The Isolation Diaries No. 29

“What makes you so strong, black man?...How is it that after all this country has done to you, you can still produce a Paul Robeson, a Thurgood Marshall, a Malcolm X, a Martin King, and a Ron McNair. What makes you so strong, black man?...This country has tried castration and lynching, miseducation and brainwashing.”  From Buck: A Memoir by MK Asante

We’ve seen it so many times before, an unarmed black man gunned down in cold blood by white men, whether police or civilians, because the men presumed the black man -- in this instance a black man jogging in a suburban neighborhood in Georgia -- had to be guilty of something. One legal authority in Georgia took his sweet time bringing charges against the father and son duo of Gregory and Travis McMichael for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. It’s like 1877 and 1910 and 1920 and 1950 and 1965, and all the intervening years, when thousands of black men and women across the South were lynched for the crime of being black. 

Ahmaud Arbery is the latest victim of white supremacy. Will his killers be acquitted? If I had to put money down I’d say yes. It’s Georgia, after all. The killers are white, the victim is black, which makes the odds of justice being served slim. If the tables were reversed, if two black men stood accused of murdering a white jogger, arrests would have been made weeks ago and the accused would be sitting in jail awaiting trial and a predictable capital sentence. 

This country of ours is debased, truly debased. Every time I think it cannot sink lower, it does. I see Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, the look in her eyes as she spoke of her son, and it’s like seeing reflected the sorrow of centuries.  

Ahmaud Arbery is the latest victim of white supremacy. Will his killers be acquitted? If I had to put money down I’d say yes. It’s Georgia, after all. The killers are white, the victim is black, which makes the odds of justice being served slim.

John Stoehr is a writer for the Washington Monthly. Stoehr wrote a piece recently in which he ruminates about Donald J. Trump’s long-standing habit of walking away from his failures, whether businesses, marriages, or the Covid-19 pandemic. When the going gets sticky, Trump turns tail. Long time Trump watchers like David Cay Johnston aren’t surprised to see Trump declare premature victory over the pandemic. 

  

What is surprising is the silence from Democrats in Congress, and those few members of the GOP who haven’t entirely sold their souls to Trump. Ian Masters, host of Background Briefing, can’t understand why politicians are not clamoring for Trump’s resignation. If you watch a montage of Trump’s statements from January forward, can you come to any conclusion other than that Trump is a make-believe president, dangerously incompetent, mentally unfit, and a miserable failure? 

Oh Donald, you pathetic little man-boy, a pandemic is not like a spouse you can ditch when you grow tired of her. Covid-19 has staying power, and it doesn’t care about your wealth or properties or any of the shit you put your faith in, all it cares about is spreading from one host to the next. Covid-19 has the insatiable appetite of a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg; it’s like a remorseless capitalist for whom there is never enough. 

If you watch a montage of Trump’s statements from January forward, can you come to any conclusion other than that Trump is a make-believe president, dangerously incompetent, mentally unfit, and a miserable failure? 

You’re a coward, Donald, and always have been. You never do your own dirty work, you always find others to carry your weight. When your country came calling, you dodged the draft like other rich, white, pampered pussies; you’re deathly afraid of intelligent women, and you fold your tent the moment anyone challenges your BS. You can’t handle being confronted with evidence of your inadequacy. You’re as insecure as any big man with a small dick. 

Today I’ll close with the words of Martin Luther King, Jr: “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.”

The Isolation Diaries No. 28

“In the twenty-first century, the geography of voter suppression had clearly changed. It was no longer only a phenomenon of the Jim Crow South.” Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote 

I feel a sense of foreboding. My thoughts stampede toward darkness and dystopia; I can’t shake them, they dog my every step, and I feel like I’m trying to escape while wearing size 16 boots. Something’s coming. More deaths from Covid-19? Economic collapse? Civil war? 

