…he’s not misguided, he’s mean. On purpose. Karen Amy on Facebook
Sometime about ten years ago, at about ten at night, Michele and I were leaving San Francisco on our way home. We had just turned on to Fourth Street when a homeless guy walked across the street in front of us, walking at the slowest speed possible, seemingly with no purpose but to stop us. As we sat in the car watching him, Michele said: “Poor guy, he must really feel powerless; he’s not helping himself, all he is doing is making us wait…I guess that’s the point, that’s the only power he has.” I often get the same feeling when President Trump does something like change lightbulb standards back to incandescent (during the CNN special on the environment). It’s stupid and hurts the environment with no upside for him.
When Trump ran for office, he ran against both the Republican and Democratic Establishments and he pitched several policy positions rough ideas that I agreed with. Get out of Afganistan and Syria and use the money on infrastructure, acknowledge that North Korea exists, don’t sign the Pacific Trade Treaty, rationalize our relationship with China, or streighten out the immigration mess, for starters, but, he hasn’t done any of that. Instead, his Administration has governed – for lack of a better word – in a much more orthodox, if extream, Conservative Republican manner. But, using “his Administration has governed” and “orthodox” together in a sentence gives the wrong impression because Donald Trump’s way of governing is not orthodox. From announcing, even establishing, new policies at events that are nothing more than interactive, partisan rallies to making international diplomacy almost entirely personal, to Tweets like China just enacted a major stimulus plan. With all the Tariffs THEY are paying to the USA, Billions and Billions of Dollars, they need it! In the meantime, our Federal Reserve sits back and does NOTHING!, President Trump has become the constant center of everybody’s attention – including his – while spreading chaos. He is the most powerful man in the world and he often acts as if he has no power.
“It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep.Tlaib to visit.” President Donald Trump
There are times when President Trump says something and my first thought is that it is a misprint, the quote above is one of those times. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand Isreal wanting to keep Representatives Omar and Talib away from the West Bank. Their trip would have included the – I hate to use this word but can’t think of any other – mainstream press and given world-wide exposure to the deplorable conditions that Isreal imposes on the Palestinian people. I can even understand why Trump wouldn’t want them to go to Israel and the West Bank (although it does just seemed like unnecessary assholery by the President). But, I can’t understand why that is not a much weaker position than saying Yeah, come on over and look around because a) we are proud of what we are doing and/or b) if you don’t like it, tough shit because we can do whatever we like.
My heart is beating just like it should, and, through the residual haze of the anesthesia, I am thrilled. To make a long story short, when I got my ablation about a month ago, I still ended up with a slight heart flutter. The doctors put me on a drug, Sotalol, to slow my heart rate and, hopefully, get rid of the flutter. It didn’t, however, and I continued to be out of breath. My ablation doctor said that my heart is injured from the Ablation and, my words here, is fluttering from all the scaring done by the procedure – if three to four hours of fiddling in and around my heart can be called a procedure – and it often takes cardioversion to get in a regular rhythm. I had the cardioversion yesterday and now the doc says my heartbeat is normal with no irregularities. I hope it stays that way.
A sanitation truck pulled up, the driver reached out his arm to give me a high-five. What that moment tells me is what we did was right. We are touching the hearts of working people. Democrats should be getting high-fives from sanitation truck drivers — that is what should be happening in America.Squad Member and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Michele and I are still binge-watching Veronica Mars and I am surprised by how much of the plots and subplots revolve around Class. Class is not something that we are comfortable talking about in America which is one of the things that makes V. Mars so interesting. There are the 09ers – the area code for the right side of town is 90909 while the rest of town is 90908 – and everybody else and while there seems to be more of everybody else, the 09ers get most of the attention, just like in real life. In our national pantheon of virtues being poor is being almost invisible, almost at the bottom, right above being low-class. Both groups are to be either pitied or despised. Most people may walk by, say, a garbage man, and maybe think There but for the grace of God go I but nobody ever thinks, Owh, I wish I was them. They are looked down upon, maybe even looked down upon kindly but, when we look down on people, they are expected to look up to us.
As an aside, all my warning buzzers are going off – do not talk about race or class! Or politics for that matter – so I want to add a couple of mitigators, when I talk about our pantheon of virtues or say we, I know there are exceptions, and I’m trying to be one of them, still, we have stories that bind us as a culture, and money and class, as well as race and religion, drive lots of those stories, maybe most. That does not make the stories true, think of it more like a societal default position. Of course, because we are a good country, nobody is trapped at the bottom, the poor and low-class can get respect by climbing out of their poverty and class – in a socially conforming way like becoming a lawyer or, better yet, a doctor – and changing their sensibilities and taste to something more acceptable to the dominant culture which, coincidently, is us.
I think that deviating from the accepted political culture of Washington is one of the things that most pisses off Liberals about Trump but we often go after him for class and money. “He’s so low class.” or some derivative is a pretty common complaint, but, in reality, it is just used as a slur. Donald Trump obviously is not low class, not in the same way that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is. Another popular slam is that the President is not really rich, he is just faking it which is why he won’t show us his taxes. My favorite slur is, People, say Trump acts like a rich man, but he doesn’t, he acts like what a poor person thinks a rich man is. Both class and money are used as ways of measuring the goodness of Trump because, in our culture, money and class are considered makers of a person’s value as a human being.
