So Far

December 31, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     Fast away the old year passes, as they say.  Amid all the news about the omicron COVID variant, there is still a little something to talk about other than the pandemic.  If it doesn't kill us all before it runs its course, there will be something going on in the country afterwards.  (Hell, even if it does kill us all there will still be plenty of things going on, except that we won't know or care about them, because we'll be dead.  Such is life--and death.)

     What I'm thinking about is how Joseph R. Biden, the duly elected president of the U.S., is doing after almost a year in office.  Opinion polls are far too fickle in this regard, because when people feel generally good about things, their opinions of their leaders go up, and when they're bummed out (as most people are now, although that's largely their own fault), those opinion numbers go down.  So President Biden's numbers are, predictably, and according to the newspapers at least, down, as if he can help the fact that the virus continues to mutate and people continue to ignore his advice to get vaccinated and wear masks in public.  Actually in that regard he's done quite a bit, forcing the military to get vaccinated, mandating vaccinations for federal employees, and also mandating vaccinations for most employees in the private sector.  That latter mandates have still to be given the final go-ahead by the Supreme Court, and I think that's due to be heard by them in early January.

     Here I must interject that it's surprising yet encouraging to me that this stiff-necked ultraconservative Supreme Court continues to uphold vaccine mandates, but they do, at least those imposed by  governments on government employees.  This is for the most part based, I think, on a long line of Supreme Court decisions in connection with the executive's emergency powers, going back to past epidemics, wars, and various other national disasters.  It's a solid chunk of jurisprudence that is pretty much unassailable, even by the troglodytes who anchor the right wing of the court to the shallow end of human compassion in most other regards.  Also, I imagine that the fact that most Supreme Court members are pretty old, and probably fairly concerned with their own health, outweighs their urge to side with the idiot demagogues who put them on the bench in the first place.  It goes to show you, anyway, that when it comes to the Supreme Court, nothing is an absolute given, regardless of the overall political leanings of the court at any particular time.  It doesn't hurt that the Supreme Court sits atop a vast pyramid of federal judges and court systems throughout the country, and as the leaders of their own co-equal branch of the government, they're inclined, as would the heads of either of the other two branches of government, to cozy up to the idea that heads of governmental units (local, state, and federal) get to do what they feel like doing.

     But back to Joe Biden, and how he's done in his first year.  It's been an eventful year, to be sure, and I say that he's done a pretty damned good job, especially for someone without strong backing in Congress, and very little at the Supreme Court.  He's had to put up with a bare majority in the Senate that really isn't a majority at all, but a pretend majority containing a ringer from the other side, in the person of Joe Manchin, or the Insidious Doctor Fu Man-chin, as I like to call him.  (He really is a doctor of sorts, having received at least one honorary doctorate that I know of, from West Virginia State University.  I know this because my brother, who was in the administration of that institution, used to brag about having placed the doctoral hood over Manchin's shoulders at the ceremony wherein he got that degree.  Lately my brother hasn't been bragging about that so much, since Manchin has turned out to be such a fly in the Democratic ointment.  He really should have put the hood over his head and fastened it with a zip tie.)

     But in spite of the Insidious Doctor, the President has managed to get a pretty big chunk of change to the American people, and is working hard on getting even more out there.  This is money the stingy bastards in the Republican Party would have begrudged the nation, and continue to begrudge us, especially the poorest among us.  They'd rather give it to the rich and assume that it will somehow trickle down to everybody else.  Or not.  They really don't care.  Why the citizens of West Virginia don't realize how much damage their own senator is doing to them personally, poor as they are, only speaks to how thoroughly brain-dead they are, on the whole.  Okay, enough about the Insidious Doctor and the benighted hillbillies of West Virginia, whose state song was co-written by a guy from out west who barely even visited there.  Jesus what a bunch of blockheads, and what a God-forsaken place they live in.  Okay okay, I've beaten that dead horse enough. 