I come across this quote about the real economy and the stock market from a piece by Hamilton Nolan in In These Times:

“The glaring disconnect between the real economy, of working humans with jobs and bills to pay, and the investor class economy, embodied by the stock market, is one of the most brutal and devious political issues of this age of crisis in which we’re living. Though free marketeers like to boast of the fact that more than half of Americans now own stocks, the fact is that most of them own too few stocks to matter to their day-to-day economic lives.” 

Unemployment claims soar, jobs are lost, some forever, rents and mortgages go unpaid, states like California and New York blow gaping holes in their budgets as they battle Covid-19, and through it all the stock market rises, as if it operates on a completely separate plane. 

In the midst of this pandemic, with all its strangeness, isolation and fear, one thought lodges in my brain: we’re murdering the planet, poisoning the air and water, decimating one species after another, clear-cutting vast tracts of the Amazon. Our leaders and institutions are heedless of the many warning signs, and when the next global crisis arrives, it’s the most vulnerable who will pay the toll with their lives. 

Don’t kid yourself, we’re fucked. 

Trump is intent on one thing and one thing only: his reelection. This is the singular impetus behind his maniacal push to re-open the country, even if it means more deaths. The Orange Menace can’t afford to lose, so we can also count on election fraud and chicanery, massive, systematic voter suppression. The Dems, hopeless and feckless, must somehow focus their energy on voter registration and turnout; not only must Trump be defeated, the Dems need to increase their majority in the House and decrease their minority in the Senate, and make significant gains at the state level. 

We live and work and play and fornicate and argue and scheme and plot and create and destroy in the shadow of grinning, smirking death. 

Listening to a Mahler symphony, music that matches my mood, as I sort these tangled emotions of insecurity and fear, resignation and submission. I don’t have rosary beads to play with and no god to pray to. I’m sure that the only thing that can save someone like me is Art -- writing, poetry, sculpture, painting, music, drama. 

In a bad way. OK, Mr. Mahler, I’m in your hands for the moment, paddling a leaky raft down a dark river, with dead trees lining the banks, and only one faint star visible in the sky. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 27

“They never pay the slaves enough to get free.” Charles Bukowski

How many are still waiting on that $1200 check?

The one-time check

How long did the corporate honchos wait for their money?

I bet no CEO had to navigate a jammed website. 

One America for the rich, another for the working class, the poor, 

The expendable. 

It’s a story as old as the world, ruler and ruled

Master and slave,

Chosen few and condemned many. 

The American Dream is as hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny.  

If dark-skinned men in camouflage vests, AR-15’s

Slung over their shoulders, holstered sidearms, stormed a legislative

Body anywhere in America,

The state would shoot them dead. The media would call them

Rioters,

thugs,

A threat to public safety.  

We’re born into this, Bukowski said, no choice over where or when

Or to who,

But all leaving by the same exit, 

ticket punched in advance. 

A beautiful spring day in a pandemic,

Hummingbirds and Monarch butterflies, a sleek crow

Sitting on the back fence; lavender in bloom, Mexican

Sage, crimson roses, yellow snapdragon. 

Losing track of time, of days, yesterday is today, and today is tomorrow, 

Covid-19 still holds the winning cards, the biggest pile of chips, momentum

And mojo.

Mask, gloves, hand sanitizer, X marks the spot where you stand

Wait your turn, speak through Plexiglass. 

There’s still meat on the rack, eggs in the dairy, apples in the bin,

Plenty of beer and booze, luck still holding. 

This is our Banana Republic, love it or leave it. 

The rat and the worm, the crow and the 

Cockroach, 

The morgue is bursting its seams, 

and the furnace

Is booked solid. 

The master stands on the veranda

Surveys his fields, glances at the sun peeking over the horizon,

Looks at the people he owns, coughs, spits, and says, quietly,

“Get to it. They’ll be no slacking today.”

