Trump's Appeal

Paul Krugman has attributed the popularity of Donald Trump to his strategy, which is to say out loud the things that prior Republicans have hinted at. Where the Bushes used dog whistles and spokespersons, Trump is plain spoken. Trump opposes political correctness--his racism is in plain sight, not half-hidden euphemisms. It's right there. For Trump Latinos are rapists, Muslims are murderers, nearly all women are failed sex objects. About half the Republican voters support open bigotry, because bigotry is what they have been responding to for decades.

Trump's Brutes

Donald Trump's racist and sexist remarks are unique in one sense. They come directly from a major Presidential candidate, not secretly from a corrupt staffer like Lee Atwater. The effect has been to make clear that around 20% of American voters are permanently baboons.

Trump's latest remarks deserve a close look. He made it obvious that the thought that women--in this case, Hillary Clinton--use toilets is "disgusting." He's a non-man with a strong aversion to women. I don't doubt that he finds them germy--he's reputedly a germaphobe. Never mind that he is a red-faced stack of wobbly flab who can't get an American woman to marry him although he's a billionaire.

And he told us that Hillary "got schlonged" by Barack Obama, using Yiddish slang for sexual intercourse. His followers loved it. It conjured perfectly the concept of large black men have sex with small white women, the concept that lit a thousand fires in racist lynch mobs. Trump said it out loud on television, thrilling the lugs who support him.

Trump won't be elected President (unless we are suicidal), but he has made it obvious that we have and always have had a mindless brute class that hates Latinos, women, Muslims, education, African Americans and so on. They love Trump, and at the moment they have control of the super-rich Republican party. There's a kind of alliance between the super-rich and the brute class--it's an old strategy in democracies. But it's rare that the brutes take command.

Originalism

Scene: On May 14, 1787, the richest men in North America begin to gather to write a constitution for the United States. George Washington takes James Madison aside. "Make sure, Jimmy," he says, "to include a provision that will ensure that our tenant farmers have the power to rise up and kill us." Madison nods eagerly. "Sir, I won't forget. I think I'll call it the second amendment."

--from the archives of the NRA, historical drama department.

LUCIE IN THE SKY

Lucie Jensen stepped through the Big Window yesterday. She was more than 100 years old and clear of mind when I last saw her. (There is hope for us to remain lucid!) Lucie was at the center of the Healdsburg current affairs discussion group, chaired by Tom Belton. She had started out as a Kansas Republican, daughter in a banking family, but at some early point, dismayed by the meanness in her party, she became a New Deal Democrat, a common sense sllghtly-left-of-center voter and columnist. She wrote a column for the local weekly, a column that was often the reason to buy the newspaper. For several recent years she handled the hospitality for the town's Democratic club. I don't seem able to get her essence down in words. Lucie was a lady--by that I mean most people automatically respected her. She married three times. One of her husbands had hit her (end of marriage). Her favorite husband, she told us once, was the last, Stan, a machinist, because he was romantic. Lucie worked as a teacher, worked with the most backward learners, worked with them as individuals. Ah, she was a major touchstone in the lives of so many of us.

Black Women and Class

By now most of us have seen the TV coverage of the former police officer convicted of serial rape of 13 black women. Melissa Harris-Perry pointed out that our media did not cover the arrest, the prosecution, defense or the trial itself. We heard about unarmed black men being shot in the street, but abused black women got no coverage. That's apparently an old problem. How many American men understand that slavery made possible an unending rape of black women? One former police officer figured it out. He selected, as his victims, black women who had been discarded by structured society: drug users, prostitutes, women with records. He eventually made the mistake of attacking a middle class woman, and now he's doing life. 

Making America Whiter

Donald Trump's ability to think is somewhat truncated, but that isn't what makes him an international topic of discussion. It's his heroic attempt to make America whiter.

The attempt began when he discovered that President Obama--only half white--was not a citizen and so not eligible to be President. It continued with Trump calling to our attention that the Chinese are a menace. Few Chinese are white. Then he vowed to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, many of whom are part Apache and don't belong in North America. Now he intends to exclude the Muslims, who come from India or Pakistan or the Semitic regions of the Middle East (50 shades of brown). 

In a democracy,  nearly 50% of the voters will be below average in intelligence. Near the bottom of that scale you find those capable of absorbing only a rudimentary education. But most of them can see through Trump. A few million support him. That's all it takes to make a splash.

The Crime of Crimes

At the end of World War Two, a relatively few German war criminals were tried in one way or another by one court or another. Then the allies lost interest. Some international principles were developed in the course of all this. It turned out that the worst possible war crime was the crime against peace--it included all the lesser war crimes that happened because someone began an aggressive war. So who have been the worst war criminals since 1946?

Armed Crackpots

It's no surprise that the Republican attempts to stir up their base with attacks on Planned Parenthood have brought on an armed attack on a Planned Parenthood office with two civilians and one police officer murdered. We knew that would happen. Every nation has its crackpots. Our nation arms the crackpots.

Accounting for the Deaths of Young Men of Color

I've tried to avoid seeing the current video of a Chicago police officer shooting a 17-year-old in the back as he walks away, then shooting the boy 15 more times. We have our local death, a deputy shooting Andy Lopez, 14. In this nation, the police kill about one unarmed black man a week on average. The police have a kind of gentleman's agreement with district attorneys, a license to kill. Our local killer was excused by the District Attorney, and he is back in his car, roaming, armed to the teeth, ready to strike again. No accountability.

