Category Archives: Americana

Wow, the coin has two left sides

Yesterday, on Facebook, almost every post that isn’t about cute animals is about Mattis and what a disaster his quitting is. Over at Twitter, everybody I follow thinks it is great, well, good.

A Facebook sample: Syria yesterday, Afghanistan today. No planning. No collaboration within admin. I think our fake president is an imminent threat to our safety. He is incapable of honoring his oath to protect the country.

A Twitter sample I’m confused as to why Mattis has been the recipient of so much love– he has been a willing participant in all of Trump’s insane racist bullshit and now he’s resigning because he wants to continue to carpet bomb civilians across the middle east forever.

Another Twitter sample: The hysterical reaction to the decision to withdraw troops from Syria is astonishing & shows just how attached to war some are. Lindsey Graham & others want us to continue our regime change war in Syria and to go to war with Iran. That’s why they’re so upset.

I’m with the Twitter group. We’ve been at these wars for 17 years. Does anybody really think we are going to change these countries in the next year? in the next five years? Yeah, we’re screwing the Kurds, but, realistically, whenever we leave we are going to end up screwing them. Maybe the Taliban will beat the Northern Alliance but can’t we console ourselves with the fact that we stirred up the Taliban, to fight the Northern Alliance, in the first place so they can’t be entirely evil. 

My preference is that Obama would have gotten us out in his, careful, thoughtful, way.  I know that Trump wants to get out in his usual, incompetent,  petulant, way and quite possibly he only wants to get out to get money for his stupid wall. I also want to acknowledge that this is no way to treat our friends and allies. Somebody on Facebook said that our allies will think they can’t trust us, well, as long as Trump is President, they can’t and the sooner they learn that, the better. Still, we can’t lay that entirely on Trump, after all, it was Henry Kissinger who said: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests” and it my opinion staying in an endless war in Afghanistan or Syria is not in our interest. 

 

 

Alternate Universes

I woke up at 4:15 in the morning, a couple of days ago and couldn’t go back to sleep. That is very rare for me but I do have a sort of pseudo-cure; get up and get cold. In this case, I got up in the cold house, didn’t get dressed, and sat in the dining room reading the news from the New York Times and Fox News. The difference was shocking. The top headline in the New York Times was Playing by His Own Rules, Trump Flips the Shutdown Script

Over at FOX News, the headline was: Migrant group demand Trump either let them in or pay them each $50G to turn around: WTF? 

The Second headline at The Times was: TURMOIL IN EUROPE Britain’s Conservatives Will Vote Today Whether to Topple Theresa May.

At FOX, it said: Earthquake, magnitude 4.4, rattles Tennessee, Georgia…The quake hit about six miles north of Decatur around 4:15 a.m., according to the U.S. Geological Survey The shaking was felt by residents as far away as Atlanta — about 149 miles south of the epicenter. I wondered why it wasn’t in The Times and the only explanation I could come up with was that this is flyover country, the hell with them. 

And the beat went on, can you guess which news source had the following headlines in the third spot? Michael Cohen, Trump’s Ex-Lawyer Who Implicated Him in Hush-Money Scandal, Faces Sentencing……Court docs reveal shocking difference between FBI’s treatment of Hillary, general [Flynn]

BTW, in only a few short minutes, I was cold and tired, went back to bed, and immediately fell asleep.  

Lost and Befuddled in Twitterland

I’ve been happily Tweeting and retweeting expecting the tweets to show up on Facebook and I just found out a little while ago, that Facebook changed its Operating System and part of that change stopped Twitter from automatically posting to Facebook. So now they are not being posted and I’m not sure that there is a manual override. I’m not as worried about my stuff as I am about a series of retweets from Rashida Tlaib  @RashidaTlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar @IlhanMN, all of which amount to a fascinating class on what Congress is really like. Here are a couple of samples without my retweet comments.

Each member of Congress gets around $1.2 million (give or take a bit) for their entire operating budget. That’s supposed to cover all salaries (DC and district), rents for district offices, travel home, tech devices, services, contracts, etc. Members decide how it’s all spent. 