     What with Congress not being his best friend and all that, Biden has had to do most of his good stuff the same way his predecessor did most of his bad stuff, by exercising his inherent executive powers.  And he's done a lot of that.  He's reversed a number of environmentally damaging decisions regarding federal land use that the last guy put in place, for instance.  Also, he's diversified his cabinet in refreshing ways, and appointed a large number of women and nonwhites to the federal bench.  His FBI, under the ultimate authority of Merrick Garland, a guy who should be on the Supreme Court right now, has rounded up and is in the process of prosecuting over 700 of the seditious turds who stormed the Capitol last January 6.  The FBI is also on the hunt for right-wing extremist organizations.  Biden's departments and agencies have given the go-ahead to the building of vast solar farms and have tried to promote other alternative forms of energy and carbon-reducing measures.  He's rejoined the Paris climate accord, tried to reassure NATO and the EU that we're not their enemy, and has quit kissing Russia's ass.

     In August Biden ended the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, which was a very good thing.  Yeah, the Afghanis are getting the shits put to them by a bunch of Islamic crazies, but that's not exactly a new thing for them, and no matter how many more years we might have stayed there it wouldn't have changed the situation, except to have kept a bunch of feckless crooks in charge of a government that only we were propping up.  Were we protecting ourselves?  Hell, no.  Were we protecting Afghanistan's neighbors?  Well, considering that its neighbors are Iran, Pakistan, and a couple of the lesser Stans, hell, no to that as well.  Were we maintaining some sort of delicate strategic balance in the region?  Shit, no, because there is no such balance.  Anyway, now the Taliban is in charge and it's going to have to start acting like the leader of a nation instead of a perpetual guerilla force.  This will either bring them down from within or push their neighbors to do something to keep them in check, instead of having the country bankrolled by the U.S. and European colonial powers.  So Biden finished ripping off the band-aid that Trump, in perhaps his only decent foreign policy move, had begun to peel off a couple of years earlier. 

     Biden and his government also have continued to stand up for the right of women to have abortions on demand, even though that might not work out so well in the coming months.  This he has done in spite of being a Catholic himself, which makes him a better Catholic than some of the nasty shits on the Supreme Court who seem poised to take the U.S. backwards into the middle of the last century on the abortion issue.  It's always struck me as interesting that a country like Ireland, held for centuries under the brutal and abusive thumb of a rigid Catholicism, could legalize abortion almost overnight, whereas the good old U.S. of A., technically religiously neutral, could give in to the most conservative elements of both the Protestant and Catholic branches of Christianity, thus balkanizing the country on the abortion issue.  What a farce.  Biden also opposes the death penalty, which is in keeping with his religious beliefs, but also shows that he has some guts and common sense and humanitarian leanings when it comes to the administration of justice.

    All right, on immigration Biden hasn't been doing so well.  In part he's been hampered by the federal courts, but he seems to be interested in reversing some of Trump's harsher policies.  And all in all he's more liberal on immigration than the President under whom he served as Veep for eight years.    

     That brings up a final point, before I end this rather turgid posting.  Joe Biden, despite his flip-flopping moderate past in the Senate, is today the most domestically liberal president this country has had since Lyndon Johnson.  Seriously.  No wonder conservatives hate him.  Sure, he has a lot more to do, and it's bound to get tougher to do after the midterm elections.  And yes, he's reversed his old positions on a number of issues, but in the right direction, not the wrong one.  That shows maturity and growth and a willingness to listen to others, not hypocrisy.  And he has not, since he was sworn in, taken a single position that I'm aware of that isn't fundamentally in line with the liberal ideals of his party.  If you can name one, then let me know.

     I shouldn't have to say this, but I will.  For a President, being liberal is a good thing.  It's not a panacea for the nation's ills, by any means, but it's better by far than being moderate or conservative.  This is a time for realpolitik, not whiny idealism, yet Biden remains an idealist, just not of the whiny sort.  He's a plodder, plodding in the correct direction, and he's surrounded himself with similar folks.  No, he's not a socialist, and we might wish him to be, but if he were he'd have an even tougher row to hoe than he does now.  

     And one last thing: charismatic he's not, no doubt about it.  But he's taken this country, in less than a year, from a presidency based on a disgusting cult of putrid personality, where every day saw a new headline about a new atrocity of presidential abuse or incompetence or dishonesty, to one where the President doesn't want or need to grab headlines on an hourly, or even a daily, basis.  Biden is a normal human being, with an abnormal amount of humility for someone in his position.  For that I give him a lot of credit, and wish him well. 

