Long Train to Nowhere

No doubt you have seen one of those long trains, the ones with two or three engines in front and one in back (no caboose these days). You look down the track, and the train rumbles on, hundreds of cars, out of sight. You might ask yourself how many workers are on board.

The correct answer is: one.

Everyone else has been replaced by automation. If that one engineer falls off the train, no one will be on board. Or if the engineer takes out a bottle of whiskey and drinks straight shots, a drunk will be aboard. Or if the engineer grows lonely for a human voice and calls his wife, one inattentive dreamer will be on board. Automation will take care of safety, except when it doesn't.

We're headed for a time when there will be one person working at the General Motors plant, flipping an on/off switch. Meanwhile the unemployment rate for Blacks is about 20%.

Maybe we should start to talk about this.

The South Secedes Again

The first time the South seceded from the United States, two of my great-grandfathers fought as privates to free the slaves. Make no mistake about what and who caused the war. Most of the rich people of the South had most of their money tied up in valuable slaves. That was their capital. They seceded to protect their investment.

Slavery was, as General Grant noted, as bad a cause as anyone ever supported.

In a way we are still fighting the Civil War today; The Tea Party, someone said on television, represents secession. The Tea Party is united around an issue that reminds me of the South in 1860: escape from the federal government. This escape takes many forms: hating people of color and immigrants and viewing women as inferiors (the government offers them some protection); home schooling rather than school district education; crippling all government by cutting its income; ending social security and Medicare; threatening to secede; arming vigilante militias; claiming the government is not legitimate; claiming to represent the original founding fathers (a tactic copied from the South in 1860); freeing itself from a belief in history and in science, including economics, climate studies, biology, geology (the earth is 6,000 years old)--in short, freedom from facts. The object of all this is to prop up a jumbled ideology that is unrelated to reality as our species understands it. Like slavery, Tea Partyism can not be defended rationally.

The good news is that Tea Party represents a minority of voters. The bad news is that we are still fighting for the sanity of a nation.

It's rumored that Rick Perry, a governor of a once Confederate State, who has threatened to secede, may run for the Republican presidential nomination. The Tea Party loves him. I hope he wins the nomination--that should make the situation clear to the majority of Americans, including the 400 families that form our oligarchy. They supported and used the Tea Party in the past, but things got out of hand. Monopoly Capitalism vs. Radical Right Populism--it might make a good monster movie.

The 600 Pound Gorilla

The other day I heard a history professor talking about what had caused the Civil War. At the start of the war, he said, the Southern orators spoke of nothing but the need to protect slavery (slaves were the most valuable property owned in the United States, worth more money than the railroads and manufacturing plants combined). Ten years after the war, the Southern orators began to claim that the war had been started because of many important factors, of which slavery was only one. The war had been fought over states' rights, for example (the right to own slaves) and Northern financial dominance and so on.

You see, the South is no longer quite as certain as it once was that slavery is humane and uplifting and sanctioned by Jesus Christ. So the claim is that the Civil War was fought for many reasons.

The historian drew an analogy. Suppose you went to see King Kong for the first time. Someone later asked you what the movie was about. "A gigantic ape," you replied. Ten years later someone else asks you the same question. "King Kong?" you reply. "It's about many things. The movie is filled with interesting characters."

A Liberal Plot

We pay a heavy price when we elect fools to public office. I remember reading, about ten years ago, that scientists had determined that Sonoma County was undergoing climate change--it was getting hotter at a rate faster than average for the nation as a whole. It occurred to me that this might not be good for premium wine grapes. Much of the economy of Healdsburg depends on fine wine grapes. When I tried to discuss this with the City Hall Old Boys at the time--mostly Republicans--they told me to ignore science. "Climate change is a liberal anti-business myth," they insisted.

Today the main headline in the Press Corporate Democrat is "WARMING CALLED MAJOR THREAT TO GRAPES." All you really need to read is the first sentence: "Global warming could leave half of Napa Valley's famed vineyards unsuitable to grow premium grapes by 2040," according to a Stanford study.

For some vintners, that sort of news is best met by denial. There is one problem with denying the plans of Mother Nature, however: what Mother Nature wants will happen. The consent of vintners and goofy Republican ideologists is not required.

I don't doubt that smarter vintners are working on ways to mitigate the growing heat, and I expect public universities like Davis to find ways to help unless we close them down to save money. All is not lost. But what fools we be.