Right now Freshman members of Congress are at a “Bipartisan” orientation w/ briefings on issues. Invited panelists offer insights to inform new Congressmembers‘ views as they prepare to legislate. # of Corporate CEOs we’ve listened to here: 4 # of Labor leaders: 0  

Gary Cohen, former CEO Goldman Sachs addressing new members of Congress today: “You guys are way over your head, you don’t know how the game is played.” No Gary, YOU don’t know what’s coming – a revolutionary Congress that puts people over profits.  @RashidaTlaib

One tweet thread that I’m having a hard time finding is a thread on how poorly the Congressional worker bees are paid. The result is that there are two kinds of people who are hired – and, yeah, I know, there are exceptions – people who are not very good and people who are good and are only taking the job to get experience that they can spin into a job as a Lobbyist. Another thing I was surprised to find out is that most interns don’t get paid, in the house only eight Republicans and four Democrats pay their interns – how much I don’t know – but it does raise the question of how much can we trust a pro-labor Congressperson who doesn’t pay a living wage. This means that only interns who can afford to do the job are people whose parents are rich enough to support them while they aren’t getting paid thus reinforcing the inbred ruling class. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after a post that said something along the lines of Time to walk the walk is going to pay her interns $15 per hour.      

I’m in Love with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar

No one puts a scarf on my head but me. It’s my choice—one protected by the first amendment. And this is not the last ban I’m going to work to lift.  Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar,

Cognitive dissonance is Republican commentators stalking, doctoring, + editing my casual livestreams out of context in order to sow doubt in my intelligence, all while blindly supporting a man who thinks our greatest defense against forest fires is: A Rake. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

What I really like about both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, is that they are not afraid to be unabashedly themselves. For somebody my age, 78, being myself is still a struggle but it seems to come naturally to these young women. They both come from the bottom rung of the Middle Class; they didn’t starve growing up but there was no money for the luxuries most of us – but not most people – consider necessities and these are the people they want to represent.  In my opinion, these are the people who have to be represented if we are going to survive as a functional democracy.  

Ocasio-Cortez has a hyperactive Twitter presence where she “shares moments of excitement and pride at the incredible privilege of being new to Congress” (to quote from an article by a young, but older, Latina who has spent her life trying to fit into – she doesn’t identify it this way but I will – the white patriarchy of Washington). Much of what Ocasio-Cortez shares is logistics – because that’s what most of life is, after all – and that has given the right-wing media lots to go after. When she tweeted about how expensive rent is in DC and that she couldn’t afford to get an apartment until she started getting her Congressional paycheck which wouldn’t happen until January. Some right-wing pundit retweeted with a snarky comment along the line of You should have thought about saving some money before you came to Washinton. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t phased, she tweeted back: There is no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed. Mocking lower incomes is exactly how those who benefit from + promote wealth inequality the most keep everyday people silent about 1 of the worst threats to American society: that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. What the snarker didn’t get is that most people can’t live in Washington DC and they relate to that tweet.

More importantly is that even with that background – or, perhaps, because of it – both Omar and Ocasio-Cortez think that Global Warming is our biggest threat and they don’t want it buried in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (which over the last several administrations has done nothing). When Ocasio-Cortez tweets People are going to die if we don’t start addressing climate change ASAP. It’s not enough to think it’s “important.” We must make it urgent. That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, & why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy. she is challenging the traditions that keep the powerful in power, she is challenging the Democratic-house hierarchy and that takes guts. And she challenging it in the area that it most needs challenging, in my view. Like Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez is defined by the establishment media as an unrealistic spender who wants programs we can’t afford, but, like Bernie, her first priority is climate change and its devastating impacts (to quote the just-released Fourth National Climate Assessment which is clear that we are in real trouble).  

As an aside, climate change and its devastating impacts is my core issue, that’ what drew me to Bernie Sanders in the first place. There are lots of things that Bernie has suggested and pushed such as free college, Single Payer Health Insurance, and a living wage that match my personal values, but these are only my values and, while I think they would make this a better place to live, that is only what I think. Climate Change is different, climate change is real, it is a fact, and it is starting to destroy this planet as our home. This is not theoretical, this is real, it is already starting. End aside. 

I want to end, however, on the happy note, for me at least, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, are already changing the world (or, maybe, they are just tuned into the change that is already happening). A lot of that is that, like Trump, they are bypassing the usual channels – the progress is slow, follow the rules, our rules, filter – by using social media. One tweet exchange that I especially got a kick out of was with Lindsey Graham. When Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about the immigrant families trying to find safe harbor into the US by saying  Asking to be considered a refuge & applying for status isn’t a crime. It wasn’t for Jewish families fleeing Germany. It wasn’t for targeted families fleeing Rawanda. It wasn’t for communities fleeing war-torn Syria. And it isn’t for those fleeing violence in Central America.