Often a district attorney will investigate, stall for long periods and then announce that the killing on an unarmed person of color was legal and good for the community.  On rare occasions there is a video of the street killing, and the district attorney must charge the killer or risk losing an election. The tactic changes. The D.A. can overcharge the police officer, making it almost impossible for a jury to convict him. Let's say the officer commits second degree murder. If you charge him with first degree murder, the jury will find him innocent. Everyone goes home happy.

33,000

Here's an oddity.  About 33,000 people in the world were killed by terrorists last year, including several Americans, and about 33,000 Americans were killed by firearms, all of them Americans. 

None of the dead included Ben Carson, who fears terrorists and supports the wider employment of firearms. (Why do I watch the news?) 

Getting Priorities Arranged

Okay, I know we're having trouble with priorities, mainly which people do we keep out first? For a while it was Mexicans. Now the Syrians are contending. The Mexicans are Christians, but they often have darker skin than Muslims. It's hard to know which to choose.

The Republican leaders say we must keep foreigners out except for the 20 million tourists each year who come without visas. We don't check on them. Some come from Syria or Mexico, and they spend money.  They can buy expensive meals or handguns. 

It's a little confusing. As Marx said, a capitalist will sell you a rope to hang him with.

Consider this. More Mexicans left our country last year than came into our country. That insults our entire heritage; perhaps we should  begin to take Don Trump's idea of an eighty-foot fence more seriously. We can build a wall, stop this drain out of our nation and maybe the Mexican government will pay for it. They already have extra people. At the same time we should focus on keeping Syrians out of New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie (imagine how pleased Jesus would be by this dude's name) has banned Syrian orphans under the age of five. I am not kidding. Keeping out Syrian orphans has become a top priority.
  

38 Countries

All I need to know is that there are 38 nations whose citizens are free to come and go in the United States without any sort of background check. 

One of the countries is Saudi Arabia, home of the 9/11 terrorists.

Syrian refugees, to enter this country, have to be vetted first, a process that takes nearly two years. Syrian refugees have not been a problem, but we've seen terrorists emerging from the 38 nations. The Republican response is to bar the Syrians. 

The citizens of Saudi Arabia remain free to come and go at will. (Saudi Arabia has the best oil in the world.)
  
The Republican leaders in this country who have stirred up hysteria about Syrian refugees are despicable.

I don't have the statistics, but when it comes to terror, ISIS probably kills 500 Muslims for each Christian. What do you suppose the Muslim communities think about that?

Which terrorists should Americans fear? The guys who enter classrooms shooting? The men who kill abortion doctors or blow up government day care centers? The unchecked visitors from 38 nations? White men with guns?

The Borderline

I have to wonder at the people I see on TV calling for America to send troops to fight ISIS on the ground. That's a job for the locals. It's up to them to free themselves. The Kurds are setting an example. We should support the Kurds directly (not indirectly, as we do now). We are not the world's police force, and we should not be constantly putting our military in harm's way.

As far as I can tell, we offer the Kurds only lukewarm support, because we want to maintain the weird national boundaries that the British Empire set up 90 years ago. We want Iraq to remain intact, so we  don't really arm the Kurds, who want out of Iraq. We should stop doing that. Let the borders change into something that makes sense to the local peoples. 

Carson

Late at night, as I am trying to fall asleep, I sometimes think that Ben Carson might be coming at me with a knife.  My only defense is a belt buckle. I can't sleep. But then I decide to listen to some Brahms. Brahms, you know, grew up poor, and he got his start in music by playing piano in a whorehouse (true story).  That was unfortunate on more than one level, but Brahms' music changes the pattern of my thoughts, and eventually I doze off.

fire

As some of you know, several weeks back our apartment burned, along with 11 others. We lost a great deal (but not our cat).  The fire fighters did a great job. The Red Cross stepped in to help in big ways. Kith and kin from all over the continent helped us. Cousin Dan put us up for three weeks. Healdsburg, led by Chris Love, came to the rescue. Sarah, our older daughter, went on Gofundme and raised a large sum of crowd-funding cash. Our insurance (Farmer's) came through. We settled in yesterday in a new apartment near Montgomery and Summerfield. Today I plan to buy inexpensive chairs to sit in.

On another topic, the paper today ran an article on the death rate among America's poor white people. Their death rate has been rising annually. That makes sense. Our nation has provided them with inadequate educations, particularly in sound ways to reason and in sound health practices. That's a political issue. Instead of an education, they got bullshit from political leaders (soulless corporate hacks).  The price if you are a poor white fellow?  You lose about five years of your life for going around saying, "We want our country back."

Crash and Burn, the Republican Story

Because of the nature of their coalition, the Republican party's constant lying--compared to the Democrats' lying-- has long been astonishing to witness. The goal of today's Republican party is to use the government to drain money from the poor and middle class and ship it to the super-rich. That's easy. You start a war and then send billions of tax dollars to a plutocrat who owns the mashed potato industry. You feed the soldiers, who now include women,  African-Americans, gays, etc. That's excellent. But enriching mashed potato billionaires doesn't lend itself to winning political slogans in an election, so the Wall Streeters arrange their campaigns around issues that mean nothing at all to them but a lot to voters who are stupid or bigoted. The campaigns attack women, African-Americans, gays, etc.

Wall Street doesn't hate abortions or fear undocumented Mexicans. In fact, it finds both quite useful. But Wall Street promises Republican voters it will end abortions and fence out people of color, because the promises (lies) help get out the KKK vote. The problem today is that the stupid and bigoted voters have finally come to understand they have been lied to for a hundred years. The Republicans never really deliver.  