In the greater scheme of things, what people choose to wear may not seem important, but it is an outer representation of a person. It is who they are saying they are. Somewhat surprising, to me, what The Squad chooses to wear is that one of the things that I most admire about them. These four women of color, are comfortable with who they are and the way they look, they are not trying to fit in by dressing like a generic Congressperson, they are trying to stand out by continuing to dress like their constituents. After her swearing-in, OC tweeted Lip+hoops were inspired by Sonia Sotomayor, who was advised to wear neutral-colored nail polish to her confirmation hearings to avoid scrutiny. She kept her red. Next time someone tells Bronx girls to take off their hoops, they can just say they’re dressing like a Congresswoman. In her victory speech, Ayanna Presley asked: “Is your appeal broad enough? Are you playing identity politics? Can a congresswoman wear her hair in braids, rock a black leather jacket and a bold red lip?” and answered in the affirmative by wearing exactly that. A little more than a week ago, after one of her numerous threats, Ilhan Omar Tweeted I am where I belong, at the people’s house and you’re just gonna have to deal! over a picture of her wearing a long black dress and hijab.
I remember having a conversation about the patriarchy and rights with Courtney Gonzalas maybe, five years ago, she said something like “They didn’t give me the right to marry, I already have that right as a Human Being”. These are avowed low-class women are saying the same thing, saying “We are as good as you, we have the same right as humans that you do, and that includes being in Congress”.
We’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII. Bill McKibben
Last weekend, Michele and I went to the West Coast Craft Fair at Fort Mason in San Francisco. A lot of our favorite people were there but the show did not have the sparkle that it used to have, say, twenty years ago. Part of it is that the majority of the exhibitors are the same people that were showing their work here in the 1970s and some even date back to the Renaissance Fair in the 60s. It feels like the scene needs more young blood but, looking around, there seem to be more young people than two years ago so maybe that is changing. Either way, the show was low key but still fun and that is not what I really want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the location,
As an aside, when we first got to Fort Mason, the upper grass area was packed with young adults standing around, drinking and talking. It reminded me of an Italian Piazza where, after dinner, the locals gather to talk. When I first started going to the Fair, the upper grass area was usually empty on a Saturday afternoon. End aside.
As another aside, maybe a month ago, Michele and I went down to Santa Cruz for the 50th anniversary of Woodies on the Wharf. Fifty years ago, I was 29 and most surfers had long given up their hard to maintain Woodies for used vans. But I know the allure of old cars, I was sort of drifting into old Italian cars which were pretty cheap in the 60s and these guys were drifting into Woodies that were even cheaper. But “here’s the thing”, as Joe says over and over again, the same people are still into Woodies. The Woodies shown on the Wharf are owned by the same people, the result is a strange, all white, male, environment wherein they all look like me. It is a phase interest hobby obsession that came into being in the 50s and 60s and never really changed, it just grew old, the world has moved on to standing around on the grass, drinking and talking rather than tinkering in the garage. If that sounds derogatory, I don’t mean it to be; the world is changing and 50s solutions will not fix today’s problems. End aside.
Walking around the fair, I kept thinking about how great it is to have these buildings for something like this, these huge spaces that the Federal Government gave to San Francisco. But they didn’t originally build these spaces for San Francisco, they built them to support a war. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, the United States changed, everything became about the war and these buildings are a microcosm of that. The Craft Fair is in a loading dock, one of three, which were built to load young Soldiers and Marines onto troopships to send them into battle against Japan. When the war started, both the troops and the troopships didn’t exist. The troops had to be trained and the infrastructure to get them to battle had to be built. Over three and a half years, using an already existing British design, the USA built 2,710 Liberty ships, many of them built at shipyards around the Bay Area. Thousands of workers, a proportion of them black, were enticed to move here from the Gulf Coast. New buildings had to be built to house the new workers, the Bay Area was changed forever.
In three and a half short years, over 23 million tons of equipment and material plus 1,647,174 men were shipped from here into the combat zone in what was known then as the Pacific Theater (and, it should be noted, the big push was in Europe against the Nazis). At an average of 40 tons each – and 40 tons is probably too high – that’s about 575,000 train cars of stuff to supply the war effort. Over twelve hundred men a day were brought into San Francisco – most of them on trains – and loaded on ships at Fort Mason along with an average of about 450 train carloads of equipment and material. Because the troops had to have a place to sleep and be fed, the ships had to be furnished with beds and blankets as well as with new plates and new flatware. As an aside, for years afterward, schools and camps all across the country used flatware that said “USN”. End aside. The government mobilized everything to fight the war, everyday life revolved around the war and the herculean effort it took to wage it.
I have no idea what Donald Trump, the man, thinks about the science of global heating but Donald Trump, the President seems hell-bent on getting as much climate-damaging carbon into the atmosphere as possible. He gets lots of money from the Fossil Fuel Industry and he has their back, I guess, no matter what it does to the environment. The Democrats are not much better, sure, at least all the candidates running for President admit to the reality of global heating but few are reacting to it as the existential problem that it is. Bernie and Elizabeth Warren have both signed on to the Green New Deal – and so have, to a lesser extent, Cory Booker, Kristen Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris – but the Democratic Leadership gets a lot of money from the same Lobbyists as Trump and the Republican members of Congress and those lobbyists are trying to minimize any discussion of Global Heating at the debates and, especially, keep the Democrats from hosting a special debate on Global Heating. It is depressing and scary. Still, one comment that I find comforting is by Bill McKibbens in which he said something along the line of “We will have to have a weather event comparable to Pearl Harbor before we do anything, then we will react as we did in World War II”. That sounds true to me; at some point – to paraphrase Isoroku Yamamoto – the sleeping giant of America is going to wake up and face the existential threat of Global Heating and, I hope, we will do it with a terrible resolve.