The net, Twittersphere went into a frenzy of anger, one of the angry people, Lindsey Graham, tried to put her in her place, saying I recommend she take a tour of the Holocaust Museum in DC. Might help her better understand the differences between the Holocaust and the caravan in Tijuana.

I’m not sure of the order of these next two tweets so I’m just arbitrarily putting Ocasio-Cortez first: , the point of such a treasured museum is to bring its lessons to present day. This administration has jailed children and violated human rights. Perhaps we should stop pretending that authoritarianism + violence is a historical event instead of a growing force. 

About three hours after Graham’s tweet, the Auschwitz Museum tweeted: When we look at  Auschwitz we see the end of the process. It’s important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence.

I want to say that I didn’t imagine a future of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes and her ilk. I thought, I hoped, that change would come from the Gavin Newsom generation. It never occurred to me that it would take an entirely new generation of activists to be brave enough to really fight for change and not just talk about it. 

We write unlimited blank checks for war, we JUST wrote a 2 trillion dollar check for the GOP tax cut and NOBODY asks those folks how are they gonna pay for it. So my question is why are our pockets only empty when it comes to education and healthcare for our kids? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Believing Is Being

In Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, Robert Pirsig writes about bringing a boat into a strange marina, in a strange river town, in the dark. He has the wrong marina or the wrong town, I don’t remember which, but the harbor lights didn’t match the charts and he kept moving the real lights around in his mind to make them fit his imagined reality. He was in the wrong place, but it seemed like the right place because he was mentally moving the data around. In other words,  Believing is seeing, not the other way around. I wrote that four years ago, I believe it, even more, today except that I want to add: Seeing is being, we are what we believe we are. 

A couple of weeks ago, Burt Kuhlman and I went to the  California State Railroad Museum. Driving to Burt’s house, I was listening to the Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testimony on the car radio and, when he got in the car, Burt said he had been watching it on TV. So, as we drove up to Sacramento, we continued to listen to the testimony of  Dr. Ford. When we got there, we both agreed the hearing was more interesting than the museum, so we skipped the museum, turned around, and drove home, listening to the start of Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony. After listening to Dr. Ford testify – and then watching and relistening on TV at home – I find it hard to see how anybody thinks she is lying. But I already believed her and her testimony just gave me a framework on which to hang that belief. I know that, but she was so vulnerable, so honest, and so strong that I thought that even some Republicans Senators would believe her. That doesn’t seem to be the case.    

I want to preach something, but first I want to tell a story. A somewhat embarrassing story. In 1966, I started a development/construction company, bas Homes, with my friend and mentor, Sam Berland. Sam was about 30 years older than me and, in many ways, he was a father figure, he certainly was one of the most influential people in my life. He had been my boss at Shapell Homes and we agreed that going in, we would continue that relationship. He would be President of  bas and, after five years of his tutelage, I would step up to President and he would stay on as an advisor. When the five years were up, I asked to become president and he agreed by saying I could be President and he would be promoted to CEO (and still boss). After a couple of months, I started whining and Sam finally agreed to an impartial referee to settle our disagreement. 

The ref moved in and watched us for a week or two and interviewed almost everybody in the company. When he got to me, he asked me if I really wanted to be President and I said: “of course”. He asked me that, he said, because in his experience, men – sorry but that’s the way it was in those days – who really wanted to be a company President, went after it “like a dog after red meat” and I wasn’t doing that. As the Ref pointed out, I was asking Sam to make me President while I was still bringing questions and problems to him, for his decisions as if he were the President. He said that if I really wanted to be President, I would make the decision and then present that decision to Sam as a  fait accompli. My priority was not taking over but having Sam like love me. I wanted to be President but not at the expense of our relationship. Sam wanted me to love him, but he was the boss and if that hurt the relationship, he was sorry. Looking back, I realize that Sam thought of himself as President; I thought of myself as his assistant. Sam was not going to give me his power, I had to take it and before I could take it, I had to own it. 

I think our country, the world really, needs women to take over and run it. And the operative word here is”take”, men are not going to give their control up. Men, especially we white men, think that the world needs us even though we are the ones who are ruining the world. Women already have more power than they are using, they control much, if not the majority, of the private money in the country – just look at the number of ads that are selling wealth management targeted towards women – and it is time to start using that leverage.