Abortion remains legal, and lynching remains illegal. The teabaggers, as mindless as inchworms, have taken a century to feel this out. Like worms who crawl out to die on cement after a rain storm, they have suddenly become disoriented. They back Trump, Fiorina and Carson. They bring down the Speaker. They want to stop the nation in its tracks, which would accidentally slow the surge of wealth to the donor class. No way, says Wall Street. The teabaggers hope to burn down the place and put up a new rotting white house. My guess, though, is that it will be the Wall Street wing that does the rebuilding. They have insurance. Maybe a steel house next time.

The Right to Die

I'm 80, so of course many of the people I love have died after long, painful, useless struggles that served only to torture them. In my father's last hours, he was in such discomfort that he signaled to his children to kill him. It was too late--we were taken by surprise--and we couldn't help. 

Today Gov. Brown signed a right-to-die bill, making physician-assisted death legal in California, and I take back every negative remark I ever made about the man, a devout Catholic. Now, when the time comes, each of us can choose, if we wish, to die with dignity. That's an enormous gift.

Death by Gun

 The following is from Market Watch

 

SilviaAscarelli

Senior news editor

You’re most likely to die because of a gun if you live in Alaska.
Deaths by firearms in Alaska totaled 19.6 per 100,000 people in 2013, the most recent data available, according to the Health Indicators Warehouse, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for Health Statistics.
That is almost double the national rate of 10.6 deaths per 100,000 people, according to its data. The national rate has generally risen over five years, although the 2013 rate was a touch below the 10.7 deaths per 100,000 recorded in 2012.
A separate measure of shootings, the crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker, lists the Umpqua shooting as the 295th mass shooting in the U.S. this year. It defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot—but not necessarily dead—in one event.
That is an average of more than one a day.
Following Alaska are in firearm mortality rates are Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Wyoming, all with 17 or more deaths by firearms per 100,000 people.

Fiorina's Face

I still remember how rejecting I was when Donald Trump criticized Carley Fiorina's face. That was about a month ago. Trump is without a doubt a racist, motormouthed blowhard and a pouting flabby sexist--but what if he was onto something? What a strange thought to have. 

To be honest, Fiorina's face has the look of a madwoman. She's brilliant, vicious and loony, radiating rage, defiantly living in an alternate reality in which her obvious lies are truths. She has the wet look of someone like Ted Cruz, someone about to pop. Cruz,  you may have noticed, is neckless, his head screwed directly onto his shoulders. Something went wrong there and twisted his lips. But Fiorina is even more off-kilter. This losing competition could end badly for her.

Funding Crackpots

My brother bent over to pick up a handout he found on the sidewalk in Santa Rosa, which is how I found out how bigots make money. The handout was the usual hate brochure about gay people.  It complained that gofundme, the website where ordinary people can fund one another with small contributions, had closed down a funding operation by a pair of "Christian" bakers after the site had raised over a hundred grand in a few hours to help these crackpot bakers out.  Gofundme tries not to fund nutters who discriminate.

Do you see the scam? You refuse to serve gay people, then go on the 'net asking for financial backing and a few days later "Christians" will have made you rich. (Note: there is nothing in the Bible about not baking cakes for gay couples.)

Black and White

It's taken me too long to recognize how smart Joy Reid is, perhaps because she speaks without flash. At the moment I suspect that she is the most insightful commentator on MSNBC. Reid has a book out. I haven't managed to get a copy yet, but I saw her interviewed for an hour, much of it on the differences between what she called "white liberals" and "black liberals."

My notion of her view oversimplifies it, but here goes. The white left works to improve the lives of all poor people, including African Americans, through support for measures like raising the minimum wage. The black left supports raising the minimum wage but is much more focused on challenging the New Jim Crow that kills African Americans or stunts their opportunities.  That's the divide. Think Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter.

Both sides are right. It's obvious that some in the white left think the black left is right, and some in the black left think the white left is right. There is a war of words going on in magazines and journals and on the  'net. We can hope that some people will be able to span the gap and pull the two groups together. 


(also on FB)

Women in Combat

Should women in the military serve in combat?  That's a major question before the Obama administration today. The answer, of course, is that they already do, but never mind facts. As a former sergeant, I want to make it clear that I endorsed women's liberation and stood ready to relinquish my place to a woman if it came to combat. My preferred duty was in San Francisco repairing messkits. 

The Politics of Respectability

You may have seen African American intellectual leaders on television who oppose something called "the politics of respectability."  I'm thinking of Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris Perry and Ta Nehisi Coates, three professors. The first two have earned doctorates, and all three are as groomed and as handsome as President Obama, who happens to be the epitome of the politics of respectability. The denouncers of respectability are themselves respectable.

Now I reckon that there have long been movements in the black community for and against respectability. Think of MLK and the Black Panthers. The arguments for respectability were (1) if African Americans are solidly respectable, others will begin to grasp that they are human and (2) fewer respectable African Americans will be lynched or left to die.

The argument against respectability is that it doesn't work.

The politics of respectability works to a degree, right? Many black people now vote. They play major league baseball. A black woman became a senator from Illinois. A black man became secretary of state. But today unarmed African American men are being shot down by the police at a rate of about one a week. Millions of black lives are stunted by underfunded educational systems, closed economic doors and so on. That's why certain respectable African Americans argue against respectability and in favor of a different approach that will lead to solutions. That's what Black Lives Matter is about, rejecting respectable behavior.  But what exactly is the movement's strategy?