The Isolation Diaries No. 26

“What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off.” Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

Numbers: more than 1,000,000 cases of Covid-19 in America, with the death toll pushing past 60,000 souls, and both numbers very likely underreported. In Santa Barbara County, 485 confirmed cases, with the federal prison in Lompoc functioning as an epicenter. Unemployment claims across the nation are moving toward 30 million, but again, those are new claims and don’t include people who were unemployed or out of the workforce before the pandemic hit. 

But Trump & Co. are moving on as if the pandemic has peaked. Leaving the scene of an accident as quickly as possible, as they were taught to do by their fathers. Jared Kushner pumped a gob of hand sanitizer on his delicate fingers, rubbed them together, and basically declared victory over the virus. “Back to work, everybody, back to school, children. My father-in-law needs to juice the economy and he’s willing to sacrifice your miserable lives to meet that end. Kindly move along.”

The full-throated chorus to open the economy is a cynical election year gambit. Trump is trying to wrest prosperity from the hands of an impending depression. If the gambit fails and we experience a resurgence of Covid-19, Trump & Co. will turn the page in their perverse hymnal and claim that it’s the fault of individual governors; they will sing in unison that Trump never told governors to reopen or even encouraged them to reopen. (Roll the tape of Trump pressuring governors to reopen their states.)

Trump still believes he can outrun the pandemic, remain a step ahead of a merciless beast that wants to feast on his flesh. A TV creation, a true believer in make-believe, Trump is always creating his next illusion. It’s over, we won. We’re number one in testing. We built a billion ventilators in a week. Every American who needs a Coronavirus test can have one. Hydroxychloroquine. UV light. Disinfect the lungs by injection. Fake news. It’s just a flu. It will magically disappear. We have it under total control. Nobody could have seen this coming. We inherited a broken system. It’s all China’s fault. 

It’s government by spectacle, by stunt, by lie. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sliced the truth with the skill of a top surgeon; Trump dynamites the truth as it suits him, heedless of collateral damage. 

What if, as the journalist Chris Hedges said in an interview recently, these days will be remembered as the “good” times? 

The tale is all-too-familiar. Powerful white man, younger female subordinate, a culture of male impunity. 

Where are the Democrats? Why aren’t Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer using their voices to counter Trump’s propoganda? Joe Biden is holed up in his basement, trying to square his story about one of his former aides, Tara Reade, whose allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her back in the early 90’s has resurfaced with renewed purchase. As if Biden needed another woman problem. The Democratic Party establishment and corporate media are reluctant to give Reade’s allegations any air, opting instead to see if the storm blows out. But you don’t think Trump and his people will let Tara Reade fade into obscurity, do you? Even though it’s rather ironic for Donald Trump, with his closetful of sexual skeletons, to accuse any man of being a sleazy, groping creep. You don’t think the Trump camp stopped searching for dirt on Joe Biden after Ukraine, do you? Deep down Trump’s a mobster and using scandal to advance his interests is second nature, part of normal operations. “Hey, Gino, I need you to dig me up some dirt on a guy.”

Is Tara Reade telling the truth? I don’t know enough about the case to say, though I’m not prepared to dismiss her allegation out of hand. What would make a woman make such an allegation public in the midst of a pandemic and a critical election year? Would a woman make the allegation public knowing the backlash and media scrutiny that would follow? Reade had to know she would be panned, downplayed and dismissed, and that her motives and character judged. For me the tale is all-too-familiar: Powerful white man, younger female subordinate, a culture of male impunity. 

We’re all Joads now. 

What a country we have! The most important election, possibly in America’s history, may very well come down to two old, decrepit white men, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden, both gropers of females, both with blood on their hands, Biden from his Head Senate Cheerleader role in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, and Trump, whose singular stupidity, incompetence, and laziness cost precious preparation time and almost certainly contributed to thousands of deaths from Covid-19. 

I pull The Grapes of Wrath from my bookshelf and open it at random. “But -- you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat.”

