Who Was Vice President?

February 7, 2019

Corona, California

     There's a game I like to play, mostly in my mind, but also among groups of people, especially those of different ages, if they'll put up with it.  It's called "Who was Vice President on the day you were born?"  Many people know who the President was when they were born, but fewer know the identity of the Vice President at that moment.  That's because, as John Nance Garner (himself the Vice President for eight years under FDR) is supposed to have said, the Vice Presidency "is not worth a bucket of warm piss."  Unless they get lucky and the President croaks or resigns from office, most Vice Presidents go into utter obscurity after their terms have ended.  A few, like Bush Sr. and Nixon, get elected to the Presidency in their own right without having first succeeded to the office through the misfortune of their predecessor, but the great majority do not.

     Knowing who was Vice President on the day you were born requires a bit of knowledge of U.S. history, as well as an understanding of when Presidential and Vice Presidential terms of office begin and end, and also maybe a thing or two about when a President may have left office prematurely.  The answer to the question for some people might be that no one was Vice President on the day they were born.  That can never be said about Presidents.  For someone born on November 22, 1963, for instance, there were two Presidents, or if you want to get really technical, one in the morning and another in the afternoon.  There's always a President, automatically, even if he takes his time getting sworn in.  It's like being the monarch of England--the king is dead, long live the king, and all that.  But the answer to who was Vice President on November 22, 1963 could be Lyndon Johnson, or it could as easily be no one, since after about noon central time on that day there wasn't a Vice President, and wouldn't be another one until Hubert Humphrey took the office in 1965.  For a person who was born on January 20 of certain years, the answer might that there were two Vice Presidents on that day as well as two Presidents.  For instance, if you were born on January 20, 1993, the Vice President was Dan Quayle until noon eastern time, and after that it was Al Gore.  But just to complicate things, if you were born before inauguration day was changed to its present earlier date--to  January 20, starting in 1937--the old inauguration day was March 4.  Then, too, some guys had more than one Vice President.  Franklin Roosevelt had three, and the last of them, Harry Truman, took office on the day FDR died, April 12, 1945, and served without a Vice President all the way until he was elected to a full term that started on January 20, 1949.  Nixon had two Vice Presidents as well.

     The 25th amendment to the constitution, which was adopted in 1967, established that when the office of Vice President becomes vacant due to the death, resignation, or removal from office of the President or Vice President, the new President may himself nominate a Vice President to fill that office.  But that nomination process takes a bit of time, since both the House of Representatives and the Senate must approve the nomination.  Thus after Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President on October 10, 1963, Nixon selected Gerald Ford to be his new Vice President, but the Congress didn't approve his nomination, and he didn't start serving, until December 6, 1973.  Similarly, after Ford became President on August 9, 1974, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be his Vice President, but Rockefeller wasn't given the green light until December 19, 1974.  Remember that, if you were born in 1973 or 1974.

   With all that in mind, do you know who, if anyone, was Vice President on the day you were born?  I confess that for many years I had no clue who was v.p. on the day I was born, and like some of you, I didn't really care.  When I was growing up, the grandfatherly bald head of Dwight D. Eisenhower adorned the walls of post offices and other public buildings, and as a young child I came to think of him as the only President I had ever had.  Not so.  In fact, on August 3, 1949, the day I was born, Harry Truman was barely into his second term as President (the only one to which he was so elected), and the Vice President was none other than Alben Barkley, a person who has since slid into that obscurity to which I alluded at the beginning of this post, joining such luminaries as the aforementioned John Nance Garner and Dan Quayle, as well as Henry Wallace, Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes, and the slightly more notorious Dick Cheney.  And those are only the ones who might have been around if you play the game with someone who is less than about a hundred years old.  Should you ask a centenarian who was Vice President on the day he or she was born, the correct answer would be Woodrow Wilson's running mate Thomas R. Marshall, pictured above, a man whose main claim to fame was his opinion that "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."  Thomas Marshall was a fairly witty guy.  He was governor of Indiana, and is supposed to have said, upon hearing of his nomination for the Vice Presidency, "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents; home of more second-class men than any other state."  Up to that point there had been three previous Vice Presidents from Indiana, and in the ensuing years we have added two more Hoosiers to the office--Dan Quayle and our beloved current veep, Mike Pence.

     The very existence of the sitting Vice President is often only brought to our attention when he does something exceptional, like tripping on the steps of an airplane.  He is, by virtue of his constitutionally-granted powers, also the president of the Senate, but only in the most technical sense.  He might choose to preside over the Senate from time to time, if he's not busy looking for a five-cent cigar, but he can't cast a vote unless the Senate is tied.  Almost all the time the person who presides over the Senate is a senior elected member of the majority party, known as the president pro tempore.  These days it's Charles Grassley of Iowa.  But just as often the president pro tem delegates the job of presiding over the Senate to a lesser hack.  It's just a matter of banging the gavel.  In all cases the person currently presiding over the Senate is addressed, ex cathedra, as "Mr. President" or "Madam President."  This might confuse the casual watcher of CSPAN into thinking that this country has more than one President.  Unfortunately, we don't.

     One final thought about the Vice President:  because he has been popularly elected to the office, he cannot be removed from office except by death, disability, resignation, or impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanors."  (Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first Vice President, came close to getting the boot.  He was federally indicted for bribes and kickbacks he had taken before and during the time when he was governor of Maryland, and, looking up and seeing the sword of Damocles, copped a plea and resigned from office.)  This means, significantly, that the Vice President can't be fired by the President no matter what he does, and he really doesn't have to do anything at all.  He doesn't even have to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate if he is disinclined to do so.  In theory, the Vice President could refuse to have anything to do with the President at all, or tell him to go fuck himself, and there's nothing the President could do about it except maybe to refuse to let him attend any boring meetings of the cabinet, of which he's not a member anyway.  To my way of thinking this would be like throwing Br'er Rabbit into the brier patch.  This knowledge gives me an even lower opinion of our current Vice President, Mike Pence, than I am already inclined to have.  Because in spite of the fact that he's constitutionally completely independent of the President, he chooses to stand behind him almost all the time, with a half smile on his face, as if he's expecting to get brownie points for being there.  Another second-class man, without at doubt. 

I've Got A Little List

February 2, 2019

Corona, California

[To my international readers:  Sorry if some of the references herein aren't well known to you.  On the other hand, you're lucky if they're not.]

                    As some day it may happen that a victim must be found

                    I've got a little list--I've got a little list

                   Of society offenders who might well be underground

                   And who never would be missed--who never would be missed!

                           --Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado

     I've had a fantasy lately that involves fast food places.  In my imagination, I have the power to eliminate from the face of the earth one fast food franchise per month for a year--signs, advertisements, buildings, and parking lots included.  There are rules involved, of course, which I have created, since I am the Lord and Master of the fantasy.  First, there can be no replacements for the eliminated franchises, that is, other fast food companies cannot increase their numbers to take up the slack from the absence of their competitors.  The locations where they once stood, after I have caused them to disappear, must never again be used for commercial purposes of any kind.  They must be left vacant, to be returned to dirt and dust and bushes and flowers and cracked asphalt.  Second, no remaining fast food franchise can begin to serve items that might have been exclusive to or particularly made by the eliminated ones.  If I eliminate a place with fried chicken made a certain way, for example, then another place that has survived the cut cannot add such fried chicken to its menu.  In fact, all menus of the survivors must remain fixed as they are or reduced, lest they incur my wrath and subject themselves to my righteous hand.  For I am the Lord God of Food, and will not hold them guiltless that attempt to flaunt the rules of my fantasy.  Finally, the franchise in question must be more or less nationwide, if not international.  It need not be present in every state, but must be distributed across a decent portion of the country.  And the smaller, local franchises may not expand, of course. 

     Okay, so what fast food places are on my list?  Remember, I can choose one per month, and during that month I will smite it from the face of the earth.  The first one is Carl's Jr.  Now, some of you in the east may not know Carl's Jr., and therefore may not know that it is the sister franchise of Hardee's. Carl's Jr. in the west, and Hardee's in the east.  So in January all Carl's Jr. and all Hardee's  restaurants will be gone.  Poof.  (And since it is now February, that means they're gone already.  Therefore if you think you see one, it's an optical illusion.  Drive on by.)  Why this franchise? you ask,  I'll tell you why.  Because Carl's Jr. is a stupid name and it makes no sense. "Carl Jr." or "Carl Jr.'s" would be better, but even those names would be dumb.  Carl?  Really?  Sorry if your name is Carl, but don't you dare ever start a business using that name.  Also their signs, with the happy yellow stars on them, are ugly and garish.  I've only been in a Carl's Jr. a couple of times, but I've been in Hardee's many times.  Hardee's is a stupid name too, so fuck them both.  Enough said about that.  In February, Del Taco will disappear.  Like Carl's Jr., Del Taco originated in California, but through franchises spread all over the country.  Why do I want to eliminate Del Taco?  For one thing, it's also a stupid name, and their signs, with happy little sunrises, or sunsets, are ridiculous on a par with those of the late, not-so-lamented, Carl's Jr.  Sorry, but that's the way it is.  For another (and more important) thing, there are plenty of local food places practically everywhere that serve good cheap Mexican street food, which is all a taco is or ever aspired to be in the first place.  Eliminate Del Taco and you still have more than enough taco joints to go around, and surely many more than are necessary.  In March, with great relish, I will eliminate Wienerschnitzel.  I know that Wienerschnitzel isn't the largest fast food outlet by a long shot, but it's particularly offensive to me, the Lord, the Supreme Destroyer of Evil, for a couple of reasons.  The first is the fact that their restaurants are silly-looking, with their yellow A-frame buildings and big red and white "Ws."  The second and more important reason is that they specialize in hot dogs.  So what? you ask, what's wrong with a nice hot dog for a change?  Nothing really, except that in German cuisine Wiener schnitzel, as anyone ought to know, is not hot dogs at all, but a dish made from pounded veal (and sometimes pork) cutlets, breaded and sauteed and smothered with gravy.  It is, therefore, akin to chicken fried steak, and hasn't got a goddamned thing to do with hot dogs.  It originated, perhaps, in Vienna (or Wien, as it's really called), as did, perhaps, the sausage that came to be known as the wiener, or hot dog.  Long gone are the days when a hot dog tasted like a sausage anyway.  Now they're just extruded tubes of American bologna.  But somebody somewhere (Texas I think) thought it would be fun and fancy to name a hot dog joint Wienerschnitzel, with no regard for accurate etymology.  For that reason alone, Wienerschnitzel restaurants deserve to be wiped from the face of the earth, as they surely will be some time during the month of March.

     In the second quarter of the year 2019, three more venerable franchises will meet their end.  In April, Burger King will go bye-bye, along with its idiotic King and its Whopper and all the rest of its hopelessly lame and imitative stuff.  This move alone will clear an enormous amount of space from both the urban and rural landscapes, and will take nothing away from our cravings for cheap calories that can't be found elsewhere.  In May will come one that might make some folks sit up and take notice, if the previous ones didn't.  In May I will eliminate from the planet, from the homes of friend and foe alike, all KFC (formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken) restaurants.  People simply shouldn't do to chicken what KFC does to theirs.  I haven't been there for a long time, but half the time I couldn't tell whether I was eating a back or a front or something in between.  It's either too juicy (fried chicken should never be that juicy) or it's too breaded.  Extra crispy?  My question is, extra crispy WHAT?  Not chicken, that's for sure.  You have to bite pretty damn far into a piece of extra crispy KFC to get to something that was hatched and not grown from the earth.  So to hell with KFC.  As with tacos, there are more than enough local and small places that serve fried chicken, and if they don't take up the slack, then let people eat something else.  Good fried chicken should be cooked in a skillet in at least an inch of melted lard or bacon fat anyway, and there's no way a franchise is going to do that.  In June, you can all say adios to Taco Bell.  For my reasoning, please see the comments above about Del Taco, not that I, the Almighty, have to give you a reason at all.  And add to that the hideous faux-Spanish colonial mission style of its buildings.  Okay, so that leaves the world with no significant Mexican fast food franchises, I realize.  Boo hoo.  Go to a local restaurant or a food truck.  With all the Mexicans Americans there are in this great country of ours, that shouldn't be difficult.  You'll thank me when you taste the difference.

     Moving along to the second half of the year, the decisions by Your Wise and Gracious Creator and Destroyer begin to get more challenging.  As you've seen, there are aesthetic as well as culinary reasons for my decisions.  July's selection (so get it while you still can) is Jack In The Box.  What horrible commercials!  I don't give a shit what the food tastes like, this is a decision based purely on easing the assault on the eyes created every time you drive past one of their restaurants or turn on the TV.  Not to mention that they tried to kill us all a decade or two back.  In August, in honor of the month of my birth, I will eliminate Wendy's.  Now I can hear some of you start to grumble, if you weren't doing so already.  Be careful, and remember the power I have.  Why Wendy's?  Don't they have big square hamburgers?  Yes they do, and that's just plain wrong.  I will miss the Frosty, I'll admit, but it's a small price to pay to get rid of the rest of their shit, and you can get ice cream, or a milk shake, or whatever the hell a Frosty is, somewhere else.  You'll have to anyway, so get used to it.  To round out the third quarter of the year, in September I will eliminate Arby's.  Whoa, whoa, whoa.  What!?  Roast beef sandwiches?  What could possibly be wrong with those?  Seriously, have you seen the pathetically small amount of meat they put in those suckers?  And it can't be that pink in real life--they must do something to it to make it look that way.  So order a French dip sandwich somewhere else, or better yet eat only roast beef that's been freshly carved and bloody in the center.  That's roast beef. You won't get it as often, but you'll appreciate it more, especially if it has a little fat on it.  Mmmm.  

     October brings the beautiful color changes of fall as we prepare for winter.  And it also will bring the end, forever, of Sonic Drive-Ins.   But wait, you say.  Where can we get cheeseburgers as well as chili dogs all under the same roof?  And what about those absurd commercials with the two lovable dickwads in the front seat of their car?  And sometimes the two women who certainly ought to know better?  They can retire into obscurity, or may make car insurance commercials.  Chili dogs and cheeseburgers are sold by every Greek restaurant in America, so not to worry.  November is turkey month in this great land that I have given unto you, and so I'll go after poultry again.  This time it will be Chick-fil-A.  Mostly just for the billboards with the illiterate cows.  I guess if you're an illiterate cow yourself you think they're funny.  Plus they're owned by right wing religious bigots, and the Lord will strike down with a mighty vengeance anyone who engages in right wing bigotry, or right wing anything, for that matter.  And everything I've said already about every other stupid name for a franchise goes at least double for Chick-fil-A.  At last we come to December, and the purge is about to come to an end.  Thus far I have spared one important category of deep fried heavily- breaded food, namely, fish.  So I will destroy all Long John Silver restaurants.  I don't really think I need to give an explanation of any kind for this move to anyone who likes fish.  Fish is supposed to be kind of good for you, or at least healthier than many other alternatives.  Otherwise why bother to eat it?  It's not as tasty as beef or pork unless you like sushi--and don't lie to yourself that it is.  Remember, I am all knowing as well as all powerful.  Anyway, Long John Silver's fish is just the opposite of healthy.  I will grant you that it's no worse than authentic English fish and chips, but that's damning it with faint praise.

     Okay, that's the list.  It's arbitrary, I know, but well thought out.  I'm sure there are a dozen more that deserve to go, but in my fantasy I had to start somewhere.  Now let's talk about the survivors.  You'll notice that I left off McDonald's, which some of you probably figured would be number one on the list.  But in my opinion none of the places that I've eliminated make better crappy mass-produced hamburgers.  The others might be different, but they're not really better.  Mass-produced burgers are inherently kind of crummy anyway, and I wanted to keep at least one major fast food place going.  McDonald's will fill in the gaps--indeed almost every other fast food place, including the ones I  eliminated, started in imitation of McDonald's, and whatever anyone else has come up with, McDonald's has effectively imitated.  Want breakfast?  They make high fat breakfasts, available around the clock.  Want fish?  They make a really unhealthy fish sandwich.  Want candy-like coffee drinks?  They got 'em.  Want chicken?  McDonald's chicken nuggets are admittedly just so much garbage, but they're like crack to little kids, and I don't want to put the children of America into some sort of grim withdrawal.  Kids can get along fine without all of the places I've gotten rid of, but I don't know if they could survive the demise of McDonald's.  And as for french fries, there is no other franchise that does them better--crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, always hot and salty.  Please don't bullshit me or yourselves on this point.  This isn't a health-generated purge anyway.  I also wanted to wipe out the places with the ugliest and most garish restaurants.  The golden arches are so much a part of the universal landscape that they hardly qualify as ugly any more.  You might also have noticed that I didn't eliminate any pizza places.  Pizza isn't fast food, strictly speaking.  Something you have to make to order, even if you do it fast, isn't fast food.  That means Subway and Jimmy John's and all those places get a pass, at least for now.

     There are local and regional franchises that have escaped my mighty hand of justice, too.  For instance, here in the west we have In-N-Out restaurants, but since they're not national I have spared them.  Otherwise they'd be gone like a cool whiff of hot fat.  In-N-Out is offensive, to be sure, and even more so because they're not particularly fast, and often their drive-through lines trail out on the street and impede normal traffic flow, instead of being tucked beside or behind the restaurant.  Also, their food just isn't that good.  Usually the fries are cold and limp and they're cut too long.  And their huge signs are a blight. I could go on about In-N-Out, but they're irrelevant to this discussion at the present time.  

     Well, my children, thus endeth my fantasy, for the time being.  Next year I might start to work on franchise sit-down restaurants, like Chili's and TGI Friday and others.  After that maybe car insurance companies, of which there are far too many spending your hard-earned dollars on TV advertising.  For now, enjoy all those new vacant lots.

     Thanks for reading, and remember: I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, or at least of part of the world.  And as any god in any religion will readily attest, destruction is a lot of fun. 

       

 

10,000 Steps

January 30, 2019

Corona, California

     Happy New Year to you, the few, the proud, the ones who are still following.  

     All right, let’s have a quick review.  I started this thing more than nine years ago, and called it Go West, Old Man.  I went west all right, then stayed there for seven years.  Then I went east last June, back to Michigan.  Now Gretchen and I are back in the west, staying at an RV park in Riverside County, at the foot of the comparatively lush hills of the Cleveland National Forest.

     But is the old man still walking?  In a manner of speaking, yes.  Not moving forward from one place to another, exactly, but I have recently begun to walk in a somewhat dedicated way.  There’s a thing on my iPhone that records the steps taken while in possession of the phone.  Most of you are familiar with it I’m sure—it has a red heart on it and keeps track of various bits of information about one's daily activities.  The only activity I care about is steps.  Steps, people.  For now, I’m trying to log 10,000 steps a day.  Like the original walk I took from Michigan to California, this isn’t difficult, just time consuming and somewhat tedious.    It isn’t twenty miles a day, either, just a comparatively wimpy three-and-a half to four miles.  I’ve been dedicated to doing this since about last October, with mixed results, meaning that I don’t always do it.  In fact, October was the only month in which I averaged more than 10,000 steps a day.  But on the days when I don’t hit the mark, I’m conscious of the fact that I haven’t.  And in keeping with the nature of resolutions generally, I’ve already allowed myself significant exceptions.  One in particular is that on days when I do a full workout at the gym I don’t require myself to walk all 10,000 steps.  Often my total on such days exceeds 5,000, but usually doesn’t reach the full number.  However, because I’ve worked out, after all, and the point of walking all those steps is mostly to get some exercise, I forgive myself the shortfall.  Putting in a half hour on the elliptical trainer machine (not counting the other stuff I do) doesn’t give me anywhere near the total magic number of steps, but the steps I do take are qualitatively better, since I have jacked the incline and difficulty settings up to the max by the time I’m about halfway through the thirty minutes, so I’m trudging uphill in a virtual way, sweating and huffing. You might be wondering why I don’t just get on a treadmill and walk the 10,000 steps that way.  And well might you ask that.  My answer is that walking on a treadmill is about as boring a way to walk as mankind has yet invented, not to mention rather hard on the legs and feet.  I’ve done it a few times, but it just doesn’t compare to walking on real flat ground past real trees and cars and bushes and garbage.  Walking on the elliptical trainer, however, does become a bit more interesting the harder it gets, and seems to be more fulfilling.

     But even the accomplishment of 10,000 steps on real terra firma can get tedious, especially by the third or fourth (not to mention the tenth or twentieth) time one has taken a particular walk.  In Pentwater, Michigan, where we live during the spring, summer, and fall, I took to doing brisk evening walks through the dark and empty streets of the village, often at ten o’clock or later, simply in order to get the rest of the steps I needed for that day.  (Walking from room to room all day with the phone in one's pocket accounts for a few thousand steps by itself.)  I got to know the mean streets of Pentwater quite well, and knew pretty accurately how many blocks I needed to go each way to get to my number.  With the iPod playing a mystery novel in my ears, I would walk from street lamp to street lamp, from one 19th century timber baron's rehabilitated mansion to the next, often taking a quick look behind me for whatever might be lurking—things that the protagonist of the book might be wondering about, too.  Listening to books worked, for the most part, to relieve the tedium, and let me get some “reading” in at the same time.

     Here in California I’ve walked the roads surrounding the RV park where we’re staying, and have gone up into the modern subdivisions nearby, but it hasn’t been as fulfilling, for some reason, as the walks around Pentwater were.  Over the holidays we had occasion to be staying in Los Angeles for about ten days, and there I walked the neighborhoods of the Mt. Washington and Highland Park areas of the city, on what might be called the northeast side, near the Arroyo Seco and the 110 freeway, for those of you who know the area.  And what a dump that is.  I mean, really ugly and litter-strewn and run down.  These descriptors could safely be used to describe just about every part of Los Angeles, with a few minor exceptions over on the west side.

     Let me give you a little taste of my Los Angeles walking:  Walking down the narrow streets at the foot of Mt. Washington toward Museum Drive as it slides into Marmion Way, one is struck by the narrow houses plastered haphazardly onto the hillsides.  It's evocative of another world, and not the first or second worlds, either.  Superficially it has the feel of a hillside village in southern France or Italy, only without the architectural integrity and respect for history of those places.  There's no attempt to harmonize the styles of the buildings with their natural surroundings.  The garishly colored eclectically designed houses haven't so much been built as they have been slapped up onto the sheer terraced inclines, with the hope that they'll stick.  The streets in the neighborhoods are impossibly narrow and steep and could only exist in a climate that never sees freezing temperatures, and very little inclement weather of any kind.  Like all parts of the city, it's better seen at night when the chaos and ignorance of the city planning is obscured by darkness and only glittering street lights show.  It's the money view that movie makers use, usually from some vantage point high up in the Hollywood hills, on some place like Mulholland Drive, where the panorama of the city below resembles a vast and excessively busy airport landing strip.   But down below, what comes to mind is what generally strikes one when driving through almost all of Los Angeles, namely that there is no integrity in this metropolis--no attempt to create something unified.  To be sure, there are many ugly cities in the United States.  But probably no large city has been built with such deliberate disregard for, and indeed violence to, the natural beauty that existed here before humans came in large numbers.  

     Down on Figueroa Avenue, one crosses the Arroyo Seco, a concrete flood control ditch running from Pasadena in the north to somewhere down in the old center of the city.  Arroyo Seco is a charming Spanish name for what would, in English, probably be called Dry Gulch.  Along the Arroyo Seco, skirted by a freeway on one side and train tracks on the other, are the tents and makeshift huts of the homeless, an interesting lot whose presence pervades the city and indeed the whole of Los Angeles County.  They number in the tens, if not the hundreds, of thousands.  Each newly-elected mayor promises to do something about the homeless problem, and each one fails spectacularly, although countless millions of dollars get appropriated and thrown at the situation in one way or another.  A fairly large percentage of the money goes into the pockets of the people who do the "visioning" and the "planning."  What filters down into the wretched depths of the problem itself is usually good money poured after bad, money spent with the best of intentions but that ignores the most important causes of the homelessness problem, in my opinion.  The easy answer to the whole idea of homelessness is to think that the building of housing is the ticket.  Just make cheap affordable places for people to live and they'll go live there and all will be well, the thinking goes.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  And not because that isn't a logically appropriate response to the idea.  However, it simply overlooks the root causes of homelessness.  Sure, a lack of affordable housing is part of the problem, but only a small one, and one whose amelioration would help only a tiny fraction of the homeless.  We're not talking about refugees here, as in some other countries, simply waiting for their chance to enter our national mainstream.  No, our homeless are home-grown, so to speak, folks who have fallen off the grid, and the majority of them are either mentally ill or drug- and alcohol-addicted, or a combination thereof.  What the homeless of Los Angeles need (and I'm sure the same goes just about everywhere in the country) is long term mental health care and alcohol and drug treatment, things we have abandoned as a society because we think they're too expensive, and because older models (scary 19th century era mental hospitals) were too abusive to those they were meant to serve.  We think that long-term confinement of such people is inhumane.  Okay, agreed.  But build them apartment buildings to live in and you simply create unsupervised nuthouses, crack houses, and flop houses.  Build outdoor toilets to relieve public defecation and all you get is filthy and dangerous confined areas where rape and mayhem occur.  Because the homeless tend to carry everything they own with them, and as a result tend to hoard and then discard, up and down Figueroa are piles of abandoned litter, clothing, and the remnants of salvaged food from dumpsters.  The city apparently has higher budgetary priorities than to spend much time or money on picking up things from the street, and so it just accumulates in niches and ditches, like the homeless people themselves.

     So that's a sample of my evening walks in Los Angeles, a city I would be happy never to have to set foot in again, not because of the homeless, but because it's a place that has been running from reality, or creating its own alternatives to reality, for the past one hundred years.  It's one thing to walk through such a place, on the way to somewhere else, or in furtherance of a goal.  It's something else altogether to swirl around in it day after day.  But hey, the weather's nice. 

     All this is in furtherance of the 10,000 step goal.  I think I got this idea from David Sedaris, who started walking around his home in the English countryside picking up litter.  And Mr. Sedaris greatly exceeds the 10,000 step mark most of the time.  How he finds time to write as much as he does, not to mention touring several hundred days a year, I don't know, but I tip my hat to him.  I have no desire to pick up litter, which in any event would be a fool's errand on the mean streets of southern California.  But emulating David Sedaris, even in a small way, is a worthy goal.  

                 

Unsex Me Here

Pentwater, Michigan
October 10, 2018

Okay, the Kavanaugh nomination happened just as I figured it would.  But I wasn't the only one, and predicting it wasn't exactly a feat of Nostradamus-like proportions.  It was more a foregone conclusion that got interrupted temporarily by the testimony of one of Kavanaugh's several sexual assault victims.

Here again, we have to examine the way we're viewing the news lately (and by "we" I mean the anti-Trump people).  So clouded has our judgment become by our bitter loathing of the president and his people that we fail, often, to see what is and is not happening.  Mostly we fail to see that Republican partisan politics will win out over reason and decency almost every time.  But since those of us who oppose Trump are mostly reasonable and decent people, we view the world through that lens.  We're on the side of fair play, for the most part, and also on the side of diversity and inclusiveness.  Well, it's about time we got a little less tolerant.  If this is a war between ideologies, as it is safe to say it is, then we shouldn't be in the business of giving anybody the benefit of the doubt.  In war you pick a side and try to annihilate the other side.  In that regard I applaud the attempts of the Democratic senators to derail Kavanaugh's nomination, even though they were pretty much doomed from the start by the unwavering mathematics of the Senate as it is now comprised.

When Kavanaugh got nominated most people (and by people I mean news reporter types) accurately predicted that he would be approved, in spite of the fact that, once on the bench, he would surely oppose liberality at every turn.  This conclusion just followed from the fact that there are a majority of Republicans in the Senate.  During his hearings he lost his composure and telegraphed to the whole country that he was precisely what liberals feared he was, namely, a card-carrying right wing Fox News conspiracy theorist of the first order, whose judgment would be unalloyed in the future by any consideration of even the possibility that a Democrat might be right about anything.  (Not that there's anything wrong with being so partisan:  such views almost perfectly mirror my own feelings about Republicans, and I would be happy to go onto the Supreme Court and be the undying voice of left-wing opposition.)  Viewed in retrospect, his tearful rant was a master stroke on Kavanaugh's part, since it established him as a once-in-a-lifetime guaranteed Republican partisan.  The failure to nominate someone with such a pristine pedigree of conservatism would be the great regret of any Republican senator for the rest of his or her life.  Even Senator Murkowski of Alaska was almost apologetic about not voting for him, and made up some bullshit so she could vote "present" rather than "no."

So, to quote a line from one of my favorite Cohen Brothers movies, "What have we learned?"  One thing, for sure, regarding women Republican senators.  They are Republicans first and foremost.  Their womanhood does not "trump," as it were, their conservatism, their hatred, their loathing of liberality and fairness.  This was another miscalculation many commentators made.  Somehow they thought that feminine solidarity would win out over partisan politics.  But no.  And really, why should they have been so rash in their expectation?  These women are, after all, Republicans.  If they'd been the least bit sensitive to the plight and rights of women, they wouldn't have run for office as Republicans in the first place.  And for Christ's sake, it's not as if there aren't dozens of other women who have put in with the forces of evil and been appointed to positions of power--Betsy DeVos, Nikki Haley, Kirstjen Nielsen, the wretched Sarah Sanders, not to mention the many harpies on Fox News.  Why should the Senate, of all places, be exempt from morally compromised women members?  These individuals have, with Lady Macbeth, called out

Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,
Unsex me here; and fill me,
From the crown to the toe, 
Topful of direst cruelty!

We suffer when we assume that there are good people on both sides of the political aisle, because we waste time that could be better spent opposing the bad ones.  Perhaps at one time there were "good" Republicans, but no more.   If they're good, they won't be Republicans.  Sorry, maybe your dad was a Republican and you think of him as basically a good guy.  But your dad was foolish and misguided at best, and bigoted and filled with fear and loathing at worst.  Time to stop thinking there are salvageable Republicans, male or female, and recognize them all for what they are--the minions of the devil.  And you know who the devil is, right?    





 

Nature

Pentwater, Michigan
October 5, 2018

Most folks who read the blog already know that I've moved to Michigan.  What does this portend for the world?   Well, nothing.  Things will keep moving along, blog or no blog, California, Michigan, wherever. 

Tomorrow they'll approve the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.  I'm so sure of this that I'm going to publish this today, before the vote.  If I'm right I won't gloat, and if I'm wrong, then I'll have some explaining to do.  Now, to hear the people on NPR talking (which I pick up in the background as my wife listens on her iPad), you'd think there's some serious question about whether he'll get the nod.  There's lots of excited and wishful speculation about Senator Susan Collins from Maine, and Joe Manchin from West Virginia.  One NPR guy asked the rhetorical question whether Manchin would want to be the single Democrat who sealed the Kavanaugh nomination, to which I thought, Hell Yes, if it gets him re-elected.  Then there's Jeff Flake, who gets lots of respectful consideration from liberals because he doesn't like Trump, notwithstanding the fact that he's a conservative Republican.  But he'll vote for Kavanaugh too, because Kavanaugh embodies his right wing views pretty much down the line. 

Still, the moderates and left-of-center folks hope against hope that Kavanaugh won't get picked.  Well of course I hope so too, but I don't go on the air and make a national hobby of telling everyone so, nor do I try to shape the more or less immutable facts to match my wishes.  But that is the disease of the anti-Trump media.  They've been denying the fact of his presidency since the day after he was elected, so it should be no surprise that they deny the fact that he has the votes in the Senate to get his guy approved.

This reminds me of the story of the scorpion and the frog.  A scorpion wants to cross a body of water, but can't swim.  So it asks a frog to carry it on its back.  The frog initially says, "No way--you'll sting me!"  The scorpion replies, "Why would I do that?  Then we'd both drown."  The frog sees the logic of this and agrees to carry the scorpion.  About halfway across the scorpion stings the frog.  As they're going down into the water the frog asks, "Why did you do it?"  The scorpion answers, "I couldn't help it.  It's my nature."

Remember this tomorrow as you see people voting against logic, but according to their nature.

Credo

Monrovia, California

April 9, 2018

Let's talk about religion.  It's in the news frequently, as the administration has deliberately attempted to exclude people from our country who adhere to one religion in particular--Islam.  This in turn raises questions about whether it is constitutional, under the First Amendment, to systematically bar immigrants, or refugees, from countries whose populations are so predominately Muslim that to exclude them is tantamount to barring Muslims--the so-called Muslim Ban.  Trump's first version of this was so blatantly unconstitutional--allowing as it did for the admission into this country of members of religious minorities in those same Muslim countries, i.e., Christians--that even a Supreme Court filled with Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases would have had no choice but to strike it down.  So the next version or two, which we might call Muslim Ban Light, was more facially neutral, and appears to have been given a temporary green light by the Supreme Court, to be reviewed in more detail later.  And since those old farts work at a snail's pace, the whole thing might not get sorted out for years. 

The result of all this anti-Muslim rhetoric and Muslim-targeting activity from this administration and from previous ones, going back at least to 9/11, has been to increase the sympathy of liberals toward Islam, a religion that hardly got a second look a generation ago in this country, before the Ayatollah, unless you were Jewish and/or concerned about Israel.  The press and the government, prior to the takeover of the executive branch by its current gang of thugs, were careful not to blur the lines of distinction between what they characterized as regular harmless Islam and and radical militant Kill-The-Infidel Islam.  Adherents to the latter version are now called Islamists, to distinguish them from everyday Muslims.  And the clergy and experts in the religion--the ones who get interviewed on CNN--are always quick to point out that Islam is essentially a religion of peace, and that the bad-guy suicide bombers and ISIS types don't represent the vast majority of quiet, assiduous believers in this essentially misogynistic and backward faith.

As so often happens, civil libertarians have a tendency to choose strange bedfellows in the name of protecting the Bill of Rights.  It's one reason I've never succumbed to the ceaseless junk mail requests of the ACLU to join its ranks.  Not that I'm opposed to the Bill of Rights generally.  I like the freedom of press and speech and assembly parts, in particular, as well as the amendments that protect the accused in criminal actions.  The Second Amendment I would gladly shitcan, since no one seems to know where to draw the line there, although plain common sense, if it were applied, would tell you that it has outlived its original intended usefulness.  That view recently got a respectable airing by retired Justice John Paul Stevens.  But that's a subject for another rant.  It's freedom of religion that concerns me here.  And again, it is the application of common sense that seems to be singularly lacking in the construction of this portion of the First Amendment.  Freedom of religion, I believe, was never intended to be an impediment to the orderly conduct of national affairs.  If a conscientious objector refuses to be inducted into the military in time of war, then the government has a right to sanction that person in some way.  Not severely, but rationally.  I myself was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, and, but for the intervening draft lottery that mooted the point for me, would have been classified 1-O, which would have meant that I could have been drafted and assigned to a nonmilitary place, such as a mental hospital, where I ended up working anyway.  My personal conscientious objection to that war wasn't based on any deeply held conviction that war in general is immoral or unsupportable, although I had to tell the draft board that it was.  Instead it was based on my private conviction that the U.S. had no business doing battle with the communist government of North Vietnam.  And look how it all played out.  Well, I digress.

Many people believe that radical Islamism is Islam at its worst and most perverted.  To some extent that's undeniable, but I must take issue with such a simplistic view.  A more logical way to look at it is that any religion is at its worst when its own fringes commit atrocities, and particularly when it believes that it must explain itself to outsiders.  If you have to explain it, it certainly isn't explaining itself very well.  If you must keep saying "Islam is a religion of peace," while Muslims of one kind or another are busy killing each other and those outside the faith, you have a basic problem.  Not a P.R. problem, but a problem of squaring ruthless objective reality with some sort of sanitized theological ideal that, after all, many members of that religion don't believe anyway.  Any religion is merely a reflection of the political mindset of its adherents at a given moment in time.  The mistake is in assuming that a religion embodies an ideal, an absolute, or even a constant.  Today's Islam may or may not be the Islam of a century ago, but guess what?--it pretty closely resembles the Islam of 500 to 1000 years ago, when Christian crusaders were fighting Muslims for control of the Middle East and Southern Europe.  I call that a lack of progress.

By that token, it needs to be said that the same goes for Christianity, which is about as much or as little a "religion of peace" as Islam is.  The difference is that the most militant, acquisitive, imperialistic period of Christianity is largely behind it.  Christianity, in Europe at least, is a toothless old lion, snoozing and dreaming of the many beasts it has torn apart and eaten raw in its more active years, and becoming ever more irrelevant.  But it is still only as good as the last bad thing that was done in the name of Christianity.

Europe, the homeland of Christianity, is entering its post-Christian phase (even in such recent theocracies as Ireland), with its churches little more than works of historical architecture and its clergy carrying the moral authority of someone's old Aunt Minnie.  The sectarian violence in the Balkan states and the crazy Polish revisionism regarding the Holocaust are, of course, notable exceptions.  Meanwhile, here in the United States, we are still dealing with the growing jihadist mentality of the conservative Protestant Right, also misogynistic, backward, absolutist, and proselytizing, if less overtly violent than the Islamists are.  The Protestant Right has systematically fought against women's rights, gay rights, racial equality, tolerance, and scientific reality with a fervor that would warm the heart of the nastiest Taliban cleric.  And in fairness, we can't give a free pass to Catholicism, which also is a major perpetrator of discrimination against women, not allowing them into its priesthood, and insisting that a woman's right to choose whether or not to have a baby isn't her right or her choice at all, but rather the prerogative of God alone, and by extension God's spokesmen on earth.  That's spokesmen, not spokespersons.  And to add insult to injury, the Pope and his little Roman boy's club in the Vatican are recognized not just as a theological, but as a political entity, and given the status of a country, which other world leaders should visit like they would visit France or Germany, as wacky as that notion might seem in the 21st Century.    

To put it plainly, many of the views of everyday Islam, and Christianity, should not be tolerated by anyone.  Given the stated intentions of these religious groups to spread--and indeed to impose--their views everywhere, at the risk to the nonbeliever of eternal and sometimes terrestrial damnation, they both are dangerous in the extreme.  Now, I know what some of you are thinking.  When we don't tolerate all religions equally, we start sliding down a slippery slope.  Where might it end?  Which religion will be safe from intolerance if we start picking on just one, or a few, of them?  This is basically homegrown American thinking, and to the extent that it's accepted in Europe or elsewhere, it's been exported from this side of the ocean to the other, not the other way around.

But as easy as it is among liberals to condemn aspects of Christianity, it seems equally difficult to step on the toes of Islam, lest we be seen as, heaven forbid, intolerant.  My question is this: when will people with secular moral and political authority stand to condemn religions that encourage, tolerate, or at best overlook the inhumane and unequal treatment of women, nonbelievers, and other segments of humanity?  Bloggers like me can do it all day long, and we get handfuls of readers.  But if the European Union or the United Nations or some other world body did it, wouldn't it get more notice and respect?  When will the people who agree with what I'm saying stand up and say to the world, Islam isn't good, it's BAD.  It is not a religion of peace, it's a religion of violence and sexism.  It must stop slaughtering infidels and requiring women to go around with their heads covered while the men do whatever the hell they want.  Covering one's head in public is not an expression of feminine cultural solidarity, as the twisted logic of cultural relativism would have you believe.  It is a disgusting acquiescence to tyranny, and a sad reflection of the acceptance of the inherent injustice of the religion that imposed it in the first place.  Islam is, to put it bluntly, fucked up.

To borrow the words of Walter Cronkite, one of the last of our national secular spokesmen, "That's the way it is."          

The Good News

Monrovia, California

April 8, 2018

Safely through the first year plus of the Trump presidency.  I say safely because he hasn't done much physical damage--only to the truth as a general ideal.  There he has done much harm, redefining truth in an eerily Orwellian way, so consistently and often that we now accept as givens that there are such things as "fake news" and "alternative facts," rather than simply lies.  Most rational people see this with a firm sense of the irony of it all, while his true believers have gained a couple of catchphrases with which to dress up and rationalize their adherence to his ultimately pedestrian and transparent brand of jingoism and white supremacy.  The rest of us have been given permission by the mainstream media to call Trump a liar, an idiot, and a hatemonger quite openly.  Some might call that a win-win situation.

It is now perfectly acceptable to wish for and expect the impeachment of the president (whether or not that will ever happen) and to assume that whatever he says will be not only self-serving, but also the opposite of factual.  It's as if Pinocchio is in the Oval Office and his nose is getting longer every day--either an amusing state of affairs or a sad one, depending on your disposition.  In fact, Trump has effectively cut himself and Fox News off from everybody else, so that it's easier, even for well-meaning but dimwitted people (a large part of the electorate), to see the line between falsehood and propaganda, on the one hand, and news on the other.

Those of us who are hunkered down to weather out the storm that is Trump are teaching ourselves to look at the relative severity of the waves of buffoonery that regularly crash down on the decks of the ship of state, and to gauge their force in terms of how much permanent damage has really been caused.  How much?  Well, not much.  So far nothing his Attorney General, or his Education Secretary, or his hapless and now departed Secretary of State have done has effected any permanent or even major temporary change in things.  Even the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court did nothing except to resurrect his predecessor, Antonin Scalia, and give him a new lease on life.  The ship of state is vast and turns only by small degrees, no matter who is at the helm.  And thank God for that.  Just imagine if Trump was a prime minister capable of instituting his harebrained ideas more or less at will, instead of a comparatively feckless president of a massive bureaucratic corporation, whose board of directors (Congress and the Supreme Court) do not answer to him but to the shareholders and our venerable corporate culture.  True, he and his allies in the Congress have altered the tax code in ways that will not be fair to all, but then the previous version wasn't fair to all either, and these things can be tweaked and changed and even undone.  It happens regularly.

To read this may come as a shock to some of you whose personal angst and disgust have been so strong that you cannot separate your feelings from what actually has, and has not, taken place.  After all, you think, hasn't the precious reputation of the country on the world stage been forever besmirched?  Aren't we a half minute closer to doomsday?  Haven't we abandoned our symbolic commitment to the laudable, if chimerical, goal of doing something about global warming?  Isn't the executive branch of the government now filled with cruel rogues and incompetent hacks?  Well, turn off Facebook and take a deep breath.  That's my advice to everyone, including myself. 

Because I'm here to give you the Good News.  And sorry, the Good News is not that Jesus died for your sins or that God is watching over us all with some kind of ineffable plan.  No, better than that, my friends.  The Good News is that all this is transitory, and not in a slow way, like the melting of the glaciers.  In less than three years it will be time for another presidential election, if we haven't all been nuked by then.  What if, at any other time in your living memory, someone had told you that in three years things will almost certainly be better.  Would you have believed it?

So relax.

Congratulations, Chumps

Monrovia, California
August 18, 2017

Well, damn it, things aren't getting any less weird.

By weird I mean ever-changing in their bizarreness.  You've got to give Trump credit for one thing--he's a pure egotist and he's got us all talking about him all the fucking time.  Do you think that after seven months in office everyone was talking about Barack Obama, or George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton every minute of every day?  Hell no.  But this guy has his finger firmly on the pulse of the nation, and indeed on the essential nature of the modern media.  He knows that our attention span has always been short and is getting shorter by the year.  There's just too much information coming at us from too many directions for us to be able to focus on any one thing for more that a few days or even a few hours.  In terms of our appetite for news, we're like little kids on Christmas morning with not just one toy but dozens of them.  We tear one thing open then go to the next one, not bothering to savor or examine anything much.  It's exhausting as well as demeaning to the entire process of gift-giving, or news broadcasting, as the case may be.  And it's just as much the fault of the gift givers, or the news broadcasters, as it is ours.  Meanwhile the guy who controls this absolutely and unerringly is Donald Trump.  The whole time everyone is talking about how terrible he is because of his latest tweet or ham-handed move he's enjoying the security of being the center of attention, which is all he's ever really wanted.  There's been a lot of talk lately about whether we have learned the lessons of history.  Well Trump sure has.  Lesson number one is that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.  And lesson number two is that there's no such thing as bad publicity.  Ask Hitler, a guy who profited from all the publicity that came his way.  Ask a Kardashian.  Ask Satan.

And, what the hell, I'm feeding into that just like everybody else.  But at least I have a point to make about it.  I know it's just about impossible not to pay attention to the President if he wants you to pay attention to him--he's got too many weapons in his arsenal, literally and figuratively.  You can't just take the guy and put him in the time-out room and lock the door and go have a little peace and quiet.  He's spawned an entire pack of parasitic newshounds, some real and yes, some fake, to report on his every move.  If, like me, you've culled out any right-wingers from your Facebook friends, either by unfollowing them or unfriending them altogether, then other than recipes for delicious things, or photos of cute-as-hell grandchildren, or pictures of people holding fish they've just caught, you have only the shrill voices of the opposition, condemning Trump's every move, and demanding his impeachment, resignation, condemnation, etc.  Everything except for his assassination, and I'm not sure why nobody's urging that.  That's probably the only way to ensure his premature exit from office.  (Pence, you say?  Don't worry about him.  He's an amateur, and would be a lot easier to handle at all levels than Trump is.  We should be hoping that that Hoosier fuck-knuckle will be president soon.)  And the regular TV news isn't much better.  MSNBC and CNN's mission in life is to obsess, negatively, about Trump on a daily basis--a laudable goal in theory, but in practice very wearying and repetitive and, let's face it, pretty useless, unless you're Donald Trump, in which case it's very useful because it keeps you in the spotlight.

Just lately the big controversy has been the neo-Nazi demonstrations surrounding the taking down of statues of Confederate (or is it Covfefe?) warriors.  Since just about everybody's memory of history is somewhere between short and nonexistent, few remember that in the 1970s the American Nazis petitioned for, and ultimately were granted, the right to march through Skokie, Illinois, a predominately Jewish suburb of Chicago.  Back then the wounds of the real Nazi regime were much sorer, and a number of Skokie's residents were actual holocaust survivors or immediate family members of such unfortunate victims.  This was naked provocation, pure and simple.  Still, the Supreme Court upheld their right to march, and congregate in Skokie they did, if rather tepidly, and the country went on, just as the country will go on now.  The President at the time, Jimmy Carter, did condemn the Nazis, while respecting their constitutional right to march, and encouraged counter-demonstrations by Jewish organizations and others.  That was the proper response to the whole thing, and it's exactly what Clinton, or the Bushes, or Obama would have done.  And it got Carter nary a nod or a vote in the next election, because no one takes any special notice when you do the correct thing--the thing that's expected of you.

So why do I even mention the Skokie thing?  Just for this reason:  The most significant difference isn't the number of Nazis now versus in 1978 (only a few dozen of them ultimately showed up in Skokie), nor is it that Nazis are any more or less offensive now than they were then.  If anything, they were more of a blight back then due to their offense to the living memories of so many participants in and victims of the Third Reich and the Second World War.  Nor is the underlying issue any different--white power, white supremacy, opposition to perceived encroachment on the prerogatives of the Aryan race.  That's what it was all about then and now.   Nor it is even the fact that this time a guy drove a vehicle into the counter-demonstrators and killed a person and wounded others.  That's being dealt with and would have been dealt with had it happened then, too.  The difference is that this was an opportunity for us to focus our entire, undivided attention on the President, which is exactly what he wants every event in the country, or for that matter in the world, to be.  Tell me honestly--do you know what's going to happen to the guy who plowed his car into the crowd?  Do you know his name?  Do you know the name of the dead woman, or any of the injured?  More importantly, do you give a fuck?  No.  You only care about Donald Trump, and what he said, and what he's doing.  And next week you'll care about Trump for a different reason.  And that's how he likes it.

Tony Schwartz, the individual who ghost wrote Trump's book The Art of the Deal, is in the news predicting that Trump will resign soon.  This strikes me as a very odd prognostication from a person who claims to know Trump well.  Why would a guy who loves nothing better than attention resign from the job that has brought him nonstop attention?  Why wouldn't he hold onto that job until the bitter end?   It reminds me of a joke an old friend told me once:  A man walks into a bar, smelling like shit, and orders a drink.  The bartender mentions that he can't help noticing how bad the guy smells.  The man says, "Well, it's because of my job.  I work for the circus, which is in town right now.  I take care of the elephants, and one of the things I have to do is to make sure they are healthy.  So when they get constipated I have to stick my arm up their asses all the way to my shoulder and sort of stir things up, and then they start shitting profusely."  The bartender is amazed, and responds, "Jesus, that sounds terrible!  Why don't you get a different job?"  The man replies, "What, and give up show business?"

So congratulations, chumps, for all the help you're giving to the most astute student of history the 21st century has yet produced, a man who will never willingly give up show business.

Novus Ordo Seclorum

Monrovia, California

May 22, 2017

Upon the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, both sides of which are depicted on the back of the one-dollar bill, appears the motto "Novus Ordo Seclorum," which means something like The New Order of the Ages.  I suppose that it was meant to declare to the world, in a certainly self-serving and self-aggrandizing way, that with the advent of the of the U.S. government we'd begun a relatively new way of approaching the concept of running a country.  It was nominally secular, or at least not deliberately dominated by any one religion, and did not include the clergy as one of the Estates, fairly rare at that time.  It eschewed hereditary royalty and nobility, as least in name.  It was a confederacy of independently-run mini-states held together by a federal government in charge of national defense and other essential national prerogatives and tasks.  The independence of the mini-states was strong enough that, regarding the issue of slavery, it lead to a civil war.  We sometimes call it The War Between the States, but in reality is was a war between several like-minded southern slave holding states and the federal government acting on behalf of the rest of them.  As such it was doomed to failure from the beginning for the South, because they just couldn't operate as a cohesive unit, so obsessed were they with the idea that each state should be allowed to operate independently.  By the best historical accounts available, running the Confederate States of  America as a country was akin to herding cats.  Vicious, hateful, prideful, self-entitled cats.  So they lost.  Also because they didn't have a hell of a lot of money, whereas we did.  By "we" of course I mean the United States, the good guys.  But as usual I digress.

Since the inception of the United States, and throughout all threats to and by the country since, we have waved the flag, literally and figuratively, of our Novus Ordo Seclorum.  But our New Order has rested on shifting sands, to say the least.  It has been our rallying cry while defending our own shores (only occasionally), while invading other shores, and while railing against perceived threats to our existence.  But no new order can remain new if it's allowed to stagnate and become old.  Some countries declare new regimes when they shift from one major domestic and world view to another. The French are currently in the midst of their Fifth Republic.  They'll no doubt have a few more in the years ahead, following various wars and vicissitudes.  It's their national way of resetting the clock without resorting to the the Pol Pot-style of Year Zero revolution they undertook around the time when the First Republic was declared back in 1792.  A civilized way of correcting their occasional episodes of backsliding into national incivility--new constitution, etc.  The British, our closest role models, just keep on trucking under the banner of their first major shift, through civil wars and new dynasties.  They like to date everything more or less from 1215, when Magna Carta was signed.  Similarly, we still date everything from 1776 and our subsequent (and so far only) constitution, even though we occasionally declare a New Birth of Freedom, or a New Deal, or a New Frontier.  Until now, at least.  This latest presidential election has most certainly ushered in a new order of sorts, more chaotic and fast-paced and overtly antagonistic and radically rule-changing than previous ones in our lifetimes.

The New American Order is driving me crazy, to the point where I have become paralyzed when it comes to talking about politics or anything close to it.   Here I have this blog where I can say pretty much anything I like, even if it's outrageous and contemptible in some peoples' eyes, but there's no longer anything I could say that doesn't get topped regularly by the words or actions of the administration.  Where once it would have been at least marginally witty and snarky to point out the idiocy of the Republican Party and its members, these inmates now have such firm control of the asylum that they're changing national expectations of normalcy, with the instantaneous help of electronic social media and 24-hour news stations--not just daily, but almost hourly.  TV stations I used to consider essentially conservative, like CNN and the original three networks, have begun to look mildly subversive due to the fact that, although they still rather slavishly adhere to the established format of trotting out "experts" from different sides of the spectrum of political opinion, they don't hesitate to state, point blank, that in such-and-such an instance the President or Sean Spicer or Paul Ryan or another of that bunch, are simply lying. But because they're all news junkies they have to keep talking about all these monsters, even when what is being said and done ought to be beneath contempt and the notice of decent people.  They do this because, well, that's pretty much all they have to talk about beyond the occasional flood or tsunami or foreign war atrocity.  They remind me of nothing so much as Marilyn Munster, the "normal" member of the TV show "The Munsters," who was considered abnormal by the rest of her family because she wasn't grotesque, when in fact she was rather comely, or at least conformed to the adolescent idea of feminine beauty.  People who watched the show got the joke immediately, of course.  Today those lines between hideously monstrous and normal have been blurred.  And while the news is much funnier than "The Munsters" ever was, it isn't supposed to be.  And the administration and its minions in the legislature have become masters at repeating the Big Lie that what the news stations say is false, or Fake News.  Black is white now, or to quote from Orwell's 1984, "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength." I needn't belabor that point further.

As I write this the president is out of the country, and so help me, I think the news stations are going through a kind of withdrawal.  It's a lull they can't quite stand, and in Trump's absence they're really sort of lost.  Some are falling back on the meager footage of Trump dancing, sword in hand, with the guys in the head scarfs in Riyadh.  Others are repeating the fatuous Impeach Him Now mantra (as if any party in power in the legislature would ever impeach one of its own).  Then there's the question of how many Flynns can dance on the head of a pin.  But it's all just filler until Trump makes his next dumb speech or tweets something in the wee hours.  The press would never say it out loud, but they wish Trump would come back home and start acting like the silly guy we've all come to love and hate.  Meanwhile they're resorting to one of their favorite fallback positions--playing back Trump's campaign speechifying to show how contradictory he's capable of being, as if that's up for debate.
Tomorrow all this could be washed over by some new craziness.  But our favorite nutbar is MIA at the moment, schmoozing with world leaders.

My point, in case it's not clear enough, is that Trump's presidency has made the press, and therefore the entire country, sillier and less reliable and less mature than ever, like helpless parents dealing with an uncontrollable child.  Which is more or less what they're having to do.  And like parents who find themselves in this unenviable position, the best advice anyone could give them is to take a deep breath and try to behave like adults.  Leave the ranting to the bloggers.  We can use the work.

It Feels So Good When I Stop

Monrovia, California
December 31, 2016

Damn, I've got to get this bad boy finished before the new year, so the few of you out there who follow won't think I've fallen into a rabbit hole because of the election, or something....ahem.....

There's an old anecdote that goes more or less like this:  A man is observed repeatedly hitting himself  in the head with a two-by-four.  When asked why he would be doing such a thing he replies, "Because it feels so good when I stop."

A few weeks ago I was hoping to be able to begin this posting with the immortal words of Gerald Ford, probably the only immortal words that guy ever spoke, "Our long national nightmare is over." He made this pronouncement as he assumed the presidency in August 1974 upon the resignation of Richard Nixon, after a couple of years of harrowing and ever-more-incriminating revelations about the bad actions of the Nixon administration in connection with what we refer to as Watergate.

As I said, I was hoping to open with that quote.  Only of course our long national nightmare isn't over.  It feels as if it's been going on forever, but now it has taken a turn for the worse, and for the somewhat different.  Some might say that it's really only beginning.  In the carnival that has been the campaign of 2015-16, we have left a house of mirrors and entered a house of horrors.

As full of hatred of Donald Trump as I am, and as angry as I might be at the wretched souls who voted for him, or who voted for someone other than Hillary Clinton out of some disinclination to support her despite the obvious alternative, or who stayed home when they could have and should have voted for her, thereby allowing Trump to win the election, I am nevertheless something of an optimist in general.  Don't get me wrong, I'm no Dr. Pangloss from Candide, believing that we are in the best of all possible worlds, nor am I so besotted with the U.S. political system that I think everything is going to work out for the best because, by God, we live in the best of all possible countries.

Our constitutional system is a pretty neat and clever one, however, and as effective in its own way as are, for example, the rules of baseball, in that it works consistently and reliably in spite of who and what comes along to fuck it up, and can tolerate the great, the mediocre, and the downright bad.  Like the rules of baseball, the constitution can be tinkered with (we use the term amended), but not without major undertaking.  And also, as with with the rules of baseball, not everyone who is aware of the basic way the constitution works knows the rules, and only a comparative few know them completely and intimately.

Many citizens of other countries, for example, see only the President and his actions on the international front, and think, erroneously, that he operates the way a premier or prime minister does and that our government operates like a parliamentary system, that is, with almost total control of both the executive and legislative processes in the hands of the ruling party or a coalition of ruling parties.  One of the most striking aspects of world politics is the fact that, despite the great power and influence of the United States in the world at large, virtually no country of any importance has a system of government like ours.  This is due, I think, to two factors.  One is that as a direct colonial power we have done very little worldwide.  We have colonized with our goods and money and weapons and influence, but not with our direct governmental control, as have the great powers of Europe, in particular Great Britain and France.  As a result we have have not spread our system of governance to others the way those two powers have.  So most of the rest of the comparatively enlightened "democratic" world--Europe, Japan, Israel, Canada, parts of South Asia, etc., use the parliamentary approach (whether or not they use the term "parliament"), which gives the majority party pretty much carte blanche run the country as it sees fit, of course within certain established limits.  This is why, in a parliamentary democracy, a new political party in power is called a "new government," rather than a "new administration."  The second reason our particular style of constitutional government hasn't caught on elsewhere is that we were conceived  in a comparative instant of time as a federation of semi-independent states held together by a limited federal government, and not as one unified, centrally-operated country.  The degree of individual power of states--the power to tax, to punish, to regulate, to elect a President--in this country is not really rivaled in other countries, and is little understood elsewhere.

Thus it is that people outside this country, who see only the unifying (or divisive) face of the President, tend to think, and perhaps fear, that he has more power than he really does.  Of course he does have power--the power to nuke us all, for example, which is a hell of a lot of power--but it's of a limited type, and utterly unique and irreversible in its execution.  Our President's power is rather like the power of some ancient god to hurl thunderbolts, but not to control the actions of his own quarreling children.

These days my thoughts have been more and more given over to the subtler nuances of the workings of the U.S. government--to the balance of power among its three branches, those famous "checks and balances."  And also I've been thinking, wistfully, about the power of the minority to disrupt the workings of the majority, a power deftly employed by the Congress against the Obama administration (and in previous years against the Clinton administration).  I admit this a mechanism of mental defense as I prepare for the inevitable takeover of the executive branch by Donald Trump and what is shaping up to be the cruelest gang of rogues, misfits, and ass-clowns in the history of the country.  I say "inevitable takeover" because (despite the musings and prognostications of silly people like Michael Moore, a person whose first few movies were good grim fun, but who has now become a blowhard of the first order and an embarrassment to progressives the nation over) Donald Trump will be inaugurated on January 20, 2017, and will be in charge of the executive branch of the government, barring a completely unforeseen circumstance.

While I was still writing this people like the aforementioned Michael Moore and tons of handwringers on the leftish side of things were hoping for an electoral college miracle, which of course didn't happen and was about as likely to occur as the earth getting threatened by a giant meteor and then being saved by Billy Bob Thornton.  The next things these feckless folks will have to let pass are the opportunity for President Obama to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court while the Senate is in recess, and the chance that no one will show up at the inauguration except one Mormon and Ted Nugent, pissing Trump off so much that he'll decide not to take office.

So, back to the realm of the possible.  The Senate minority does have the power to filibuster nominees for cabinet positions and the Supreme Court.  Let's see if they have the energy or the guts to do it.  (And no, signing some stupid petition on Facebook isn't going to make it happen.)  And let's see if the two or three Republicans who seem to be more pissed at Trump than the others will be willing to switch sides from time to time.  And even with an even-trade replacement for Scalia on the Supreme Court, that body will be composed exactly as it was when gay marriage was legalized nationally.  So as long as the octogenarians don't croak we're okay there.

Oh, and a word about constitutional amendments.  Stop talking about them, everybody.  They're not going to happen because they're too difficult to enact, and I'm sick of hearing people bandy about the idea that we should ban this or that by an amendment.  Like the electoral college.  Really?  A Republican congress that has just acquired a Republican President who got less votes than his opponent did, for the second time in 16 years, is going to decide all of sudden to eliminate the thing that allowed that to happen?  (Oh, and 38 state legislatures are going to go along with it?)  I've got a better idea.  Let's amend the constitution to ban Facebook and Twitter.

Well, I'm rambling.  Got to wrap this up and get it out before the new year.  Tell you one thing: it'll feel good to stop thinking about this shit, whether it happens via the ballot box, by fire, or by the sword.

Mother of Exiles

...Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles....

--From "The New Colossus," by Emma Lazarus

Monrovia, California

October 24, 2016

In a recent posting I accused Los Angeles County of being physically ugly, dirty, and overcrowded.  It is all those things. But in fairness to the place it does possess a few positives as well.  One of the most fascinating and invigorating aspects of life here is its human diversity.  Certainly there are other places where ethnic and cultural differences are the norm.  New York City comes immediately to mind, and I doubt that LA County can compare to Brooklyn or Queens.  Other big cities on earth, like Paris and London, in recent years also have become places where folks of many stripes rub elbows, however uneasily.  Then there are locales where more than one race or ethnicity or religion coexist, but where the number of different groups is limited to two or three.  Any number of US cities have large white populations and large black populations, with only a sprinkling of brown and yellow people.

There are also spots on earth where diversity barely exists, and if it does, is not prized all that much.  Whole countries, or parts of countries, or tribal lands, just love the sameness of their people, and take pleasure not only in how much alike they all are, but in how long they've occupied their particular pied a terre.  Hundreds or thousands of years is the norm with such prideful folks.  This comparative permanence in one spot, going back to before their own written history, is what leads some nations or ethnic groups to imagine that they sprang, wholly formed, from the very soil on which they currently urinate and defecate--planted there by God or the gods.  Autochthony, they call that, and of course it's the stuff of myth but not of history.  Anyway, bless their homogeneous little hearts and their shallow little gene pools.  If there is merit in staying put and not venturing forth to new places, then I congratulate them.

In this country it is taken for granted that no one has been here since the dawn of  human existence.  We understand that the pair of continents known as North and South America were once uninhabited by human beings even while Europe, Africa, and Asia were.  Nevertheless, and rather curiously, those of us in the United States who know damn well that our cultures and races didn't originate where we currently live still tend to prize the more longstanding presence of the older groups.  The people who were on this continent before Europeans came seem to us to be, like heirloom tomatoes, better and more pure and somehow stronger, in a deeply spiritual and nostalgic and nourishing sense, than we comparative newcomers are.  This, mind you, in spite of the fact that our European ancestors had the wherewithal to travel halfway around the world in a very short time and to systematically, through their tenacity and technological advantages--and yes, ruthlessness--take over.  About this latter fact we feel guilty, without ever stopping to consider where we ourselves would be if we hadn't done the dirty deeds that besmirch our continental past.  Maybe we could have settled North America more humanely, we imagine.  Maybe we could have established and spread ourselves out by more charitable degrees, leaving bigger swathes of tribal lands alone and forgoing the genocide and forced migration we perpetrated.  Maybe, we think, in our most self-effacing moments, we never should have come at all. We didn't always think this way as a nation, but in the early 21st century we tend to do so.

In truth, nobody has been in the same place for even a fraction of the entirety of human existence, except possibly for the people in a few spots in east Africa.  The rest of us, which is to say almost everyone, came from somewhere else.  Because written records don't exist before a few hundred or thousand years ago, the most that scientists and historians can do is to generalize--for example, to tell us that certain people, like the Celts, came from "somewhere east of modern Europe, perhaps from central Asia," and swept across northwestern Europe, settling in northern France and throughout the British Isles.  Here's a curious fact: as far as we know, a hell of a lot of people seem to have come from somewhere in central Asia for some reason, no matter which direction they went.  The Celts, the Huns, the Mongols, the various Germanic tribes, even the Mongolian-type people who went east across what is now the Bering Strait and down into North and South America and became our revered Native Americans.  Nobody seems to have figured out how they all got into central Asia in the first place.  But the commonality of practically all people on the planet, no matter who they are, is that they picked up and left where they were and went some place else.  Maybe a few of them went first, then let the others know it was a pretty good deal, or at least better than where they had been, and the rest came.  Maybe they skirted the coastlines, trading or raiding, and saw new places worth looking into.  Or maybe they moved en masse, killing, raping, and plundering as they went in the good old fashioned way that nomads of all colors seem prone to do.  But they moved around, following the ocean currents, the herds, the seasons, the easy victims, whatever.  And in moving, in the very process of traveling and adapting, they seem to have gained technological strength and versatility.  In traveling they adapted.  Then they traveled some more and adapted some more.  That's the thing about travel--it tends to broaden one's horizons.

Oh, and there's another common denominator in the tales of the history of peoples who moved about.  In the felicitous memory of their descendants (us) they seem often to have been kings of wherever they were, or at least very noble, and pure, and generally good, and somehow more in touch with the earth and the gods than we are today.  This despite the fact that what may have driven them from one shore to another was not success, but failure; not ease and comfort, but desperation born of privation or shortage or loss or religious nonconformity.  Irishmen like to think they're descended from Brian Boru, notwithstanding the fact that the potato famine might have been what starved their peasant ancestors into braving the Atlantic for the New World.  Every poor African American was kidnapped from a race of chieftains.   I guess fantasizing about having once been great makes people feel better about their sorry pasts and their present circumstances. But who leaves a country they're in charge of already to go to a country where they're uncertain about anything?  The majority of European Americans know better about themselves.  They are taught, correctly, that their ancestors were the dregs of their native countries, or at least outcasts for one reason or another, or political losers.  Religious nuts, younger sons who didn't inherit anything, soldiers of fortune, prisoners who were spared the gallows.

Anyway, back to LA County, my home for the time being, nomad that I am.  Here we have a fascinating welter of different people from different backgrounds.  The largest single group, with a plurality that is rapidly approaching a majority, is Latinos.  The common denominator of most Latinos is that they speak Spanish as their first or second language.  The bulk of them hereabouts are of Mexican heritage, but increasingly they come from South and Central America as well.  But Latinos aren't all of the same stripe.  Some are far whiter than others, some identify as descendants of the Aztecs, some claim to have come from the Mayan culture, but most just think of themselves as Latinos.  Some appear to be almost pure pre-Colombian Indian, looking like they just stepped out of a tropical jungle or desert, and some evince a great deal of Spanish or other European blood in their veins.  In the regions south of our border, as here in the US, the lighter your skin color the more likely you are to be better off financially and politically, and hence the less likely you are to feel the need to move elsewhere.

But there are lots of other non-European groups as well.  Asians probably constitute the second-largest segment of these people, and they're far more diverse than the Latinos are, speaking many different languages.  They are Chinese, Koreans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos (who can claim to be either Asians or Latinos as they choose because of the former Spanish colonial presence in their native country), and also South Asians, from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other nearby places.  We also have a good number of Middle Easterners, from Israel, Palestine, Iran (who prefer to be called Persians), and various Arabian countries.  In the Glendale and Burbank areas, in particular, there are large settlements of Armenians--a perpetually pissed-off bunch on the whole.  They of course are Caucasian, because they come from the Caucasus region, with a language and alphabet they regard as practically timeless and greatly superior to all others.  They're brimming over with resentment toward Turks and naked hatred of Russians, of whom we have a fair number as well.  Many of the Russians are Jewish, and in any event are generally thought to be mobbed up.  And of course there are African Americans, always present and always occupying the bottom rung of the social ladder, no matter who arrives next, forever held down by the color of their skin and their slave past and forever complaining about it--with absolute justification.  I'm sure I'm forgetting a few prominent groups, but that gives you a fair sampling of the diversity of the region.  Amid all these folks are people of non-Spanish Western European heritage--Jewish and gentile--who make up at most a third of the total population, though a much greater percentage of the financially and politically powerful.  They're called Anglos.

As with any area that brings together people of many recently-abandoned nationalities, people here tend to complain about each other, to mistrust others outside their own families or ethnic groups, and to consider themselves innately superior to, if not everybody else, then at least someone else.  That's standard human behavior, it seems.  Cubans look down on Mexicans and Mexicans look down on Central Americans; Chinese and Japanese look down on Vietnamese and Cambodians; European immigrants look down on Latinos and Asians of all kinds; blacks from Africa or the Caribbean, as well as just about everyone from anywhere else, look down on African Americans; Israelis and Persians and Anglos look down on everybody.

Newcomers, from whichever direction they have arrived here, also tend to believe that they should probably have been the last persons allowed to come into the United States, and that the doors should henceforth be shut to any more latecomers.  This has been going on in the US for a long time, going back to when the original white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were beset by influxes of Irish, Chinese, and then Southern and Eastern Europeans.  It is amazing how quickly this desire to exclude others begins to prevail among new immigrants and their children.  Identification with, and aspiration to belong to, the dominant elements of social and economic power in the country tends to trump (pardon the pun) any leftover sympathy and identification with our sad histories in whatever old countries we traveled from, leaving only nostalgia for grandma's cooking and for grandpa's folk songs.  America is, above all, a land of new birth.

All of which leads to one basic point.  This is no country for old men or old ideas.  We are a land that has been forever populated by newcomers, almost always looking for a better deal than whatever deal we left behind.  No one who came here came on a winning streak.  Some, perhaps, would have preferred to stay put but for the fact that they weren't wanted, or couldn't make a decent living, or couldn't be free, or hated the government, or were hated by it.  But they had to leave.

First, thousands of years ago, it was the central Asians who were driven through Siberia and into our land for reasons that have become obscure.  But we know one thing: they didn't want to, or couldn't, stay where they were.  Then, half a millennium ago, people came from the other direction for all those reasons.  Not because they were fat and happy and secure and in charge where they were, but because they weren't any of those things.  Today, they come from all directions at once.  But always for the same reasons.  This phenomenon isn't new, and we can't pretend that it is, nor should we.  Other countries may have the dubious luxury of identifying themselves with their ancient and mythological pasts, but we do not.  The Western Hemisphere was been populated by wanderers and escapees, not by persons chosen by God to live here.  Today the US exists as a nation because many other parts of the world are worse places to live.  Having moved here out of necessity or opportunism, we can't decide that the necessity and opportunity no longer exist for others. We have tried to lock the gates, but have never permanently succeeded in doing so.  Immigration quotas have existed and still do exist, biased in favor of the whiter and less foreign-looking and grubby of our world neighbors, but they will always be subject to challenge and will be brought back into line by the better angels of our national nature.

And there is no better way to round out this sentiment than with the sestet of the sonnet with which we began--both a rebuke to the European feudalism and intolerance of that time and an exhortation not to fall back into the same intolerance on this side of the ocean:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips.  "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

The golden door, indeed.  In part, of course, Ms. Lazarus was referring to the often-cited belief by some that the streets of America were paved with gold.  Silly, but idealistic and tempting.  Paved they were, back in the late nineteenth century, but in horse shit and sewage, just like in the cities of the Old World.  In a metaphorical sense they were paved in the gold of opportunity, as rough and tumble as it was.  Work your ass off and you might, just might, get a little ahead, and out of perpetual peonage.  And if not you, then your children, or their children, which was a better hope than what you left behind.  Almost a century and a half later this is still what many folks hope for.  It's not a hell of a lot to want, but it is worth wanting for them.  The thing we have going for us isn't that life will necessarily be good for the immigrant, but that life will be a little better for the immigrant's children, and that the rest of us will be better for that.  If we shut the golden door now, we shut it on ourselves as well as those on the other side.  We lose our lifeblood and begin our decay.