 The Black Panthers had a strategy that ranged from programs to feed children to armed defiance.  The strategy failed, but it was a strategy. Rudeness to old people, the hallmark of Black Lives Matter so far, is not a plan but an adolescent reaction.

How the larger African American community divides on this issue, I don't know. Coates, Perry and Dyson are powerful intellectual thinkers. In some sense they straddle the issues, opposed to respectability while safely living deeply respectable lives. I'm counting on them to explain a new strategy, which I hope to support.

aesthetics

In its editorial today, our local daily newspaper gave Donald Trump a low grade, which he earned for his KKK-like racism. For emphasis, the final sentence of the editorial reads, "His eye-rolling and name-calling is getting old."  I want to congratulate the editorial board members, who decided to reinforce  their point about Trump's vulgarity by expressing it in substandard language.  The style mimics the message, and that is a powerful stroke we seldom see employed these days. Or maybe the paper should hire a grammarian. 


 

Our Latest Ethnic Cleansing

Donald Trump's first attempts at ethnic cleansing were absurd, almost comical. I'm not sure that his many years of claiming President Obama was an impostor from another country counts as ethnic cleansing. It was moronic, but no one with her own brain bought into it. It was stupid, like a sit com farce. Then Trump went after Latinos, calling them rapists and so on, committing political suicide. Latinos are part of the deep fabric of America, a large and potent ethnicity capable of defending themselves. Attacking Latinos is so absurd you marvel at it the way you marvel at The Three Stooges. But at Trump's news conference today, he fielded questions from some paranoid asking him to ethnically cleanse Muslims (and their imaginary military training camps) from the United States. Trump's response was that he'd be looking into it. Muslims in America are a tiny vulnerable minority without political clout. Now we have entered KKK territory.

And yesterday we saw a scholarly 14-year-old boy, Ahmed Mohamed, arrested because he brought a clock he'd made to school to show to his teachers. No one in his school did the right thing.  The police covered their butts by charging the boy, who wants to study engineering, with making a fake bomb, then dropped the charge.

It's time to return Trump to the Real Estate turkey cages where gobblers belong.

I Blame Mr. Nobody

This morning I turned on my TV and caught the end of an interview with a Republican senator. He said, and I quote exactly, "I don't blame anyone. I blame Obama." (This is the unconscious racism Mark Twain mocked in HUCKLEBERRY FINN.)

also on Facebook 

Who the Hell Is Ben Carson?

A year ago I had never heard of Ben Carson, now running second for the Republican nomination for President. About six months ago I learned that he had been a successful surgeon, which led me to assume that exceptional eye-hand dexterity is what we are looking for in political leaders.  Maybe the Democrats should nominate Stephen Curry when he gets old enough. 

But I was misled. Ben Carson is not a doctor who came out of nowhere. He has long been well-known, just not in mainstream circles.  Carson has spent 20 years giving balmy talks to America's evangelical nutters. He had a head start that people like me knew nothing about. This is a huge country, and much of it is not covered by big media.

The End-Of-Life Option

Healdsburg is a small, charming town well down the road to becoming wholly owned by the swanky.  Our progressive state senator (Mike McGuire) and our progressive assembly member (Jim Wood) hail from Healdsburg, while ably representing much larger districts. I got to know them when they first ran for the Healdsburg city council, and they are why it makes sense to participate in our badly flawed political system. 

I read in the paper today that the California assembly has passed a right-to-die bill. It should get through the senate easily.  Then it will be up to Gov. Jerry Brown, who does the right thing once in a while.

I just want to thank Mike and Jim for this bill. I'm 80, which means I have watched people I love deeply go through long difficult painful and pointless struggles to die. 

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Shameless

Faced with a difficult political choice, the safest ways a politician can vote are (1) vote yes on a motion that loses and (2) vote no on a motion that passes. No matter what happens after that, it's not your fault. That's why Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin waited until the last minute to announce he opposed the Iran nuclear agreement.  He waited until his vote wasn't needed by his party. Now his party can't be too mad at him. Now he can go back to the Israel lobby and tell them he was with them all the way. The same applies to Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.  She waited until the last minute and then voted to reject reality, pleasing her backers. Manchin and Collins knew they were doing the wrong thing to placate awful people, but, what the heck, nothing matters as much as re-election. 

The Republicans had no counter-proposal to the Iran agreement. If they had prevailed, Iran would have been nuclear within a year. But they were utterly shameless. People who knew better--John Boehner and Mitch McConnell--endorsed big empty folly because they are utterly without shame.  They are contemptible moral degenerates who put themselves first and the nation last. They empower, on a daily basis, the evil lights shining in Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker.

The Cheneys

Today Dick Cheney met with his followers to denounce the nuclear agreement with Iran. "This is a man who's lost his mind," one Republican military analyst said afterwards. Yet he still has an audience. He's more paranoid than Richard Nixon. He's more paranoid than Oliver Stone on a crack pipe. Still, Cheney has a following of nutters. The number of these nutters grows smaller day by day, but some are rich and powerful. It seems safe to say, though, that this crackpot's night has begun to fall. His daughter Liz, his main disciple, remains faithful to his lunacy.

I'm not sure what's true about the political leader of Israel, who came here and got involved with our American politics on the losing side of the Iran agreement.  The tail set out to wag the dog. He wore out his welcome. Israelis need new voices to speak for their nation. 