Yes, Mr. Steinbeck, it’s as true now as it was then. We’re all Joads now. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 25

“This is like a repeat of 2008, where Congress is dumping staggering sums of money into the hands of Wall Street thieves.” Chris Hedges. 

I spend three and a half hours in the deserted office. I feel clumsy in my own work space. Surrounded by familiar things, I still can’t work at my normal efficiency. Every task before me feels monumental. It’s one of those hit-the-wall days, a low ebb. They happen in bleak times like this. Stress, anxiety, worry, boredom, singularly, or all at once. I feel impatient, harried by my thoughts. When I return home I’m edgy with my wife. Has the apartment shrunk in my short absence? 

We’re at a stand-off with our 18-year-old daughter, who continues to blame her parents for the total disruption of her young, important life. She can’t hang with her friends or see her boyfriend; she asks if she can visit him, we tell her, no, not unless you’re prepared to move in with him. No going to and fro like Heidi Klum skipping down the runway. Uneasy truce. On the positive side the portable AC unit my wife ordered arrived. Our defense against the stifling days to come. My poor wife suffers in the heat, it wipes her out; fans don’t cut it. We have a swamp cooler that helps, but when it’s 85 or 90 outside it feels like 100 inside. 

What do you fall back on when you feel empty inside? Where do you place your faith? God or man? Religion never did it for me, but men frighten me more than God, because they’re here, now. Is there more good than evil in humankind? 

Back to normal, back to normal, back to normal the drumbeat sounds. Back to normal? No, that’s a mirage. An economic bomb is about to hit. We’re about to learn how hard it is to build a foundation that can stand the test of time, good and bad, droughts and floods, wars and hurricanes, earthquakes and fires, and how easy it is to destroy a foundation that has been deliberately allowed to rot. The odds of a swift recovery are very long, this isn’t 2008/09. We allowed that golden opportunity to angle the economy -- just a tiny bit -- toward average people and away from the wealthy to pass in favor of the status quo. Obama chose the wealthy over the people. The rich got richer, remember? Executive bonuses and stock buybacks. Even greater wealth inequality.Working people either lost or stayed the same. Had our economy been stronger prior to the pandemic, the hurt now would be less drastic. (By stronger I don’t mean a bigger bull market and hefty corporate profits, I mean more equal in terms of wealth, more equitable sharing of the spoils, far less precarity.) No person allowed to die of hunger or neglect. No person unhoused. No person without access to medical care. No person without access to clean water. No tents on the streets of Los Angeles, no Skid Row, ever, anywhere. Let’s start with FDR’s 4 Freedoms, see how those notions can be improved and expanded upon. Let’s revive the idea of social justice. We need a new definition of profit that takes into account owners, workers, and the planet. You can make money, lots of it, but not on the backs of workers, and not to the detriment of the planet. The Pentagon all-you-can-eat buffet must end; wars of choice that never end must stop. Unbridled corporate power must be checked. Our political system must be reformed, big money and soft money and dark money rooted out, voting rights expanded and secured, and the war on the poor that manifests in mass incarceration, ended. Only then might we stand a chance against what’s barreling toward us. 

Yeah, it was a day. I guess this is what I fall back on, playing with the word. It’s funny to think that six weeks ago our routines, our lives, seemed solid and predictable, but of course that was an illusion. Life is more fluid, especially in a society like ours, gilded on the surface and rotten to its core. This realization is humbling, and infuriating. A line from a Springsteen song comes to mind, from his album The Ghost of Tom Joad: “You get used to anything and it becomes your life.”

What stupid thing did Trump say today? What was the lie of the day? 

What happened to the anti-war movement in the US?

If America had a robust labor movement and a semi-level regulatory playing field, would we all enjoy universal health care now? 

The big money boys put the New Deal to the sword. Now they are busy looting the treasury. They do their best work in broad daylight, out in the open, under the glare of TV cameras. We get $1200, the dust left over from the frenzy of theft orchestrated by corporate lobbyists and their political cronies. 

