The Blame for Ebola

In discussion groups it is easy for me to spot people who get their news from Fox. They have the basic facts wrong. Fox viewers are especially ignorant people, either because ignorance drew them to Fox or because Fox miseducates its viewers.

Long ago I stood in a friend's backyard. I coached a girls soccer team the friend's daughter played on, and he had thrown us a party. He was pulling up stakes, moving to the South to join a spanking new TV network called Fox. As if a new network could survive and make money, I thought at the time.

What is hard is to spot misinformation on the TV shows I like. I watched many a show that explained that the Ebola crisis came about in part because the Republicans had cut funding for the Center for Disease Control, so the CDC was unprepared. Blame George W. Bush. I bought that narrative. It sounded right.

The fact is that Bush increased funding for the CDC. I don't know his motives, of course. Last year (2014) the CDC had a budget of nearly $7 billion. That's not shabby. In 2013 the Republican House authorized more money for the National Health Institute than President Obama requested. Increases and cuts in the budget were passed by combinations of Democrats and Republicans. And I am astonished that I got the thing wrong. (You don't get the whole picture if you stand too close.)

Beyond the Fringe

A few months back, I dropped out of the Healdsburg Peace Project. I did this reluctantly, because I like the members. The Project began about 13 years ago, a hundred people strong. Over the years the more astute members died or moved away or just quit, leaving behind good people whose belief systems were inconsistent with reality. Eventually I had to go, too. And that raises a question. Why does the Left have so little impact on American politics today? 

The first robber-baron era in the United States drew a vigorous response from ordinary people, who organized themselves into several movements that culminated in the New Deal. We are now deep into the second robber-baron era, triggered by the Reagan Revolution. This time the middle class and poor have no unity, no agenda, no plan, no Farmer-Labor Party, no New Deal. We face huge issues: poverty, climate change, racism, nuclear threats, our own dominant weapons industry and fluoridated water. You may wonder why fluoridated water is on the list. So do I.  

In the face of all this, the general public remains passive; and the Far Left in my area seems committed to an angry early-20th-century struggle to repeal western civilization, siding with the John Birch Society, the wine barons and local teabaggers in revolt against the world as it is. 

The actual work of trying to help actual people has been left to religious charities and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. They help a little here and a little there--but they, too, have no plan. The Republicans, these days, offer Wall Street and fundamentalist forms of oppression. What we need are movements that ordinary people will trust and a positive plan that makes sense to the average voter. 

If the Left wants to gain trust, here's a suggestion. Do something useful like gathering and delivering food to hungry people. They might then sit and talk. A plan might emerge.

The Lost Ranch, a family story

My wife and I returned to Northern California from Redlands last night. We had visited a friend in hospice.  Redlands is in the Inland Empire, such a great name for fairly ordinary turf. I would have driven back in one long day, but Susan now insists on shorter days, We stopped at a motel in Paso Robles, which the locals call "Paso." I wanted another crack at looking at my grandfather's ranch nearby, near Pozo.

Many years ago I read a book titled FAMILY STORIES.  I recently tried to find it on the 'net and  on Amazon, but it seems to have vanished. This book was an examination of family stories, which ones were common and what purposes they served. "Grandfather's lost ranch" is a classic. It tells how the family once had some significant property, a ranch or a gold mine or a bank, so the family is really more fancy and unified than it now seems. Anyway, I had once found the ranch site, which is a bit beyond the southern end of Lake Margarita, and the foundation of my grandparents' small house. But I did not realize what it was that I had come across at the time. I last visited the complete house in (maybe) Dec of 1942, and at that time it had no electricity. Primitive. On this trip I wanted to see if I could find the small property again (now part of a county park, I think). Susan and I drove along an empty road (River Road) for some time. The road paralleled the Salinas River, which is no more than a small creek at that point. I did  manage to find the parking lot that had been fenced off on the property, and I marked it on my GPS. I then walked a lot but did not find the house foundation. Maybe it has been taken out as part of a general improvement of the wild scene there.

The story is that some fancy people in San Luis Obispo wanted permission to hunt deer on my grandparents' property. He told them to get lost, so they took the property from him, using eminent domain. The justification was that they needed his ranch to make Lake Margarita, but the lake never came near his small ranch, and his neighbors got to keep their land. Just a story, of course. Susan wants me to sue, but that was 75 years ago, the land is now part of the park around the lake, and hunting is explicitly forbidden. And nobody beats eminent domain. Having seen the land, Susan now thinks more highly of me.

A Major Constitutional Flaw

I used to wonder why Supreme Court decisions were based on flimsy nonsense (even when I liked the decisions). It turns out that there is a simple answer. We have a Constitution that is the hardest to amend in the entire world. It is much too hard to change.  But times change, of course, and we have to keep changing. We often can't amend,  so we get new interpretations that might sound absurd but are needed. Or at times not needed.