Hillary on TV

Today presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was interviewed at length on television by Andrea Mitchell. Much of the interview consisted of questions about a fictional email-server scandal, dreamed up in right wing think tanks. This imaginary problem has been eagerly promoted by news people because they don't like Clinton any more than I do.  What struck my wife, though, was Hillary's answer to a simple question. Should we be taking in more Syrian refugees?

Andrea got the standard Hillary answer. It was a boring ten minute digression that covered the duties of the United Nations, the slow response to Syrian refugees by Asia, the need for discussion and unity,  and blah blah blah blah blah. Our probable next President never said whether we should be taking in more refugees.  Message discipline is her middle name. 

Why say anything? If you take a position, some voters might disagree. Just blah blah and smile with cool self-control. Nothing human there. (If Hillary wins the nomination, she'll get my vote, because that's the system we have in these parts. It will be her vs. a Republican flesh-eating virus.)
 

Killing Random Officers

In my work as a college teacher, I came into contact with maybe a hundred police officers over the years. One of two or them were nuts and very dangerous. The rest struck me as intelligent, careful, interesting and engaging people. Like me these individual human beings, who had spouses and children, had been born into the working class, and like me they had gone into public service because it offered solid jobs. The current epidemic of murdering police officers is beyond vile.

Today's chasm of mistrust between many police departments and minority communities is genuine and earned. An entirely new relationship needs to be worked out. There is something wrong with the structure of our nation when unarmed black men die in the streets and random police officers get shot in the back. We need a major overhaul.

The Origin of the Tea Party

I don't know how the Tea Party began, but in America it has always been there. We've had, from the start, a segment of our population steeped in ridiculous religious alarmism, in a loathing of job-stealing immigrants, in a sense that our culture or race will be rejected by newcomers, in a certainty that women are inferior, in a belief that new people are mental and moral brutes, in a sense that outsiders hate our liberties, in a hatred for our elected government. 

The political strength of the Tea Party has differed in different eras, but it's always present. It was there among our founding families, who thought those with dark skins were three-fifths of a real person. It was there when Irish women were told they were too apelike to work as servants (no Irish need apply).  From time to time the Tea Party would fully surface--as a political party--and win public office. In the 1850s the American Party or Know-Nothings won three governorships. That period deserves a close look.

In the 1850s our political parties were disintegrating. The voters had lost faith in them. Two new parties formed to fill the void: the Republican Party (based on abolitionism) and the American Party (based on nativism). The Republican Party became dominant. The American (Tea) Party, I guess, eventually found a home among the Southern Democrats, much as the current Tea Party is at home among our current Southern Republicans.

Today our political parties may be disintegrating. The voters have lost faith in them.  The Republican Party, as a leader said the other day, may be falling apart, creating a three party system: a Business Party, a Tea Party and the Democrats, unless the Democrats split, too. It's happened before. It might be happening again. That works for me.

Get Out of My Country

A few days back we saw on TV the Univision anchor, Jorge Ramos, being shoved out of a Trump news conference by a hired Trump goon who looked about seven feet tall.  There was a follow up that didn't see much air time, an unpaid large white fellow in the hallway who shouted at Ramos, "Get out of my country." Ramos, of course, is an American citizen.

Two days later I saw on TV a sheriff who wanted to deport not only undocumented workers but also American citizens he considered unworthy. He wasn't talking about babies. He was talking about you and me. I kind of understood how he felt. I wanted to deport him--but who would take him?

All right, we have strange people holding office or running for office and trying to deport citizens, both babies and adults. The divide in this country is growing more bitter. The deporters are unlikely to win, but they aren't harmless. The next step, white vigilantes attacking the helpless in the dead of night, has begun to surface. It's up to each of us to intervene.

Laughing While Black

This won't be news to local people, but maybe some on Facebook haven't heard of the incident. A day or two back, a women's book club, mostly black women, took a ride on the Napa Wine Train. The train rumbles slowly up and down the Napa Valley serving expensive wines to tourists. Anyway, apparently this group of women laughed too loudly, some genteel wine zombies complained, and about halfway through the journey, the book club was ejected from the train and met by local police, who did not arrest them. The women were bussed back to their starting point, and their money was refunded. 

The publicity has been negative, so the Wine Train has apologised several times. I find--and I think the book club women found--the sort of 19th century racism the Wine Train zombies exhibited to be astonishing. Racism is supposed to be more subtle these days, based on special code words and ancient lifted eyebrows. 
    

Turner

Yesterday a friend drove up from Aptos and took Susan and me to the Turner exhibition at the de Young.  This was in honor of what would have been our friend's sister's birthday. We had lunch at the de Young. All three of us ordered gazpacho, but only Susan could get it down (hers and mine). My salmon salad was okay--all of the food had been fancied up with extra ingredients that provided just enough disappointment to make the meal mediocre. San Francisco cuisine at its worst.

The show was large and interesting. My favorite was "Burial at Sea," which was no doubt very popular. There were many small watercolors Turner had painted as samples to show wealthy patrons in case they wanted him to complete a similar oil. Even I could see that Turner took a big step toward the major art movements just ahead of him. What most impressed me, though, was a huge video screen, maybe 18 by 24 feet, that dominated the entrance. On it gray waves under a gray sky kept rolling toward my feet. It was like standing on the beach at Avenue C. You know how mesmerizing that is, just watching waves break over and over, never the same twice. I stood there for a long time.

