So Far

December 31, 2021

Cathedral City, California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

A More Perfect Union

December 28, 2021

Cathedral City, California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Bacon, Revisited

December 22, 2021

Cathedral City, California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

             

Bacon

November 30, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     It's hard to know where to start.  So many things are going on, in the world and in my head.

     As I write this my hand is on the bible.  Funny place for it to be, but I'll explain.  When we moved into this condo last February, it was furnished--not merely with furniture, but with a number of items of, shall we say, "home decor." For instance, there were at least a dozen large clocks (some working, some not) scattered throughout the place.  The previous owners also were quite fond of faux French stuff--wall hangings, serving trays, pictures, etc.  Gay Paree, by way of Pier One.  There were many artificial flowers, as well as containers for them, including all sizes of baskets, vases, and ceramic pots.  And a few books as well, which they evidently didn't think enough of to take with them.  We got rid of most of the aforementioned stuff, managing to sell quite a bit of it out of the garage via Craigslist (it's amazing how much artificial plants cost at retail, and how much people are willing to pay for them after the fact).  Some things we simply had to chuck because they were too hideous for anyone, and some things we kept--a few of the better clocks, baskets, pots, etc.  One thing that didn't sell for some reason was the bible, and I couldn't quite bring myself to shitcan it.  Probably a superstitious holdover from my childhood as a preacher's kid.  

     Well, it turns out that my computer mouse doesn't work well on the glass-topped work desk where I'm seated as I write this, so I decided to use the bible as a mouse pad.  A couple of days ago my wife and I happened to be listening to an episode of "This American Life" on public radio.  It was the first-person story of a man raised in an orthodox Jewish family headed by an abusive alcoholic father.  The narrator attended a yeshiva rather than a regular school, where he had to learn all about the innumerable arcane rules of behavior surrounding the Sabbath, as well as everyday life, for orthodox Jews.  Among them was the puzzling array of blessings to be given, depending on what type of food was being blessed. Separate blessings for dairy, meat, things made of wheat, etc.  All kinds of blessings.  At school the kid was in a sort of "blessing bee" when he was asked to give the blessing for an ice cream cone.  He knew the blessing for dairy, but didn't know what a cone was made of, so he was stumped, as I recall, and decided to wing it, with bad results.  And for him, overshadowing all these bizarre rules, and exceptions to rules, imposed by Hashem and taught at school, was the terrible drunken behavior of his father, often ending with beatings.  A poignant story.

     After having listened to this, I was back at the computer, and it occurred to me that I hadn't opened the bible at all during the time I've been using it as a mouse pad.  I keep it face down, with only the black paper back showing.  The print is tiny, and well, I spent so much of my youth reading from the damn thing, and the content is meaningless as it ever was.  But on a whim I decided to open it to the crazy Hebrew part (as differentiated from the crazy Jesus part, which takes up only about a quarter of the whole bible).  I flipped to the book of Deuteronomy, which is a veritable mine field of rules for the poor Israelite shmucks who had to follow them, and in some cases still feel compelled to do.  At random I read a single chapter, and man, talk about rules.  What to do if your wife isn't a virgin when you marry her, and what to do if she was a virgin but got raped on her way to the wedding, and how many shekels need to be paid for various infractions, and when someone needs to be stoned to death.  Also (and I can't overemphasize this) do NOT wear clothing made of both wool and linen, do not yoke an ox and an ass together, and whatever you do, don't have sex with your father's wife.  And all this in the same chapter!  A quick scan of the previous and subsequent chapters indicates that there is much, much more of the same.

     I personally can't imagine being an adherent of a religion with so many rules--and not, mind you, rules about how to behave kindly and generously and justly to your fellow human beings, Golden Rule type stuff, but about things like where to tie up your farm animals and which ones to eat and which ones to burn as offerings and where to do so.  There are some people some who just get a bang out of not only following the rules, but of quibbling about what the rules mean, for their entire lifetimes.  To sort of paraphrase Al Pacino's Satan in The Devil's Advocate, the God of the Jews definitely comes across as a cosmic prankster, keeping his people jumping from one foot to the other.

     Not to pick on Jews only, to be sure.  Muslims basically follow that whole megillah of Old Testament rules, too, and in addition are heavily into putting the message forth with the blade of a sword or the barrel of a machine gun.  And Christianity, even though it was ostensibly based on the teachings of a Jewish guy who in essence said, "Fuck all these rules, just be good to each other" and paid for saying so with his life, has incorporated all this Mosaic nonsense into its bible, the King James Version of which sits, face down, under my mouse.  And it's those crazy, intolerant, misogynistic laws, not to mention the silly creation myths that begin the Old Testament, that get used the most by fundamentalist Christians as a bludgeon wherewith to pummel the nonbeliever, and one another, for that matter.  For Christians, if you want to be generous and tolerant, you cite certain portions of the New Testament, but if you want to be stingy and nasty and intolerant, you cite portions of the Old Testament.  Except that some of the intolerance of the Old Testament got included in the New Testament, mostly because of St. Paul, a Jew who converted to Christianity, who wrote a big fat chunk of it.  It's quite a versatile religion, when you come to think about it.  

     All of which has me scratching my head, as I often do when I contemplate our sacred western traditions.  Not being a Muslim, I can't explain the allure of a religion that wants you to bow down in a specific direction and pray five times a day; to make a pilgrimage to a sandy no-man's-land run by a bunch of sword-wielding medieval chieftains, where you walk counterclockwise around a massive cube; and to spend the rest of your time, if you're lucky enough to be a male, hanging out with other hairy men who act the same way.  And on top of all that, you can't eat bacon.  Not being Jewish, I can't really explain the allure of a religion that has no meaning outside of adherence to a lot of anal regulations and ceremonies imposed by a perpetually pissed-off God who claims he loves you, but when he's not having you sold into slavery or massacred by goyim, is inventing little tricky pitfalls to make you disobey him so he can punish you all over again, and who doesn't even bother to tease you with offers of paradise or threats of hell in the afterlife.  Just, I guess, a chance to rest up for eternity from having to remember all those fucking rules.  And on top of all that, you can't eat bacon. 