     

A More Perfect Union

December 28, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     People will tell you the country is deeply divided, politically and culturally.  I won't dispute this.  Probably at no time since the Civil War has one political party in the United States been so unalterably opposed to the views and values of the other as today.  In fact, I'm not sure the Democrats and Republicans at the beginning of the Civil War were as predictably divided as they are now.  After all, there were Northern Democrats who, while not condoning slavery in their own states, and believing in the preservation of the Union, still supported the right of the Southerners (Democrats one and all) to have slaves if they wanted to.  Today the ideological viewpoints of the two parties have pretty much flipped, but the dividing lines are even brighter and less capable of being crossed than they were then.  

     The modern Republican Party comprises two basic types of people.  The first are wealthy folks who don't wish to pay taxes and who wish to be able to conduct businesses of all kinds without having the government interfere in any way with how they treat their workers, but do expect the government to help them get richer.  They also wish to be able to pollute the earth at will and ignore the current and coming changes to the world's climate.  The second are poorer, more ignorant folks, who suffer under a huge variety of delusions.  They imagine that being wealthy is an inherent virtue, and many of them think they'll be wealthy some day, so they don't want the government to interfere with the wealthy.  They profess to respect unbridled capitalism, yet they complain when they don't get enough money from the government.  They want welfare for themselves, but begrudge it to anyone who doesn't look like they do.  Both the rich and the poor folks are, predominately, white, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, excessively patriotic and religious, and backward-looking.  Most of all they are fearful.  They feel threatened by everyone and everything that isn't exactly like they are, or that portends change.  This harkening back to a nonexistent time when things were better is the real allure of the Republican Party, and the antidote to their fear.  Oh, and the stupid ones also believe that Trump had the election stolen from him in 2020 and that it's not necessary to take any precautions against the spread of COVID, or else they doubt that there is such thing as COVID, and even if COVID exists, they're afraid of the vaccine.  Fear, fear, fear.

     The modern Democratic Party comprises people in all income brackets who believe, more or less, in sharing wealth with the less fortunate, welcoming newcomers, paying their fair share of taxes, conserving our natural resources, curbing pollution, trying (however vainly) to combat climate change, and extending more rights and privileges to people who don't carry with them the automatic privilege of being white, male, heterosexual, and affluent.   If they're religious they tend to belong to religions that teach tolerance, forgiveness, and inclusiveness rather than vengeance, condemnation, and punishment.  And they believe that Joe Biden won the election fair and square, and they try to curb the spread of COVID through vaccinations and the wearing of masks.  Courage and caution, but no fear.  

     Republicans and Democrats are scattered all over the place, it's true, but in terms of which states are reliably "red" and which are reliably "blue," there's really no dispute.  There are a small handful of states that might be termed "purple" swing states in an election, too, and whose electoral votes are sufficient in number to make a difference.  These states are fiercely fought over by the two parties.  During the most recent presidential election, these swing states included Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and, surprisingly, Arizona and Georgia.  In 2016 all those states went for Trump, whereas in 2020 they all went for Biden.  But beware of assuming where they'll go in 2024.

     Okay, everybody who might be reading this already knows all this, so what's my point?  Well, I have a modest proposal.  Because the blue states and the red states differ so greatly in their political, social, philosophical, and moral perspectives, and because these differences are unlikely ever to resolve themselves, why not have another civil war between the states?  Nah, just kidding.  Anyway, that would be a waste of time, energy, and lives, and besides, the blue states would win because they're smarter, more technologically advanced, and mostly because they outnumber the red states in population, which were pretty much all the reasons why the North beat the South the last time.  Assuming the two sides don't nuke one another, it would be just a matter of time before the war would be over and the outcome would be the same as it was after the other Civil War--victory for the good guys and perpetual refusal to accept loss by the bad guys.  I mean, hell, if the Trumpers couldn't accept that Biden beat him by 74 electoral votes and seven million popular votes, how could you expect them to acknowledge having lost a civil war?  