The System

In the August 24 NEW YORKER, Lewis Menand wrote about Joan Didion and her insight into why media focus on sensational events. "It's not because the stories tell us who we are. It's because they don't.  They leave unexamined and untouched the class antagonisms and economic failures that are the underlying causes of socially destructive events. Personal stories feed the American illusion that the system is never the cause of anything."

This is Republican doctrine: each of us is solely responsible for whatever happens, and the carefully constructed system that helps to create us, our environment and Donald Trump remains invisible.
 

Donald Trump Speaks

Donald Trump speaks: "Let me tell you about the wall I'm going to build, because I am a builder. I build things. That's my job. Do you know the Great Wall of China?  That's a big wall, but it didn't keep out the Chinese. It wasn't tall enough. Now you can see that I'm a tall person, a big guy. That's just the way I am. Bill Clinton is tall--he is tall, really--but next to me,  he looks like a footstool. I don't take credit for that, but I'm tall and I'm going to build a wall that is really really really tall,  taller than any ladder. Let's say it's forty storeys high. I've built taller buildings. Easy. It will be a beautiful wall, and the Mexicans will love it. They're going to pay for it. I won't build an ugly wall. My name is going to be on it. It will be gorgeous. The Mexicans will love it, and they will thank me for building a wall that is thicker than Rick Perry's thinking process. I'll tell you the truth. I went, you know, to the Wharton School of Finance. It's not really a school. It's more like a college, and they taught the smartest people how to think and how to take an inheritance, say a hundred million, and turn it into a fortune.  Rick Perry attacked me, and he went from two percent in the polls to nothing. That's very weak. I didn't ask him to attack me. He has no percentage. I didn't know that was possible. He's running behind Dez Nutts in the polls. I'm twice as tall as Dez  Nutts. That's just something that happened, that some people are taller and smarter than others. The Chinese are smart people and. . . ."

JEB!

Donald Trump, leader of the Republican party, has pointed out that Jeb Bush and his campaign have no energy. Eugene Robinson has suggested a cure. As you may know, the logo for the Bush campaign is JEB!  Not enough exclamation marks. JEB !!!!! would rocket the colorless Bush, who has the lack of personal definition common to fat albino rabbits, back into contention. If that's not enough, Jeb's positions in foreign policy and foreign wars. borrowed from his younger brother, will likely induce a huge turnout among America's League of Contemporary Idiots.   

This Is Not Your Mother

Recently I came across a new group called Black Lives Matter. I saw a representative on TV who said that people like me are "liberal white supremacists."  Fair enough. I view every person on the planet as a racist, although some cope with it better than others. But I resent being called a liberal.

In my youth liberals supported war. It was an insult to be called a liberal. But the meanings of words change, and I realize now that the young woman meant well. She added that the opinions of old people like me who support Bernie Sanders, a socialist, mean nothing to her. Nothing. She is clearly the sort of independent person who can think for herself. 

Then I watched another representative of Black Lives Matter, a young man who wore a T-shirt on which was printed "This Is Not Your Mother's Civil Rights Movement." I know what you're thinking: How did this guy find out about my mother?  She died before he was born. He did seem a bit dismissive about women in general, but I'll bet that if he had gotten to know my mother better, he would have liked her. I did.

Gendering Civil Rights

Watching a well-educated spokesman for the Black Lives Matter movement on Melissa Harris-Perry's TV show, I noticed that he was wearing a T-shirt that read, "This Is Not Your Mother's Civil Rights Movement." The spokesman, in his talk, mentioned his pride in wearing the cap on his head backwards. He was rejecting the civil rights movement of the 1960s--which he saw as the soft womanly efforts of MLK and John Lewis--but taking fierce pride in the retro male headgear of the 1980s. Imagine thinking that wearing your cap backwards is still a statement in 2015.  Testosterone abounded. He dimly assigned gender to the two civil rights movements. Melissa had no problem with that.

I can say this out loud because I'm so damned old. 

The basic issue is white privilege and structural racism. When that problem comes to our attention, male privilege and structural paternalism count for nothing at all, as Anita Hill once found out.

In California if you gather together everyone held back by structural racism (the Latinos, the African-Americans, the Filipinos, the Japanese and Chinese, the Pomo Indians and so on), you have a majority. The Black Lives Matter movement, though, rejects with open scorn the idea of including brown ethnic groups in their demand for black justice. They call their natural allies, the political left, "liberal white supremacists." They are going it alone. They will grow smaller and even purer. They aren't after Marco Rubio or Hillary Clinton. They attack Bernie Sanders, a socialist invested in supporting the entire working class. That's safe in America. What could be safer? There's little that pleases the swanky class more than seeing the Left split up into small groups and go at one another in a quest for purity. 

 

The Clown Car

Watching the first Republican debates was freaking amazing. I can't imagine how such a collection of bad people gets put together in one hall.

You have some dopes like Rick Perry. Several narcissists are pushing along, including Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee. Sociopaths like Snot Walker,  Ted Cruz from Canada, Carlie Fiorina and Chris Christie elbow for room. Rand Paul offers a kind of teenager's dimwitted ideology. In place of Bush and Rubio we see empty suits. Gov. Kasich of Ohio attempts to be human, and, finally, there is a surgeon who doesn't know who the cabinet officers are. You'll find a much better assortment of people working at a Safeway or teaching at a high school. It's incredible, really.

The males tried to seem macho, but not one of them objected when Donald Trump spewed his coarse attack on Ms. Kelly.  They remained silent, waiting for the polling. No balls at all. Do you think Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter would have stood there in cowed timidity?