Pine Flat

The Press Democrat's Clark Mason told some of this in the Sunday paper.

Near Healdsburg, near the Jimtown store, Pine Flat Road snakes up into the Mayacomas. It's a steep climb used by some Tour de France cyclists for an extreme workout. At the top of the mountains it ends in a locked gate, and on the other side is a dirt road leading down to Lake County. Dan, Tim and I sometimes bike about a half mile up the road, and then we turn around and boast to one another on the way back.

I  have driven to the top five or six times, and short of the top there is a little meadow with a creek. It's bear and cougar country, now owned by the Audubon Society. A great place to stroll. There once was a town there, Pine Flat, with 3,000 people mining quicksilver. They had stores, hotels, brothels, and a stage coach route. That was in the 1870s, and the town had three districts: a Latino district, a Chinese district, and between them was what they called the American (or white) district. But there is nothing left of the town, not a stick, not even one photograph or personal diary, just some newspaper accounts. The town completely vanished.

The stage coach owner and driver, Clark Foss, has a mural in his honor in Calistoga, and the creek that floods Healdsburg is Foss Creek. Foss was famous for rapid stage coach rides, and he did crash once and kill a passenger. Pine Flat had homicides, of course, and the most famous killer there was Eadweard Muybridge. I suppose he is most famous for some photographs he commissioned of a running horse that proved that there were moments when all four hooves were in the air.  Muybridge murdered Major Henry Larkins, his wife's British  lover. The British were unpopular at the time.  Muybridge pleaded temporary insanity and walked free.

The Unicorn Defense

We understand what the Nuremberg defense is. You kill a thousand children, and then, when you are tried for the offense, you say, "My boss told me to do it."  The CIA is not using the Nuremberg defense. Instead they are saying, "There is a legal justification for torture."  And it is true that a legal justification exists in the sense that unicorns exist. They exist as fictions on paper. We can draw a unicorn on a piece of paper and point to it and say, "Dick Cheney  told me to insert vegetable matter into the prisoner's rectum and the unicorn said it was legal." The three branches of our government may or may not agree with the claim. The rest of the world will continue to think the claim is delusional, but only because unicorns do not exist in the same way as zebras. Zebras are as real as the treaties we sign.

The Idiot's Defense

Let's say you work for the CIA, and some lawyer tells you that it's legal to torture people. So you go ahead and do it. It's good for your career. You trust lawyers? You don't know right from wrong? And that is your argument? What are you, an idiot?

Pop Quiz

This is my standard quiz on pop music. Answers will be posted in a few days.

1. Who was the first white man to be named jazz vocalist of the year in DOWNBEAT  magazine?

2.  Which vocalist has had the most #1 hits in American history?

3.  Who was the singer on the best selling recording of all time in the United States?

4. Name the first singer who taped his radio show in advance, so he could edit it.

5. Which singer walked off his film set and wouldn't return until Louis Armstrong was granted his first movie billing?

Arrest Them

Dianne Feinstein is not the worst senator in Washington. I don't like her, but she isn't bone stupid like the Republican senators who deny science on behalf of an imaginary friend who lives on Mount Olympus. She hasn't dedicated her waking life to evil works. Feinstein is a corporate Democrat, herself one of the fancy class, which means she mostly serves her peers, the rational rich, and on occasion she does something for ordinary voters. Today she is releasing a 600 page summary of a longer report on the torture used against prisoners by the second, feckless Bush administration.

The people need to understand and discuss what has been done in our name. Anyone who says we don't need to know is attempting to smother what remains of our democracy. 

Torture is illegal under our Constitution. If a government agent finds himself in a situation where torture is an absolute necessity, he should do it and then turn himself in to be tried. When MLK decided it was necessary to break the law, he broke it and waited to be arrested. He didn't run. He was genuinely committed to the democratic system he was trying to improve. We have let our official torturers run and hide and pretend to be everything but what they obviously are. They broke the law. Arrest them.

 

The 2016 Campaign

Tom Belton reminded me that the voters in 2016 will not be voting out of gratitude. The fact that the Democrats brought them Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, the Civil Rights Act, etc., will not be decisive. The Democrats have opposed--to some extent--racism, gender bias, climate change, homophobia and anti-Semitism, but that will not be decisive. Gratitude wears thin faster than a cheap t-shirt. What will matter are the plans the two parties put forward to improve things in the future. What will the parties offer? What ideas?

Of course the Democrats could get lucky. The Republicans might nominate another unbearable hairy head. But what voters want is a plan to move this country in concrete ways to a better future.