Dust to dust. The human condition. I take a snifter of Irish whiskey out on the deck and sit in my new recliner. As the evening quiet deepens, I sip whiskey and stare at the waxing crescent moon. I can’t believe how beautiful it looks. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 24

“Meanwhile the authorities had another cause for anxiety in the difficulty of maintaining the food-supply. Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops. The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing.” Albert Camus, The Plague

Bad week for King Donald I. After his reality show utterly tanked on Thursday, when Trump rambled about UV rays, light, sunlight, light in the body, light on the skin, and then mused aloud about the possibility of injecting “disinfectants” into the lungs of Covid-19 patients. Even by Trump’s lofty standards, it was batshit of the highest grade and potency. Public health officials, product manufacturers, poison control centers, and political figures immediately urged people to ignore Trump’s remarks. On Friday in the White House, Trump attempted the greatest gaslight in world history by claiming that he had posed his death spells as sarcasm aimed at the assembled media, an assertion that millions of people know by their own eyes and ears is flat out false. Trump was dead serious on Thursday, and he wasn’t posing his fabulist queries to journalists -- he was talking to his own people, no one else. It was pathetic, or, sad, as Trump might Tweet. Loser. 

The daily propaganda briefing on Friday was shy of thirty minutes long, a record for brevity. Trump turned and left the stage like he couldn’t get away fast enough. He took no questions. The bully is also a coward. 

That’s why you have to go after Trump hard and directly. Once you get past his first line of defense -- the name calling, the lies -- Trump’s got nothing. At that point he’s a target, an exposed mug waiting for a jab-cross-hook combination that sends him to the canvas. The money media play Trump’s game, participate in the charade, pretend that Trump is somehow minimally qualified for the office he holds. False deference. We have to give him the benefit of the doubt, they say. But why? He’s been spouting insane gibberish since the day he was fucking inaugurated. Stop treating him like he earned the right to be there. 

We are OK as long as the money holds. Then it will get tough. I feel a bad juju coming, unpleasant tidings, a sense that this pandemic is shifting the foundation of our lives in ways that we will be dealing with for years. How can we possibly bounce back to where we were? A better question is: why would we want to? I know, I know, greatest economy, ever, courtesy of King Donald I. Really? How did your personal circumstances change in the past three years? Are your taxes lower? Did you earn more? Do you have access to health care? Can you drink the tap water in your community? Can you afford housing? How are you better off now than you were when you became convinced that Donald J. Trump was the answer to your grievances against Barack Obama and the United States?  

Cognitive dissonance between the world I read about online, and what I see in my own community. Most people are staying the course, staying home as much as possible, but judging by what I see it seems that vehicle traffic is heavier, and there are more people out and about. Most wear masks, but not all. It’s even more difficult to remain cooped up when the sun is out, the sky is blue, and the ocean offers respite from the heat. Santa Barbara is a place where it seems possible to keep the ugliness of the world at bay. Somewhat isolated, hyper-expensive, the city’s a self-satisfied haughty beauty. We are, after all, the American Riviera. 

I just had the luck to be born here. 

Lady Liberty. 

We believed you to be beautiful and just; 

now we see you for what you have become, 

a crass, crabby, stingy and severe old woman. 

When did the rose of your beauty become this thorn? 

Mike “I’m With God” Pence says the pandemic should be done & dusted by Memorial Day. We can celebrate with Covid-19-free hotdogs. Mike must know something the rest of the nation doesn’t. 

I bet Trump whines every night like a little bitch. “This pandemic is very unfair. It’s very unfair that my great administration got hit with this. It’s unfair to me. I’m the greatest American president, ever. Number 1 in the ratings. My crowds are the biggest, millions of people, they love Trump, they love me. They should give me the Nobel Prize for medicine, or science.”

America desperately needs a reboot.