Snott Walker, Android

Gov.  Snott Walker (of some state) isn't sure that President Obama is a Christian. He's never had a chance to discuss the matter with Obama, so Walker is left up in the air.  Some people call themselves Jews or Muslims, and Walker takes most of them at their word, but when the President says he's Christian, he might be lying.

Gov. Walker himself may be an android. He calls himself human, but I've never had a chance to discuss the matter with him. I'm devoutly human myself, and I can't be sure about Snott. He probably is human, as he claims, but he seems to act mechanically.

Why The American Revolution Failed

 The American revolution against Great Britain didn't fail, but it should have. There was a good reason it had to fail.

As you no doubt recall, North and South America were held as colonies by European masters.  In 1776 no colony had revolted, because a successful revolt was impossible. You know why, of course. All of the world's major gun makers and black powder plants were in Europe and Great Britain. It was an insightful European policy not to arm the colonies. They sold the colonies a few guns and a little black powder but not enough to matter.

When Massachusetts grew restive, the first move the British made was to march on Lexington and Concord to collect the guns in the armories. That went badly.

The Americans revolted and succeeded because the French King gave us hundreds of thousands of free muskets etc. The Americans had no money. His government went broke helping us and that brought on the French Revolution.

Once the United States formed, it became a major gun and ammo maker. Our capitalists supplied guns--at a steep price--to the revolutionaries in North and South America. We've been arms dealers ever since, according to a professor at Berkeley.

Why African-Americans and Latinos Can't Vote

During the hundred years of Jim Crow, people of color were blocked from voting in a hundred different ways. From time to time leaders like President Grant would attempt to enfranchise non-whites by passing laws and amendments. For racist reasons, the laws and amendments ended up warped, ignored, circumvented or blocked in many places.

Something similar is going on today. Republican voter suppression and gerrymandering looks like racism, and no doubt that's the case in some instances, but most Republicans are not blocking black or brown voters because of their skin color. Most Republicans are not particularly racist. The Republican goal is to suppress Democrats. We--and our courts--ought to face that. It's an attack on democracy itself.

The Ballad of Oney Judge

Everyone liked Martha Washington, even Abigail Adams. Martha was kind, and she was kind to the more than one hundred human slaves she held in trust for the descendants of her first marriage. Oney Judge was her main maidservant and decidely Martha's favorite enslaved individual. You can imagine Oney's shock when Martha decided to give her as a wedding present to Martha's granddaughter, Eliza Custis, who was not a nice person to work for. Oney packed her clothes and slipped away, headed north. The Washingtons regarded this flight as an act of disloyalty, which was unforgivable.

If Oney had been one of George Washington's slaves, he might not have tried hard to recapture her. George owned many slaves, more than were useful in running his tobacco farms etc.  That was bad for his bottom line, and George was a bottom line guy. He actually wanted to get rid of some slaves, but he did not like to break up families, so he  couldn't sell them. George was also aware that slavery did not make sense in a nation devoted to liberty. He planned to free his slaves in his will (and did so). But Oney was not his disloyal slave. In a sense he had had her on loan. If he didn't recover her, he would owe the Custis estate her value, a lot of money. And he was a bottom line guy. 

Oney made it to New Hampshire, where she married and settled down, but Washington's contacts found her. Plans were laid to seize her and return her to slavery, but with the help of some decent people, Oney managed to flee in time and spent the rest of her life hiding, I guess. Washington never gave up. 

According to federal law, Washington had every right to demand the return of his wife's property. Some of the northern states, though, insisted that they reserved the right under the Constitution to defy federal law. That was before the Civil War, and if there was one thing the South detested more than abolitionists like Benjamin Franklyn, it was the satanic New England theory called states rights.
 

Hamilton's Corollary

If you teach at a college, one thing you notice is that the economics professors aren't rich. That's because they don't understand how the economy works or what will happen next.

This should not lead me to dismiss all economists. Adam Smith, the first capitalist economist, warned us that capitalism better be well regulated or greed would destroy the world. We should have listened to him.

Alexander Hamilton added a corollary important to democracies. If you let people vote, they will ask for food to sustain their lives. The government will borrow money to pay for food, going into debt. Chances are that it will never be able to repay the debt, but that won't matter, Hamilton realized, as long as the voters and the rest of the world don't notice. In short, it doesn't matter if you can repay the debt as long as people believe--mistakenly--that you will eventually pay it off. As long as people have faith in you, you can continue to borrow new money. And that is how government debt works--I'm  suggesting Germany and Greece read Alexander Hamilton.

Marco Rubio's Dog Whistle

When Donald T. Rump claimed that Barack Obama was not an American citizen, he was blowing a dog whistle, not directly calling the President an N-word in a way that every fool could hear but doing it indirectly in a way that racists could figure out and enjoy. He's doing something similar now to millions of undocumented Mexican workers in the United States, calling them rapists and so forth.

T. Rump is a loser, a mean clown from the world of dubious entertainments, but Sen. Marco Rubio may end up squatting someplace on the Republican national ticket. His recent comments that President Obama has "no class" are his racist dog whistles. As an observation "no class" is as absurd as T. Rump's claim that Obama is not American. It serves the same purpose--it's a silent N-word sent out to win support from right-wing Republican racist populists.

In general the history of Latin countries is less racist than the history of the United States.  Mexico freed its slaves about 35 years before we did. Los Angeles was founded, in large part, by mulato families like the Picos. But the Latino countries founded by Spain began with a Spanish caste system in which black people were at the bottom as slaves. Social prejudices that work against black people linger and can still be used by political manipulators in Florida to their own advantage. 