     However, I was raised a Christian, and the son of a clergyman, so I suppose I should be able to explain that religion, but for the life of me I can't.  First, as noted, there is Christianity's brutal underpinnings--the sort of preamble to the religion--laid out ad nauseam in the Hebrew scriptures, with all their laws and kings and judges and prophets and people smiting one another and getting smitten by others.  The last words of the Old Testament, in fact, are in the Book of Malachi, with God warning the Jews to behave, "lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."  And really, that pretty much sums up the overall thrust of that section of the bible--God saying, Be good (which I know you won't) or I will put the shits to you (once again).  I mean, really, why is this stuff even in the Christian scriptures?  But it is, and shame on Christianity for including it.

     The New Testament, on the other hand, offers a whole different kind of craziness.  Here we are given to believe that Jesus was a direct descendant of old Abraham himself, as the very first chapter of the very first book tells us.  Except not really, because his father Joseph wasn't really his father.  Instead, his mother was miraculously made pregnant by the Holy Spirit and Joseph didn't have anything to do with it.  Then, as things proceeded, Jesus became, first, a boy wonder, teaching his elders, then after that wandered around gathering disciples and performing miracles until finally the Jewish ecclesiastical authorities in Roman-occupied Judea (this occupation being another hurt put on the beleaguered Jews by their God for fucking up in some way) had had enough of his blatant disdain for their nitpicking rules and his claims that he was God's son, and had him executed for blasphemy against the Jewish religion.  And that was a task the Romans were happy to perform, especially if it made the place easier to govern.  Let's face it, if you're an empire and one of your otherwise fairly compliant imperial provinces is having internal problems, you do what you can to smooth things over.  Okay, fine so far, and nothing particularly unusual.  The Romans loved to crucify people.  They really seemed to enjoy it, as much as the Jews enjoyed stoning people to death.  It was just good fun.

     If all this wasn't enough, however, Jesus appeared to rise from the dead after about a day and a half (or on the "third day," as Christians like to say, which counts the first half day, the whole middle day, and a tiny bit of the morning of the third day--the math here always puzzles me).  Now, rising from the dead was not a bad trick, nor a particularly difficult one, considering that crucifixion was a deliberately slow form of suffocation by means of gravity and exhaustion, and wasn't meant to kill anybody right away.  In fact, the average strong man could last for days up there on a cross, and sometimes died of starvation and thirst unless he was used for target practice by soldiers with spears or birds pecked at him too much.  But Jesus played possum and was taken down after only a few hours and laid to rest.  Small wonder that he recovered and got the hell out of the tomb, albeit with sore hands and feet and maybe a cut in his side.  But really, only a wimp would die that quickly, and he seemed to be a pretty regular guy, physically.  I mean, the son of God ought to be able to take a little physical punishment without croaking, don't you think?  He carried that cross through town while being whipped, for crying out loud.

     But that whole rising from the dead deal, along with Jesus's conception and birth that apparently had nothing to do with his father, are celebrated as the two Big Events of Christianity.  Pretty thin stuff, if you ask me, and really no basis for a whole religion, which I guess is the reason we borrowed all the Hebrew stuff, to sort of fill in the gaps, and also made up a big city in the sky where the good people go and a lake of fire where the bad people go.  If nothing else, heaven and hell have made for some good New Yorker cartoons over the years.  

     Then, we Christians had our turn at imposing our ostensibly forgiving and redemptive religion on everybody else on pain of death, just like our Muslim brethren have done and continue to do.  Stupid doesn't even begin to cover it.  But at least we get to eat bacon.        

 

Too Many Assholes, or What We've Lost

September 30, 2021

Pentwater, Michigan

     The other night I was watching a movie from about ten years ago with what used to be a familiar theme--the scrappy newspaper reporter burrowing into a scandal in order to take on and expose corruption within the U.S. political establishment.  Movies along this line go back at least as far as the black and white days of Humphrey Bogart.  Typically, the final scenes are of the reporter, after many travails, secret meetings with informants, and arguments with his editors, putting the final touch on the Big Story--the one that's going to bring down the crooks in city hall, the House or the Senate, or even the White House.  I suppose this hard-hitting theme was best represented, and perhaps elevated to durable genre status for those in my generation, by the film All the President's Men, about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's exposing of the Watergate scandal.

     As I said, that used to be a familiar movie theme, all the way into the second decade of this century.   But as I watched it, I was struck by the thought of how little difference the exposure of the crooked political behavior, as bad as it was in the movie, would make today.  Papers that used to be the gold standard of journalism--the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., while still respectable and well-thought-of the world over, are now considered by a great big chunk of the American populace to be mere propaganda tools of the mythical "radical left," less believable than the National Enquirer or the shit they read on Facebook.  That change has been so recent in the political history of the U.S. that it's almost a blink of an eye.  Most of it has happened since the election campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 and his steady, relentless, and very effective efforts to undermine the credibility of any newspaper, television station, or social media platform that would dare to criticize him.  Granted, there was some roll-up to the Trump approach by the Tea Partiers, and even Nixon hated the Post for its coverage of him, but the level of simple deniability of the truth of, well, the Truth, was perfected by that most recent King of Lies. 

     It's not simply that Trump is such a consummately compelling crook, which of course he is, with a political message that brings out the worst in so many people.  Other presidents have done that and probably will do it again.  It's much worse than that.  The sea change that has taken place in the country in this tiny bit of time since 2016 has not been so much about the existence of the beast that Trump is, as it has been about the practical elimination of anything we might call the Mainstream Media (the papers named above and a few others from big cities, plus the original three TV networks and CNN), which the bulk of the public for the most part believed was the bearer of the more or less objective truth about things in general--earthquakes, diseases, murders, and so on.  

     Cynics will say that the Mainstream Media I just described never was really objective--it told us what the government spoon fed it most of the time.  Maybe.  The only departure from that was for a very brief interval from the middle of the Vietnam War through Nixon's impeachment, after which the Mainstream Media went back to reporting on things pretty much the way Washington told it to, all the way up until 2016 or so.  Sure, there were political overtones, and you could always tell a Democratic from a Republican paper based on what it chose to emphasize about what was going on.  But what, exactly was going on, whether it be a scandal or a hurricane, was pretty much reported the same way across the board.  Yes, they were often government shills; for example, without the active participation of the Mainstream Media, the September 11, 2001 hijackings would not have been absurdly elevated to the status of Pearl Harbor Day, and the endless military adventure known as the War on Terror, including the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction, would not have been dignified with those names, as silly as they were.  

     Others will say that there never was such thing as the Mainstream Media, and that the media has always been politicized to some extent.  For centuries in this country there have been Democratic and Republican newspapers, and they were a lot more partisan than they are now.  These folks would say that the fact that we got our news for a long time from the likes of Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley, and later Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, and that they were deemed trustworthy by practically everybody, says as much about our gullibility as it did about their objectivity, and that furthermore, it was mid-20th century aberration.  But today there's just a whole shitload more broadcast news time than there ever was before.  Everybody knows that MSNBC unashamedly represents the slightly left of center viewpoint, while Fox News brazenly represents the deep red right.  And for a long time most people saw CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC as falling pretty much in the middle of things, and hence more objective, if not more accurate.  These latter outlets constituted the Mainstream Media, for what it was worth.

     The trustworthy thing about that Mainstream Media was that it was viewed askance by both the left and right in about equal measure, which meant that it probably came closer to the objective truth than one might think.  Okay, okay, it didn't promote progressive ideals very much or delve too deeply into the nuances of institutional racism or the military industrial complex or the triumph of the elite capitalist oligarchy that controls the nation's wealth, not to mention the vast social media data bases that have us all in their thrall.  But it also did not lie outright, or shy away from the presentation of violence and unrest in the streets or on the battlefield, or misrepresent the right wing as the saviors of the American Dream.  And most importantly, it did not preach.  

     But, as with any sea change, there was a major series of events that precipitated it.  Trump of course always had a soft spot for Fox News, and early on in the 2016 campaign, when the more moderate, Mainstream, networks such as NBC and CNN began to call him out publicly for his blatant lies, he countered by calling their criticism of him "fake news."  The irony of this was rich indeed, due to the fact that it was actual pro-Trump fake news--emanating mostly from Eastern Europe and making its way onto social media platforms such as Facebook, that began to emerge big-time during the campaign, spreading negative lies about Hillary Clinton and positive lies about Trump himself, replete with utterly outrageous National Enquirer-style bullshit like stories about the Pope endorsing Trump for president, Clinton harboring pedophiles in pizza shops, etc.  

     Then, as the Mainstream Media began to hector Trump even more, especially after he was elected, keeping track of how many lies he'd told that week, or doing then-novel things like "fact-checking" presidential statements, something hitherto considered unsportsmanlike for a news outlet to do to a sitting executive, Trump reacted by throwing a CNN reporter out of the White House press corps.  That event, and the tensions that led up to it, with Trump criticizing CNN and its coverage, did a strange thing:  instead of having the desired effect, from his point of view, it turned CNN into a bitterly anti-Trump network, and other elements of the Mainstream Media either followed suit, or continued to criticize Trump in a way that old-time Mainstream Media outlets wouldn't have done even a decade earlier.  Tit for tat.  Well, pretty soon after Trump took office newspapers like the Los Angeles Times were running articles with headlines like, "Trump Lies Again About [fill in the blank]."  Refreshing, for those of us who hate Trump and possess the basic intelligence to see a pure lie for what it is, but also disturbing in terms of the necessity for such daily reporting.

     The result of all this is that a significant segment of the public has pretty much abandoned the idea that they can get their news straight from the shoulders of the average national broadcaster.  For the Fox News types there's no credibility in anything but Fox, and for the heavy duty Trumpers, even Fox isn't reliable, because that network has had the temerity to occasionally disagree with him.  That would leave nothing but the Volkischer Beobachter to report the news to Trump's satisfaction, except that it went out of print with the fall of the Nazis at the end of World War Two.  Conversely, for the MSNBC and other left-of-center types, there's hardly any truth unless it comes from the Here We Go Again wisecracking mouth of Rachel Madow, or the whiny wagging head of Bill Maher.

     With the devaluation of the Mainstream Media has come the loss of interest in such a concept as nationwide objective truth.  So what? you might ask.  Well, here's what.  The loss of even such a comparatively small thing as the distribution of more or less objective truth on a nightly basis has been the reason the few fairly consistent touchstones we have by which to run a decent society are under scrutiny.  It's all well and good to have opinions on things--politics, music, entertainment, whether or not squirrels and pigeons are a nuisance, whether dark roast coffee tastes too bitter--and even fringe issues like whether God exists or if we have been visited by aliens.  But there are some things on which we should NOT have differing opinions, even in a free-thinking society such as the one we imagine we live in.  For instance, the benefits and the necessity for all people to receive a lifesaving vaccine against Covid 19 should not be up for debate.  We shouldn't have differing opinions on how far inland a hurricane has gone or whether the polar icecaps are melting.  And there's no room for disagreement about whether genocide or racism or child molestation or female genital mutilation are bad things.  They simply are bad, period.  And hell, I admit that the Mainstream Media don't always reinforce all the values they should, but at least they don't contradict them and try to say that bad things are good things, and vice versa.   

    The loss of a centralized source of more or less objective truth in favor of lots of individual smaller sources of polemics, baiting, and sometimes outright lies has encouraged the diffusion--the Balkanization if you will--of the news, and engenders a general sense of entitlement by EVERYONE to have their own opinions about nearly EVERYTHING, even things that shouldn't be up for discussion.  There's an old saying that opinions are like assholes--everyone has one.  But when we hold too many opinions on really nondebatable issues we risk having not one, but many assholes.  That's essentially the problem we're stuck with at present--too many assholes.     

Well, well.

June 8, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     A few months back I published a post entitled, "Well," in which I outlined my pessimistic view of the plight and status of Black people in America.  At the end of the post I mentioned that I was about to read a book called Afropessimism, by Frank B. Wilderson III, and that I'd report back if any of the observations I'd made needed to be changed after having read it.  Well, I don't think I'd change anything, except to say that Wilderson has deepened and strengthened my view that for the African American there is no reason to be optimistic about the future; the past and present have made that a certainty.

     First, a few words about the book.  It's part autobiography and part socio-political treatise, I guess you could say.  The author is an academic and a strongly political person, having solidified his views, over years, into the philosophy he calls Afropessimism.  (I'm not sure he coined the term.)  He started, in the 1960s, as a radical, influenced by Marx, and then by the Marxist writings of Antonio Gramsci, an ill-fated Italian communist philosopher, and later by the writings of Frantz Fanon, a Black French colonial subject from Martinique, who became a psychiatrist and a philosopher, and eventually propounded a view of anti-colonialism that centers on the institutionalism of anti-black racism.  That's a pretty superficial view of those people and of Wilderson's own ideas, but it's a start, especially for a guy like me who hasn't, and probably won't, read any of the people on whom Wilderson has derived his world view expressed in Afropessimism.  His book is a patchwork of personal memories of key times in the author's life and a whole lot of jargon-laden political thought, filled with words you don't hear in everyday speech (unless, I suppose, you're an academic political scientist), like "hegemonic," "embrication," and "ontological."  In that regard it's definitely meant to imbue the reader with a sense of the sound structural and historical underpinnings of his ideas, but I think the book is by far at its best and most poignant when it uses simpler language, accompanied by actual moments of narrative from his life, all of which tend to illustrate his points well.  I don't require Frank Wilderson to prove to me that he's a serious, well-read, very thoughtful, and most importantly, legitimate, thinker, any more than he expects me to give him any approval.  I accept that.  But that's just me, and really, I'm pretty sure I'm not his target audience.

     Unfortunately, I don't have the book with me in California, so I can't quote from it directly.  But the thrust of the thesis of the philosophy of Afropessimism is that Black people are not and never have been regarded as human beings, much less as members of society.  They exist to serve an important purpose, however, and that is to validate, by contrast, the existence and value of those whom society does regard as human beings.  Blacks are the non-humans that prove the humanness of non-Blacks.  Those non-Blacks include not just white people, but also non-Black non-white people, such as Latins, Asians, and Native Americans, all of whom Wilderson calls the "junior partners" of the whites.  And, he says, much as it might suit the purposes of non-white non-Blacks to lump themselves in with Blacks as "persons of color," or whatever term you like, they are not the same as Blacks, and never will be.  The important reason for that is that non-Black non-whites all have, or have had, something to lose, whereas Blacks have absolutely nothing to lose and never did.  

     Here I'm straying a bit from Wilderson's political narrative, but not distorting or changing it in any material way.  Essentially, Blacks have nothing anyone wants, except maybe athletic and musical skills, and those things can be copied, and if necessary ignored, by whites.  The property of Blacks, to the extent that they own anything at all, is nothing but the shittiest leftover parts of the shittiest places, which no one wants or needs.  The jobs of Blacks are the lowest of the low, and can be done by others who come in new and are willing to work even more cheaply.  The education of Blacks is negligible.  Native Americans, by contrast, once had a great deal of property, which admittedly was taken from them, but which they now seek to take back in small bits.  Plus they're allowed to build casinos, in order to at least steal back a little something from the white man.  Latins bring with them ambition to succeed and rise out of peonage, and have economic value because they serve the need for labor at the absolute bottom of the barrel.  Asians, God knows, have a great deal going for them, and a great deal to gain and lose.  The white liberal fantasy played out by placing these non-Black non-whites together with Blacks and trying to unite them all as "persons of color," discriminated against by the white establishment in equal measure, besides being disingenuous, has profound limitations.  One is that the non-Black non-whites are all, sooner or later, going to improve their lot.  Though they may have been killed indiscriminately for political reasons, they have never been enslaved directly, never treated, en masse, as subhuman or nonhuman chattels, to be bought and sold at will by the whites.

     Wow.  No wonder he calls it Afropessimism.  There's no real way out, and no lasting hope for the future.  And that's about it.  There is no "But wait!" and no light at the end of the long dark tunnel.  We white folks who are sympathetic to the plight of Black people can try, at a personal and political level, to lend a hand, but we can't solve the problem, for the simple reason that it's unsolvable.  But that doesn't mean that we should give up the idea of being decent.  

     Meanwhile, white supremacy, alive like a virus in us all in spite of the earnest wish of some of us to be rid of it, waits patiently to erase the pitiful bit of progress that has been made in the area of race relations.  Thus it is now, just as it was after the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.  Whatever good is accomplished will probably be erased.  Frank Wilderson knows this, even if the rest of us refuse to believe it, because he understands why Black people exist.   

Revolution

March 14, 2021

Cathedral City, California 

     There was an amusing bit in the social media two months ago, in the aftermath of the Trumpist storming of the U.S. Capitol.  It was a short film clip of a young woman weepily telling a reporter that she’d been hit with mace upon trying to enter the building.  She seemed to be complaining about it, as if she thought she had a right to get in that had been abridged.  At the end she said, by way of explanation for her own actions, “We’re storming the Capitol.  It’s a revolution.”  She said it in a sort of deadpan, plaintive way.

     Besides being sad and pathetic, the young woman on January 6 bore signs of the same feeling of childlike disbelief  people in my generation used to display at times similar to that—when they’d been tear gassed or beaten or whatever—while in the act of, say, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam or attempting to occupy the administration building of a university.  Only in this person there seemed to be less of ideological vehemence and more of a whiney whiff of entitlement, minus any real political underpinnings.

     All that got me to thinking about “revolution” as I’ve come to look at it in this country, and I got sort of peeved.  Not at the thought of self-described revolutionaries languidly storming a building and temporarily occupying it, sitting in the symbolic seats of power, putting their feet up on desks, and so on.   Hell, that’s old hat.  My generation more or less invented that routine, although we thought (and I for one still think) that our causes—opposing the Vietnam war, institutional racism, and capitalism in general—were nobler and more just than preserving the presidency of an idiotic demagogue who wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit him in his fat ass.  What bothered me was that I realized that I’d come to think of occupying buildings as being the rightful, even proprietary, province of the American left, not the right-wing proto-fascist bunch on display on January 6.  I found myself saying, “Hey, YOU cracker shitheels don’t get to do that—WE get to do that.  You get to drive trucks with big tires and honk the horn and fly the rebel flag and tote guns and all that cornball shit, but we left wingers get to storm the barricades.”  I felt intruded upon, and somewhat upstaged.  “Aux armes, citoyens, formez vos bataillons” just doesn’t go with people looking they just wandered in from a Civil War battle reenactment, where they played Confederate troops.

     Of course, despite what we’re learning a little at a time, once they got in there they didn't really appear to quite know what to do, and in fact didn’t do much, other than to piss and shit and take selfies, and that was even without any really serious pushback from law enforcement.  Oh sure, some of them had aspirations.  Maybe that’s an indication of their lack of intelligence, generally, or maybe they were simply imitating their leader, who, never seriously having expected to get elected, didn’t quite know what to do once he got into office, and whose sole aspiration once he got there was simply to stay there.  Likewise the Capitol stormers, once they got into the chambers and halls and indeed some offices, didn't quite know what to do.  I’m not saying we won’t find out more in the months to come, or that the FBI won’t root out more sinister stuff about the people they’ve arrested (assuming we don’t just get bored with the whole deal in the afterglow of a new, more adult-like administration).  But just looking at what they’ve fed us so far, it doesn’t seem as if anyone really had a plan, except in their own heads.  Many who have been arrested will try to hide behind Trump's bulky torso, but they won't get to use that as a defense.  Certainly they did a shitty job of coordinating with one another once they entered the Capitol.  Again, chalk it up to stupidity, or the vast diversity even within the right-wing white-supremacist fringe, but for some reason they never pushed their advantage while they had it.  They really could have chased down a Democrat or two and beaten him or her to death, perhaps thereby delaying the vote on the electoral college even longer, but they didn't.  And once they "occupied" the building, they very soon got bored with the whole idea and ended up filing out instead of holding out.  No one insisted on being dragged out by the heels or the hair.

     I think my fear that the country will get bored with the re-hashing of the January 6 event will come true, especially after the CNN/Fox/MSNBC mini-series on it aired, in the form of the trial of Trump in the Senate.  Okay, everyone will say, that happened.  Now what?  Meanwhile the people who have been arrested will eventually be tried, which is good, and will probably receive sentences of some kind.  Nowhere near what they should get, I imagine, but something.  They'll get some time in federal prisons, join the Aryan Brotherhood, and just keep on truckin'.  And the real pity of all that is that they won't be able to conclusively establish that Trump was the inciter of insurrection, in a legally binding sense, so he'll slide on that.

     Some revolution.  

Why I Don't Like Christmas Songs

December 28, 2020

Monrovia, California

     For a long time I couldn't quite put my finger on why I dislike Christmas songs so much.  I think it was difficult because it was one of those "let me count the ways" deals.  There are so many reasons.  

     First off, there's the fact that they start playing them over the loudspeakers in stores by no later than Thanksgiving, and more and more, even before that.  Halloween, really, marks the beginning of the Christmas season now, from a commercial standpoint, and one is likely to begin to hear a loop of Christmas songs at just about every store one goes into from November onward.  Occasionally I will ask a clerk whether he or she gets tired of listening to these songs all day long, day after day, and since I ask it in a sort of confidential, friendly, commiserating way, I expect to hear what I want to hear.  I want them to say, "Man, you have no fucking idea how maddening it is to listen to that shit over and over for two solid months."  Instead, more often than not, they'll say, "No, I really sort of like the music," or "It's okay, because it helps me get into the holiday spirit," or "Actually, I kind of tune them out."  That latter one I can understand and admire, especially because I'm not sure I'd be able to do that.  The other reasons are downright puzzling, and although it does occur to me that they might be expressing their appreciation for Christmas music out of a sense of self-preservation (meaning that they're afraid to speak their minds to a customer because I might tell management), I am often afraid that they are telling the truth, and that they really do like the endless Christmas music, which means that they're on a wavelength so different from mine that we might as well be from different species.

    At any rate, I find Christmas music to be depressing, or boring, or ridiculous, or a combination of those things.  First, there are the secular ones, the Johnny Mathis/Andy Williams/Nat King Cole/Mel Torme/Bing Crosby-type songs.  "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" is a big offender with the crooner set, along with "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."  And of course "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is right up there, along with "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and "Walking in a Winter Wonderland."  Then there are the children's Christmas songs, like "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bells" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."  All these songs are shallow and maudlin and covered by one singer after another, old and new--from the aforementioned tunemeisters of our parents' generation to Elvis to Bruce Springsteen to Beyonce to Christ knows who else, as if each different person who sings them can somehow infuse them with something new, when they cannot, and just make fools of themselves over essentially foolish songs.  I swear, I wouldn't be surprised if Snoop Dogg did a version of "Here Comes Santa Claus" (and come to think of it, he might have done so).  As pieces of music, whatever initial zing all these songs might have had as, let's say, dance interlude numbers in a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie, or Bing Crosby singles, or cartoon soundtracks, has been lost to the ages.  Their initial limited appeal has evaporated like the oomph "Over There" must have had back during World War One, or "John Brown's Body" during the Civil War. 

     So much for the secular songs.  And now maybe you're thinking, Aha! he's a purist--he only likes religious Christmas songs, since Christmas is, or once was, a religious holiday.  No my friends, there you'd be wrong as hell.  I don't like religious Christmas carols either, whether they're sung sanctimoniously by those same people I mentioned in the previous paragraph or by little kids standing in the snow or by hardworking, clean-shaven Norman Rockwell types standing up in a New England church or by, well, anybody.  In fact, I dislike religious Christmas songs even more, because they're supposed to have more meaning than the secular ones.  They're all about how the world was hopelessly fucked up until, lo and behold, a little baby was born in a barn in the Middle East, and ever since then everything's been SO much better.  Oh yeah, big improvement.  How's that working out for you, earthlings? 

     So yeah, the son of God was born, as weirdly idiotic as that sounds.  I guess nothing proves the idea that man created God in his own image more than the utterly anthropomorphic way we describe the doings of the infinitely divine and powerful.  Having a son, sacrificing a son, being a pissed-off dad, being a vengeful and jealous narcissist, etc.  Mind you, the concept of a god impregnating an earth woman and having a child I do understand, because I am an educated person, and since it comes straight out of Greco-Roman mythology, where people and gods were much more interactive with one another, and it most assuredly had antecedents going much farther back than the Greeks and the Romans.  But the operative word there is mythology, isn't it?  Just So Stories.  How the camel got its hump, and all that.  And yet--and yet--and yet, against all reason, at least a couple of billion people on this planet--many dozen times the number of ninnies who voted for Donald Trump last month, and a far greater percentage of humans than has any right to think so--actually professes to believe that the creator of the universe had a kid, just like the average absentee father down the block.  And apparently only one child, at that, which is even more mystifying to me.  What'd he do after that, get a vasectomy?  But, there it is.  Ask the average guy on the street in Cincinnati or Mexico City or Warsaw whether he believes that Zeus came down to Leda in the form of a swan, fucked her, and that she gave birth to Helen of Troy, and he'd probably walk away shaking his head.  But ask the same person if he believes that God came to the Virgin Mary as a dove and knocked her up with Jesus Christ, and he'd say, yeah, sure, of course.  That did happen.  That, my friends, is a real head-scratcher, and that, as the preachers tell us, year in and year out, is the True Meaning of Christmas.

     I think my dislike of Christmas songs might all go back to my own father, who was a Presbyterian minister.  Aha!  You're saying again.  So that's it!  Some sort of father/religious rebellion deal.  Nope, not at all.  My dad was a good minister to his several congregations throughout his career, preaching almost every Sunday, visiting the sick, counseling troubled parishioners, baptizing babies, marrying couples, burying the dead, and comforting their survivors.  All the stuff you'd expect a clergyman to do.  And he did a pretty good job of it, from what I've been told.  He was a traditionalist, in that he observed the two major Christian holidays--Christmas and Easter--and led a good steady bunch of ordinary folks in the obligatory weekly get togethers to, rather formally, praise God and look for ways to be better people.  Being a Presbyterian, he wasn't particularly evangelical, as that term is used today.  Though he did talk about Jesus quite a bit (from the pulpit, not at home), he didn't demand that people be washed in the blood, or personally testify to the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, or try to convert their fellow men.  In fact, he looked down on that stuff.  The demands he placed on his congregations, if you can even call them demands, were pretty simple:  come to church regularly, give enough money to keep things going and to do good in the community and the world, participate as lay persons in the workings of the church, and have a good time.  He was a fixture in the community, trying never to alienate anyone with his theological positions.  He liked to hang around town with some of the local merchants, listening to or telling the occasional off-color joke (although his best dirty jokes came from his fellow ministers at their monthly get togethers), steering clear of politics outside our home, and just generally "being there."

     The Presbyterian denomination is a part of the so-called Reformed, or Calvinist, branch of Protestantism.  Some of its ancestors in this country included the French Huguenots, the Dutch Reformed folks who settled New Amsterdam, and, perhaps most prominently, the Puritans, who later morphed into the Congregationalists, now know as the United Church of Christ.  Today the most liberal branches of Calvinism are the aforementioned Congregationalists and to an increasing degree the Presbyterians.  Despite their rather strait-laced ancestors, Presbyterians are likely to condone, and even welcome, gay marriage, strong social consciousness, and other elements of "inclusiveness."  The more conservative branches of Calvinism include the various Reformed Churches--particularly the Christian Reformed Church--and some even more recondite groups like the Netherlands Reformed Church.  These remain fundamentalist in their scriptural teachings, exclusive, and in some cases, downright cult-like.  Needless to say, they decry the way the world is going to hell in a handbasket today, which is code for the fact that they think the Republicans are correct and the Democrats are wrong.

     All Calvinist denominations derive their theological underpinnings, like Protestants generally, from the rejection of the Pope as the head of the church.  In addition, the Calvinists reject the idea of a hierarchical episcopal clergy (in other words, no bishops), and absolutely abhor the idea that the body of Christ is present in the eucharist, or anywhere else outside of heaven.  They do, however, cling to the idea of infant baptism, like their Roman Catholic brethren, which separates them from the many groups that go by the name Baptist.  And the Calvinists theoretically emphasize predestination over free will, although trying to explain that is far beyond the scope of this posting, and frankly more in the realm of speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  Furthermore, they don't really seem, in the modern era at least, to give much of a damn about these theological niceties.  

     One thing Presbyterians, or at least my father, cared about when I was growing up, was people being part of the congregation, and not just part-timers.  Oh sure, he was glad to see you even if you came only a few times a year, but he really liked the regulars, and was likely to make jokes at home about the once-a-year types.  I suspect that pretty much all clergymen, of all denominations, feel the same way.  The idea of there being just a couple of Holy Days of Obligation, like Christmas and Easter, when the faithful absolutely had to go to church, was more or less anathema to him, as smacking too much of Catholicism.  Every Sunday was a day of obligation, more like the way the Jews view the sabbath.  It was perhaps for this reason, then, that he regarded both Christmas and Easter as sort of religious amateur hours, although he didn't mind the extra cash that came in the collection plates on these occasions.  Easter, of course, was always on Sunday, and was a good excuse to trot out the annual He Is Risen sermon, and at Christmastime there was The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us sermon.  But he didn't believe in Christmas Eve services, and unless Christmas happened to fall on a Sunday, he didn't ever have a service on that day either.  Christmas, he said, was a time to stay home with the family.  And once Christmas and Easter were out of the way, it was back to business as usual, which I could always tell made him much more comfortable.  We got our Christmas tree on December 21st, which was my parents' wedding anniversary, put up the usual lights, and did our little comparatively modest Christmas morning thing (unless, God forbid, Christmas was on Sunday, in which case we had to wait until afternoon), and had that tree out of the living room by New Year's Day.

     Which brings me back to Christmas songs.  From about the beginning of December on, my father knew there pretty much had to be a Christmas hymn at every Sunday service ("O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," etc.), but I don't think he was all charged up about it.  And maybe on the Sunday after Christmas there would be "We Three Kings of Orient Are."  And then, BAM.  Christmas's ass was over, baby, and it was back to the standards, which for Presbyterians were mostly Psalms set to music.  But at home?  I don't remember much of anything in the way of Christmas songs.  (Think of it this way.  If your father was an insurance salesman, do you think he'd get a kick out of watching commercials for insurance?  Probably not.)  Maybe on Christmas Eve or Christmas day there would be some selections from Handel's Messiah on the record player, or Mahalia Jackson.  But Johnny Mathis or Perry Como or Der Bingle?  No fucking way.  Chestnuts roasting?  Making a snowman and dressing him up like Parson Brown?  Sheeeeit.  Not only were those songs profane, but also profoundly irrelevant.   To sing an actual, bona fide Christmas carol, about the birth of the Christ child, you had to be an actual, bona fide Christian, which both my parents knew Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra most decidedly were not.

     So today, despite the fact that I am a complete and utter apostate, in the fast lane of the highway to hell, I retain within me what I firmly believe to be my clergyman father's contempt for all secular Christmas songs combined with his impatience about the religious ones.  What it adds up to for me is a rejection of it all.  

     And don't even get me started on Easter.  Oy.    

If I Were President

November 24, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     If I were president, I would not pardon a turkey at Thanksgiving time.  That's just stupid, especially when you're probably going to eat turkey for the Thanksgiving meal.  But even if you're not having turkey for dinner, pardoning an animal that gets raised for slaughter is absurd.

     If I were president, I would promptly commute the death sentence of any person convicted in a federal court.  People's lives are more important than those of turkeys, and if you can't figure that out, you shouldn't even be walking around, much less be the president.

     If I were president, I would not allow Mitch McConnell, or any other mealy-mouthed Republican senator or congressman, to set foot in the White House.  I would arrange for them to meet with my staff in front of a landscaping place next to a porn shop, on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

     If I were president, I would have regular news conferences, but at the news conferences my favorite thing to say would be, "That's got to be one of the stupidest questions I've ever heard.  What are you, the fucking scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz?"

     If I were president, I would not say "so help me God" at the end of my oath of office.   It's not in the constitution, and I don't care if that revered old slave owner George Washington said it.  I wouldn't place my other hand on the bible when taking the oath, either.  I'd put it in my pocket.  Also, I'd never end a speech with "God bless" anything at all.  Fuck that.

     If I were president I'd try to get "under God" removed from the pledge of allegiance, where it was put in the early 1950s during the Red Scare, at the behest of the Knights of Columbus--as if they should have any say in anything we do as a country.  In fact, I'd discourage the use of the pledge of allegiance to the flag altogether.  What's the point?  If you make war against the U.S. or give aid or comfort to our enemies you're committing treason, and can be tried for it.  Isn't that enough?  Why make a kid, or anybody else for that matter, pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth?  What is this, Nazi Germany?

     If I were president, I'd try to ban the playing of the national anthem at sporting events.  What a waste of time.  They say baseball is too slow now.  That would speed things up.  What is this, Nazi Germany?

     If I were president, the next time a vacancy came up on the Supreme Court, I'd nominate a mainline Protestant or a Jew or an atheist.  We have more than enough Catholics there now, and they're systematically fucking things up. 

     If I were president I'd have the Treasury Department try to remove all images of slave owners from our currency.  That means no more George Washington on the dollar bill and the quarter, no more Jefferson on the two-dollar bill and the nickel, and no more Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill.  I'd replace Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr.  I'd replace Jefferson with Ma Rainey.  Jackson was already supposed to be replaced with Harriet Tubman.  Maybe we'd mix it up every few years--get some new blood on those coins and bills.  

     If I were president I also would try to remove "In God We Trust" from all our currency.  That was the misguided idea of Abraham Lincoln, an otherwise fairly bright and decent guy.   

     If I were president, speaking of money, I'd try to eliminate the penny.  It costs more to make than it's worth.  Retailers accepting cash would have to round everything up to the nearest five cents, which shouldn't break their hearts.  Credit card and bank purchases could still be recorded in odd amounts of cents, though.  They add up.  Didn't you ever watch Office Space?

     If I were president I'd instruct the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of any church or other religious organization that ever tried to get anyone to vote for any Republican, ever.  (Political activities are already not allowed to be conducted by tax-exempt 501(c)(3) entities under the Internal Revenue Code, but I would selectively enforce this provision so as to allow Black churches to continue to host politicians, as long as they were Democrats.)

     If I were president I'd have the Attorney General put the FBI on a mission to infiltrate and eradicate all right-wing organizations.

     If I were president I'd propose to the congress that it repeal the second amendment to the constitution.  Also the part of the first amendment that prohibits the government from making laws restricting the free exercise of religion.

     If I were president I'd find a way to have Kid Rock and Ted Nugent locked up in Guantanamo Bay.  

     If I were president I'd issue an executive order making Tom Brady's birthday a national holiday.  It's not that I like Tom Brady that much--actually he's a right-wing dick, as far as I know.  But Tom Brady's birthday is the same as mine, August 3, and so as not to appear immodest I'd put Tom Brady up as the ostensible reason for the holiday.  But then I'd call it President Teeuwissen's Day.

     If I were president I'd deport Elon Musk to whatever country, or planet, he came from.

     

Something

In Memory Of

John Carbaugh, 1951-2020

Loyal Blog Follower

And Good Friend

R.I.P.

November 14, 2020

Cathedral City, California 

     Something really terrible happened in this country last week.  No, not what you’re thinking—you all know me better than that.  What happened was this:  over 72 million people—the second largest number of presidential voters in the history of this country—CHOSE to vote for Donald Trump.  Of their own free will, well over one-third of all the eligible voters in the United States voted for an unapologetically immoral, undemocratic, semi-literate, immature, utterly self-absorbed pathological liar, who foments racial hatred and bizarre conspiracy theories, panders to absurd religious beliefs, and rejects science and normal human progress in a way that would make a shit-covered medieval peasant in a Monty Python movie look like Einstein by comparison.

     In so doing, were these 72 million plus people—more than one in every five humans who inhabit this country—voting to stop a Hitler from becoming president?  Were they voting to prevent the next Stalin, or Kim Jong-Un, or Idi Amin, or Genghis Khan from taking control of our land and ripping our constitution to shreds?  Were they trying to stave off the coming of the Antichrist or the naked evil of Satan himself?  No; quite the opposite.  They were, instead, voting against a man who has ably demonstrated that he is capable of occupying the office, and has never done much worse than to be rather repetitive and hokey, and at times (certainly in my book) a bit too bipartisan.  Oh, and he's had some hair transplants and cosmetic surgery.  They were voting to reject the standard-bearer for a political party whose platform calls for affordable health care, cheaper education, racial justice, fairer taxation of the wealthy, ecological responsibility, international cooperation and leadership, and a well-organized effort to end the worse pandemic to plague the earth in over one hundred years--all ideas that his opponent and his party either explicitly rejected or neglected to carry out.

     Probably not since the days prior to the Civil War has such a large chunk of the American electorate deliberately opted to reject human decency and enshrine the degradation of human life.  And that was at a time when neither African Americans, nor Asians, nor Indians, nor women of any race or color could vote.  Just white men.  You'd think, given that fact, that the onus for the recent display of horrible bad judgment on the part of this very large segment of the American people would fall primarily and directly on the heads of the descendants of those same white males.  And you'd be mostly right, to be sure.  If you took out all the white men who voted for Trump, you'd be left with a much smaller number, and a more lopsided victory for Biden.  But a hell of a lot of white women voted for Trump, too.  And they didn't do it while holding their noses.  No sir.  They did it with the full-throated enthusiasm of drunken Harley mommas.

     The operative word in the analysis in the above paragraph, however, isn't "men," or "women," it's "WHITE."  Already, due to a delay in vote counting and tabulation in several states, the news media are falling all over themselves to come up with new filler in the form of obscure demographic factoids and statistics meant to alarm us and challenge what, for most thinking people, should be a simple application of logic in the light of history.  In part they are doing this in order to cover up for the fact that, for the second straight presidential election, they were substantially wrong in their predictions of the outcomes of the election.  Oh sure, they backed the right horse, but they picked him to win by half a furlong, not by a length.  And that, again, is because they were looking in all the wrong places for the answers--the keys, so to speak, to the situation.   For instance, we're being treated right now to articles about how the Black vote isn't monolithic, and how a "surprisingly" large number of Black men, in particular, voted for Trump.  But when you burrow into the numbers you find that the size of the majority of Black people, male and female, who voted for Biden was enormous--80-90 percent or more--far larger than the percentage of Latins or whites or Asians who voted for him.  And, as John Oliver put it so well in his last show, these Black people weren't doing so in order to give the stamp of approval, a ringing endorsement, to the elderly white guy at the top of the Biden-Harris ticket.  They were doing so for the best of all possible reasons, namely, pragmatism:  given the choice between two old white guys (which, let's face it, is almost always the choice), they voted for the one less likely to deliberately fuck them over.  Same with the Indians.  And same, to a lesser extent, with Latins (about whom more in a later posting).

     But quibbling about whether or not Black men, or Latins, or Asians, voted for Trump more than people might have expected them to is a big waste of time.  And by the same token, quibbling about what might have motivated the overwhelming majority of those 72 million voters to vote for Trump is also a fool's errand, when the answer is so simple.  Economics?  Hell no.  Trump didn't do jack shit for them economically, unless they were Wall Street sharks.  Health and safety?  Are you shitting me?  They're dropping like flies from a disease that loves to eat the old, the fat, and the dissolute.  No.  The reason almost all those people, male and female, voted for Trump is that they are scared shitless of Black people, and angry at their attempts to assert their equality with white people.  Trump voters voted for Trump because he validated their racism, their sense of white entitlement and supremacy, or, if they weren't quite white, their sense of entitlement to something more than Black people have ever had.  

     Assuming the transition of government goes as it should, people will soon be writing books, op-ed pieces, and high-toned magazine articles about what happened, and why.  And they'll be coming up with some weird-ass theories.  This is particularly ironic, because the only people literate enough or interested enough to read such things are the folks who voted for Biden, and they should already know the answer to why people voted for Trump.  HATRED OF BLACK PEOPLE.  Sorry, I don't think I can make it any more explicit.  

     Hillary Clinton put it best a few years ago when she was running for president--the people who favor Trump are a "basket of deplorables."  She caught hell for that, because, folks said, it cost her the election in key states where such deplorables might have been more likely to vote for her if they hadn't been insulted.  Well, first of all I don't believe that.  And second of all, fuck whether they were insulted.  Deplorables are deplorables.  They proved it in 2016 and they proved it in 2020.  For that matter, they proved it in the 1860s, and many other times along the way.  These people are irredeemable.  If you're thinking that we're going to "bind up the nation's wounds," and all that, think again.  We might harass the organized far-right using the FBI.  That would be good.  And we might bring about some tiny measure of police reform.  And we might teach ourselves more nuanced ways to look at the subjects of institutional and individual racism.  That, also, would be good, but it won't reach the people who voted for Trump.  We will never change their minds.  The only end to their beliefs is the grave.

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