid.