Happy 2021

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I was going to write this for Winter Solstice, then for New Years, now it is getting past the time of year to look back. Still, even as the Trump Presidency and 2020 fade into the past, the tidal pull and drama of the daily headlines continue to pull me away from contemplation. I want to think about the arc and influence of this strange year but the urgency of what we were told was the most important presidential election since the Civil War has now morphed into, what we are told, is the most important Senate election in this century, is still crowding out almost everything but the present.

When I first started writing this, President Trump had gone to Mar-Largo for Christmas just like Michael Cohan predicted a month ago. Cohen, who does know Donald Trump pretty well, also said that Trump will not return to the White House but continue to play president from Florida – while he plays golf, I guess – but Trump now says he will be coming back to Washington in time for the protests over his being unable to change the election results. But, really, who knows what is future faking and what is real with Trump. BTW, Ivanka and Jared Kushner also seem to be moving to Florida, they bought a lot on a high-security island near Miami for 30 million. As an aside, the island’s elevation is five feet above sea level so I’m inclined to believe that they really don’t believe in Climate Change (although I read that the storm sewers are already running backward during king tides in the City of Miami Beach so some people must have noticed something is happening).

Watching the Trump Administration collapse into itself like a dying nova, I am shocked, almost on a daily basis, how rickety our governmental system is. Most of the structure that supports our government, I thought were laws; they’re not, they are only agreed-upon norms. Norms that Trump violated with impunity with the support of the Republican Party and well over seventy-four million people. Well, that last half of the sentence is a little disingenuous, lots of people who voted for him are probably appalled at this blatant power grab and some might not have voted for him if they had known what would happen. The fear is that that’s often how dictators come into power, that’s how both Putin or Erdoğan came into power, after all, the wanna-be dictators push the norms until they snap but then it is too late. What saved us this time around is that Donald Trump and his family – and it was by and large a family affair – are almost unbelievably inept. But the next guy – and it most likely will be a guy, a white guy – that tries to be dictator might not be as amateurish. We are going to have to write a shitpot full of real laws to guard against a repeat and, somehow, put teeth into the 25th Amendment.

I was going to say Trump has monetized the presidency but it has been monetized for a long time – nobody leaves the White House poor anymore – still, Trump took away all pretense of Public Service. He weaponized the Presidency as a money-making Office. Joe Biden – soon to be President Joe Biden, I dearly hope – says that he will normalize things but it will not be the normal of Jimmy Carter.

One thing I’ve learned during the last year and don’t want to forget in 2021 – maybe not exactly learned, but got a deeper understanding of – is how much effort and money our society has put into putting keeping Black people down. And yet, they keep rising (to sort of quote Lewis Hamilton’s helmet which features the quote from Maya Angelou). It has occurred to me several times that maybe all we need to do to help Black people is get our knees off their necks. I know we should be doing more to live up to our ideals, but treating Black people equally and getting cops to stop killing them is a place to start.

How 2020 will carry over into 2021 and how it will be different is a prediction(s) I really don’t want to make other than having a President Biden will be different than a President Trump. I do think Joe Biden, unlike Trump, believes in the Federal Government as an agency for good. He has been in the Federal Government most of his adult life and I think he would define that as being in Public Service. His appointments, so far – with a couple of exceptions such as Larry Summers who has gotten very rich going back and forth between working in the financial sector and governing that same financial sector – show serious concern for Global Climate Change; Biden choose Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm for Secretary of the Department of Energy rather than the likes of Trump’s pick of Texas Governor Rick Perry. Granholm is a promoter of electric vehicle technology and Perry thought the Department of Energy should be abolished.

I don’t think the Proud Boys, Neo-Nazis, et al, are going away on January 7th and that is a bad thing. We are a racist country all the way back to our founding but from the late sixties to the start of the Trump presidency, being racist increasingly became unfashionable. Senator George Allen, during his 2006 re-election campaign, calls somebody a Macaca, and it ended his campaign. We thought, I thought, that meant that racism was slowly disappearing, but it wasn’t, it was just being pushed underground. There racism festered, resenting our Liberal superiority, and now racism and xenophobia have been given permission to resurface with groups that the President, at least, seems to acknowledge as legit, like the Proud Boys.

I don’t think the Proud Boys, Neo-Nazis, et al, are going away on January 7th and that may be a good thing. During the 60s, the raging trouble makers that scared the populous were on the left, like the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Black Panthers, and that ended up pushing the country right, however, now, the scary ones are on the right and are probably pushing the country to the left. Let’s hope that push trumps racism in Georgia.

Happy New Year and Happy 2021.

A Couple of Random Thoughts

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I’ve started falling back on the “well, taylor swift wrote/produced 2 albums in the past 9 months, certainly I can at least vacuum” lro@LRo70 science doesn’t care what you think. Manhattan, NY instagram.com/larryrowe1/

As 2020 winds down towards the Winter Solstice, President Trump is no longer the focus of the world’s attention, two, two!, Covid-19 vaccines are their way – faster than expected and faster than usual because of the same Trump – and President-elect Biden is still making noises that suggest he is serious about both diversity and climate change. Even though the pandemic is raging across the country out of control, hope for an end to this bad trip is coming back.

With everybody stuck at home, the only reason to put up holiday decorations is for ourselves; nobody will see our tree and the carefully displayed decorations but us and that gives the tree and the other decorations a certain purity.