     So let's just skip the bloodletting and simply divide into two countries.  Back when the Civil War was being fought the North had a lot to lose by letting the South become a different country.  Most of the lucrative agriculture in the country was located in the South, and England and France and other wealthy countries were poised to back the Confederacy if it would guarantee a supply of cheap cotton, and the U.S. wasn't the world power that it is today.  Take away the South, and we were basically Canada under a different flag.  I'm not forgetting the most important issue, slavery, which lots of Northerners opposed, and not just in their own back yards, but in general.

     Everybody talks about how great it was that the North won and got the South back into the Union.  But look how much the North was able to accomplish during and immediately after the secession of the South from the country!  They got the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments passed, abolishing slavery, granting citizenship to Blacks, guaranteeing the Bill of Rights to all citizens at the state level, and giving Blacks (well, Black men at least) the right to vote.  These major accomplishments happened either during the Civil War or immediately afterwards, when the South was being run by occupation Reconstruction governments.  Had the country stayed together, none of those amendments would have been passed, because the Southern senators, and the Southern state legislatures, wouldn't have allowed it.  These three amendments--the most important ones of the 19th century--were accomplished when the white South was either a different country or a disenfranchised bunch of losers, and while their original congressional members and senators were prohibited from participating in the governmental process in Washington.  That's my point, and the one I'm leading up to in this posting: good things got done when the South was not part of the U.S., but once the country got reunited and the Northern occupation of the South ended, the Southerners did their best to ignore those three amendments, rather successfully, for the next hundred or more years.  And they got their political power back in Congress, where they were able to obstruct progress for many years to come--all the way to the present day, in fact.  Most insulting of all was the fact that, after freedom and citizenship were granted to formerly-enslaved Black people, the South got even more power than it previously had in the House of Representatives, because it was able to count all the former slaves for purposes of how many congressional seats it was entitled to, instead of the three-fifths it had previously been allowed, while still keeping those former slaves from exercising their legal right to vote and, basically, while continuing to treat them like slaves, only without having to feed, clothe, and house them.

     So let's cut the bullshit and divide into the Liberal States of America and the Conservative States of America, or whatever we might wish to name ourselves.  The red states, after all, don't really want to be part of the liberal U.S., nor do the blue states want to be lumped in with the backwater likes of Alabama and South Carolina.  I mean, it's downright embarrassing to be in a country that contains states like Texas, and West Virginia, and, for Christ's sake, Idaho.  Embarrassing and costly, since we have to carry their weight when natural disasters strike or COVID overwhelms them, because they're mostly too stupid to take the necessary precautions. 

     Now, doing this would make for a physically divided country, especially the blue part.  When you look at the blue-red map, what you see is three reliably blue states along the west coast, plus Hawaii, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico.  Then, heading east, a vast amount of solid red, in the middle and throughout the south all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, with a little cluster of blue in the upper Midwest (Minnesota, Illinois, and maybe Wisconsin and Michigan), and then another area of solid blue in New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.  Pennsylvania, well, who knows?  The chopped up blue country would be reminiscent of East and West Pakistan after the partition of the Indian subcontinent when the Brits pulled out.  But hey, today such geographic divisions aren't as serious as they once were, due to better air and sea travel.    

     Of course the blue states have more industrial, educational, and technological strength by far than do the red states.  And as for natural resources and agriculture, I think we could hold our own.  We'd have Minnesota and Illinois in the corn belt, and California, Oregon, and Washington for just about every kind of crop you can think of.  As for petrochemicals, California and Nevada are net producers of oil and gas, not to mention the capacity for lots of solar and wind power, and Illinois has a bunch of coal, should it come to that.  Minnesota mines iron, Colorado and Nevada mine silver, and California still has gold.  And the Pacific northwest has most of the harvestable lumber.  Besides, the blues will be much wealthier and could buy what they don't have from overseas, or for that matter, from the reds, if we deign to do so.

     This is what they call a win-win situation.  Neither side can stand the other anyway.  Mississippians would be tickled pink not to have to be part of what they see as the mongrelized Yankee/Jewish conspiracy to deprive us of our freedoms.  And Californians and New Yorkers and New Englanders could continue to ignore the existence of all those inbred red-state hicks.  Sure, there would be issues to work out, like a time line, and a moment of decision by the purple states.  Maybe we could have a two-year decision window, wherein each state votes by referendum as to whether it wishes to be part of the Liberal States of America or the Conservative States of America.  That way the dumb fucks in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, who don't seem to know what's good for them, could make up their minds.  And after those boundaries are set, we could give folks another two years to migrate to or from whichever country they do or don't want to live in, before the two become absolutely separate.  I'd hate to leave the nonwhite people of the deep south stuck where they know damn well they'll be even less enfranchised than they are now.  And should states like Michigan vote to go blue, the hillbillies in those states (of whom there are many) could hightail it for Indiana or Ohio or West Virginia.  Fuck 'em.  

     During the transition period, the two future countries could decide whether they'll allow travel to and from (and over) one another.  Each country would develop its own constitution and decide on its own immigration policies.  The blues could decide not to have a Second Amendment, for example, or to ban capital punishment, or to make abortion on demand fully legal.  Both countries would have the advantage of having lived under a constitution that, despite its shortcomings, could be a model for its future governance.

     Naturally there will be many, many other issues to work through, such as the minting of money, the distribution of nukes (presently located, I believe, in both blue and red states in sufficient quantities to assure mutual destruction), the maintenance of armies, and the two countries' places on the world stage.  We can learn a few things from the successes and mistakes resulting from the breakup of the Soviet Union.  My guess is that most countries will want to cozy up to the blues, since our more progressive political philosophy would mesh better with those of the advanced nations of the western world, who today remain mystified by the strange behaviors of the red states.  And the other large, nonwestern countries would wish to trade with us, too, because we will have more money.  Canada will favor the blues.  Mexico, which is fundamentally undemocratic and corrupt, will probably take a more neutral wait and see posture.  The reds, because of their historically low wages and anti-union beliefs, might even become a place where more advanced nations will wish to have things manufactured, and might by that token become a net exporter of comparatively cheap goods and natural resources, sort of a redneck version of China, minus China's innate efficiency.  And if the reds reflect the attitude of their most cherished recent leader, they will probably wish to remain politically isolated from the rest of the world, which they will consider to be distinctly inferior, but they'll suck up to Russia just in case. 

     The biggest payoff to the blue nation will be an opportunity to fulfill some of the cherished dreams of the Democratic party--cheaper higher education, more government medical care, gun control, pollution control, racial justice, and justice for the native peoples, to name just a few.  The red nation never did care much for higher education, except as a backdrop for college football, and its medical care has always been rudimentary, at best.  If the nonwhites are able to get out of the red nation while the getting's good, the reds will have fulfilled another of their cherished dreams--pure, unadulterated, Jesus-loving whiteness.  Who they'll get to wait on them, slaughter their animals, cook their food, and shovel their shit will be anybody's guess.  Probably they'll let more Mexicans in.

     And so, onward toward a More Perfect Union.  Bind up the nation's wounds?  Sorry Abe, but hell, no.  This time we amputate!      

 

Bacon, Revisited

December 22, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     Reading the previous posting again, and making a few minor changes, as I often do, it struck me that I might have been a little hard on Judaism, and by implication, the Jewish people.  After all, for the last couple of thousand years, they've been mostly victims.  There's the diaspora (an incredibly complicated series of occupations and migrations), the expulsions from various countries, the Inquisition, the pogroms of the Cossacks, the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviets, and of course, God, who we have to assume, based on the very beliefs of the Jewish people, put all that in motion.  Then, when the State of Israel came into existence in 1948, the Israelis had to fight against all the neighboring Arab countries that were arrayed against them, which they did several times, with great alacrity and well-armed efficiency, like Popeye devouring can after can of spinach.  But as things stand now, they finally have someone weaker than themselves to pick on within their own borders, and in the semi-autonomous ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, namely, the Palestinians.  

     The Palestinians, as we know, are the Arabs who were sort of pushed aside to make way for the Jews who got the area we now call Israel in 1948. The Zionist Jews had begun to go back there in earnest at least fifty years before that, while it was part of yet another couple of empires, those of the Turks and then of the British.  Today, to fast forward a bit, the Palestinians have, by dint of a relentless guerilla war that has killed many people and gotten many of them killed (rather akin to the same kind of stuff the IRA was doing in Northern Ireland), finally obtained, on a semi-autonomous basis, a couple of little pieces of land at the outskirts of Israel, from which they are sometimes allowed to come and go in order to function as the permanent underclass that serves the more affluent Europeanized citizenry of Israel.  (I'm leaving out the Palestinians who live in Israel proper, and are citizens of that country.)  Not that the Palestinians really own their little bits of land, or owned pre-Israeli Palestine, for that matter.  That's the thing.  The Palestinians were living there, but they were no more owners of the land than the Jews ever were, except for a few thousand years ago, off and on, and also of course on and after 1948.  The history of the region is so complicated and so replete with occupations by foreign powers going back millennia, that it would take (and indeed has taken) volumes to discourse over it.  The bottom line is that right now, for a comparatively tiny sliver of time--just over 70 years--the Israeli Jews have been in charge of the area, for the umpteenth time, and the Palestinians are not in charge, also for the umpteenth time.  

     The saying goes that possession is nine-tenths of the law.  Actually, the saying originally was that possession is nine points of the law, which I'm pretty sure means about the same thing.  And what it means is that if you possess land now, and haven't blatantly stolen it, and even if you have stolen it you've exercised control and care over it for some period of time, that reality gives you a bit of a leg up on anyone who claims the land should belong to them.  I think it comes from the English common law, which I'll admit doesn't cut much ice with displaced populations, especially those that don't adhere to the English common law.  (But even those that do, including for example the Welsh and the Scots and the Irish, don't care much for the idea that coming in and taking over a place confers certain proprietary rights, even though the Celtic ancestors of the Welsh, Scots, and Irish did pretty much the same to the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain way back when.)  But what's indisputable is that the Palestinians and the Israelis each are utterly and unalterably convinced that they, and not the other ones, are the rightful owners and possessors of what we call Israel.  There's very little wiggle room on that issue on either side.  God gave each of them the land, they believe, and God is mighty and always right, and that's the end of it.  So Fuck You.

     I won't say much more about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict here, though.  I don't think it's an easy issue on which to take sides, unless you're one of the interested parties.  And I am not.  I can afford to be more or less neutral.  I don't want to see either side have to leave, but I would like to see the Palestinians treated with more compassion by the Israelis, considering especially that the Israelis should know better than to act like such dicks, considering how shabbily the Israelis were treated throughout European history.  In exchange for being compassionate and accepting of the Palestinians, the Palestinians should accept that Israel is pretty much fully in charge, on the basis of that possession thing I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and also on the basis of another saying, namely, that Might Makes Right.  It's sort of the way of the world, and unless you have your head pretty far up your ass, you shouldn't be thinking that Israel will suddenly pull up stakes, or that the Palestinians are going elsewhere either.

     As I said at the beginning, I gave Judaism as a religion a bit of an unfair shake when I tarred it with the same brush as I did Islam and Christianity.  Judaism doesn't want to try to make you convert.  In fact, Judaism doesn't really want you at all, unless you're a Jew by birth.  They'll take you, if you sincerely want to join them, but all in all they'd just as soon you didn't want to.  Judaism, as far as I know, has never put anyone to the sword or the gun simply for refusing to join the Jewish religion.  You can't say the same of Christianity or Islam.  So there's that.  

     The Israelis who run the country of Israel, on the other hand, can be real pricks, and treat their Palestinian co-inhabitants like shit.  Much of this goes back to the Jews' own bad treatment at the hands of practically everybody for a long time, which, bless their hearts, they migrated to Israel to get away from.  But now they somehow can't avoid internalizing all that mistreatment.  So they're as ruthlessly efficient and exclusionary as their own tormentors, and as disdainful of the Arabs as the Europeans were (and pretty much still are) of them.  And it also dovetails neatly with the religious principles of Judaism, which seem to hold both past and future generations responsible for each others' actions.  It's like there's no real passage of time within Judaism.  They live in an eddy of repeated history--a constant state of travail, punishments, momentary victories, long-term losses, and above all, lots and lots of rules, with very little qualitative progress.  It's as if they're caught in an episode of the Twilight Zone, where they wake up to the same thing every day, perpetually under threat from outside, bound by their own neurotic obsession for order, and lorded over by a nasty Father-God who won't give them a break.

     And on top of all that, they can't eat bacon.