I saw one of my favorite houses on the Noah Trevor Daily Social Distancing Show a couple of days ago and I was thrilled. He was Zooming with an actor I only know from television and the actor was in the house (on the first floor by the fishpond, I think). I worked as a carpenter for the owner and designer Allyn Morris, on a house down the street, and was in the house almost every day for several months and it was sensational. It took my breath away every time I walked in which was Morris’s plan. The street view was an almost blank facade but, when you entered, you were standing on a landing in front of a two-story glass wall facing the Glendale Freeway with the San Gabriels behind. For a long time, Morris got very little recognition but, now, he is getting much-deserved credit. It turns out that the actor is the new owner and the house looked great behind the owner. If you are at all interested in architecture, check it out here: The A.E. Morris Residence | Crosby Doe Associates, Inc.

If you’re looking for an interesting read and are still not bored with politics, I suggest What It Takes, The Way to the White House, a book about the 1988 Presidential Election, by Richard Ben Cramer written in a sort of breathless Tom Wolfe style. It is fascinating (although very long at over a thousand pages and very dense). The book follows each of the major candidates, George “Poppy” Herbert Walker Bush who, you may remember, won and Bob Dole on the Republican side; Michael Dukakis, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt, and Gary Hart – with a cameo by Jesse Jackson – on the Democratic side as they run for the presidency but it also traces their roots sometimes all the way back to their grandparents. The book is fascinating not only because of the various candidates and not only because so many of today’s problems existed in the 80s in a nascent form, but because Cramer often presents information in a way that I haven’t thought about before.

As Bush starts to run for the Senate, he has a set of advisers who call themselves the Gee-6 who Cramer describes: The name was a tip-off: it was a play on the G-, the Group of Seven – Prime Ministers and Presidents who’d meet, from time to time, for photos and to decide what the dollar should be worth, what to do about oil, how the civilized world would fight terrorism, that kind of thing. It was the U.S., Japan, Germany Britain, France, Italy, maybe Canada was in there…pretty much everybody who can make a decent car. The meetings, the group photo, were meant to convey to the world’s unwashed that the Free World big boys, the guys with the twelve-inch GNPs bulging in their pants, were all agreed how the game should be played.

I’ve never thought of the Group of Seven that way, that arbitrary and dictatorial, before. I’ve sort of thought – and thought is the wrong word here, not much thinking was going on, mostly just taking in what I been told – was a benevolent organization keeping the world on track. And, of course, that is true…with the addition of for the benefit of the rich countries making the rules. One of the things that I’ve become much more aware of during the year of staying home is how the rules and regulations we are told is good for the commonweal are self-seving to the rule makers.

One of the signs that the Republicans really know that Biden has won is that they are now worried about the National Debt when the talk turns to giving survival money to people who are out of work, destitute, and hungry. It was not a problem when Congress and the President gave themselves a big tax cut, but giving broke, starving, people money, we are now being told, is not good for the country.

Originally Titled “Stupid and Gullible”; Now Titled “Distressing”

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Late Saturday, pro-Trump supporters descended on the nation’s capital and clashed with counter-protesters. Among the most vocal Trump supporters were members of Proud Boys, which is considered a hate group by human rights activists. More than a dozen people were arrested and four taken to the hospital with what authorities described as serious knife wounds. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers continued Sunday to shy away from urging Trump to accept reality. Los Angeles Times, December 13, 2020.

The Supremes, by a vote of seven to two, have voted to not hear what seems to be President-unelect Trump’s last legal chance to change the Presidential election (although, apparently, Trump has taken his case to YouTube). This whole thing has been surprising and distressing to me.

It’s not surprising that Donald Trump has been trying to fight the election results. He has an excessive need for admiration and we have been shown this from the get-go. The opening sequence of his Administration was to exaggerate the number of his adoring fans. It was not doing something he had promised, but sending poor, humiliated, Sean Spicer out to lie about the size of the Trump’s inaugural crowd. Spicer knew he was lying, I have no idea if Trump did, but President Trump’s first act was to try to bend, if not ignore, reality to flatter his own ego. That he is now telling us that he won the election, that it was stolen from him, that he got more legal votes than anyone in history just like his inaugural crowd was the biggest in history, is not a surprise, it is, after all, another attempt to flatter his own ego.

It is not a surprise that he is using this to try to get rich(er). What is a surprise and disheartening is the number of Congressmembers – and now, Governors, State Attorneys general – who have been willing to Sean Spicer themselves. It seems like most of them must know they are doing irreparable damage to the country, but, maybe, that is just projection on my part, maybe most of them are too stupid or too lost in the Inside The Beltway bubble. But I don’t think so and I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised. The opening sequence of this national nightmare, after all, was also Trump making Spicer his bitch and the closing scene may very well making the Republican Party his bitch.

Trump is a kiss-up, punch down, kind of guy. There are not many people in the world who are higher on the food chain that he has to kiss-up to but there are lots who are lower and he likes to punch down. He punches down at almost everyone no matter how much power difference, actually, especially with a big power difference, Colin Kaepernick, a black, out-of-work football player, for example. Few people are willing to go toe to toe with President Trump, interestingly enough, those that do are mostly women- Speaker Pelosi comes to mind – and especially women of color like Yamiche Alcindor, a reporter with PBS, or Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. But no Republicans, with the possible exception of Mit Romney, have the cojones to go toe to toe with him for the good of the country. He has dominated his Party, unlike any President I can remember and he has sown hate and distrust like no public figure since Joseph McCarthy. That is surprising and distressing.