Toad in the Hole

I know little about English cooking or toad in the hole, which is sometimes sausages in Yorkshire pudding.  My cousin Dan introduced Susan and me to a cafe called Toad in the Hole in Railroad Square in Santa Rosa. The address is 116 Fifth St.  Anyway, I ate a pasty, a kind of meat pie, with a lot of pleasure. You can buy Irish beer, Dry Creek wines, etc. The phone is 707 544 8623 if you have questions. It's informal, a kind of pub, not expensive, a good place to go watch a soccer match on TV.  We intend to return.

A Critique of the Iran Deal

The Republicon Party, before reading the document, has developed a critique of the current Iran nuclear power agreement that deserves our close attention. What Republicons are telling us is that they want a better deal, and a new deal might be better. There's no denying that. A better deal would be an improvement on a deal that is less than better. The better deal would be, in at least some areas, superior. The logic of this argument in favor of an improved deal is unassailable. The deal we have today with Russia, China, Germany, France, Great Britain and Iran could be revised, refined and beautified. The benefits of an enhanced and polished deal are obvious. So we should reject the current deal and also reject President Obama who, as Sen. Marco Rubio pointed out yesterday, has "no class."

Rick Perry

Lizz Winstead, one of the founders of The Daily Show, said on TV last night that Rick Perry's new glasses are half empty.

The Worst Nation Ever

About 50 years ago it occurred to me that all large dominant nations tended to behave the same way, whether they were Hittites, Rome, China, Great Britain or Russia. That is, they bullied smaller countries, advanced their own interests, tortured prisoners, spied on weaker states, lied to themselves, etc. Each of these empires considered itself exceptional, unique in history. Americans think the USA is exceptional. The Right considers us exceptionally good and the Left, exceptionally bad. That's American exceptionalism--we are probably average as empires go.

Jim Crow and Press Democrat

Last Wednesday the Press Democrat, our county newspaper, printed a comment by its editorial board that defended the naming of two California schools for Gen. Robert E. Lee. They argued that Lee had "opposed the Civil War and rejected slavery but agreed to lead the Confederate army primarily out of devotion to his beloved Virginia." None of that is true, as any current historian would tell you. The Press Democrat, often a kind of middling centrist progressive paper, just repeated the Jim Crow history that was taught in our schools for about 100 years after the South lost the war but won the peace.

To start with, Lee never led the Confederate army. He commanded the Army of Northern Virginia, a subtle way of opposing the Civil War. Lee supported slavery, which he considered the will of God. He did believe that in the future God might change his mind. Lee was the sort of slave master who had insolent slaves whipped, including at least one black woman. When Lee's overseer refused to whip the woman, Lee sent for a public official who gave her 20 lashes. Lee was a traitor who was glorified by the South as a symbol of Confederate gentility after he'd gotten most of his soldiers killed and then surrendered and went home weeping. Naming public buildings for Lee insults the troops, white and black, who died fighting the last remaining slave nation in Western Civilization. 

What on earth went wrong at the Press Democrat? 

Complicity and Diction

It's worth looking at the assertion that every white American is "complicit" with racism. Being complicit calls for a deliberate choice. Being complicit is choosing to be involved in an illegal or immoral act, especially with others. If you tell the white girls in the fifth grade that they are complicit with racism, you are telling them that they all have made deliberate choices to be racists. That's probably not what you intend to claim.

Down Memory Lane: American Pie

This is a clip that puts together the song "American Pie" with the pictures and film clips that explain the references.

http://youtu.be/VhX3b1h7GQw

 

The Slaves of Robert E. Lee

There is a movement in California to remove the name of Robert E. Lee from several public buildings. Lee has defenders, of course, who support Lee with imaginary facts culled from misinformation they've been taught about the Civil War. One of their claims is that Lee freed his slaves. 

The truth is that Lee was wishy-washy about the institution of slavery, which he believed had been authorized by God. In time, Lee held, God would free the slaves but on his own schedule.

The slaves Lee freed were not his own. He had inherited them from his father-in-law, a better man than Lee. A descendant of Martha Washington's family, the father-in-law stated in his will that his slaves were to be freed over a five-year period. George Washington had done something similar in his will. The five year period gave the enslaved human beings time to learn trades and make plans.

Lee did, slowly, free the slaves as ordered, but apparently some of them grew impatient and were failing to follow orders with alacrity during the five years. Finding them insolent, Lee ordered three of them (two men and one woman) whipped. After the Civil War, five or six people who had been present (or whipped) wrote about the incident. Lee's overseer gave 50 lashes to each of the men but refused to whip the woman. Lee sent for county official who gave the woman twenty stripes as Lee supervised.

We should keep in mind that Lee got a lot of his own men killed in mindless charges against fortified American positions. Statistics show that it was more dangerous to be a private in Lee's army than in Grant's army. Lee was defeated in battle by Gen. Meade, a sound but second-rate leader, and then was beaten like a drum by Grant, an innovative military genius. Lee was a traitor to the United States, which had educated him at no cost to himself and then employed him until 1860. It makes no more sense to name state buildings for Lee than for Benedict Arnold or Braxton Bragg. 
    

The White Latinos

Not too long ago we learned that in Hawaii citizens of Asian descent outnumber white-skinned folks. New Mexico has a Latino plurality (Latinos are the largest group but not a majority). This week demographers informed us that Latinos outnumber whites in California. They reached that conclusion by counting white Latinos with Spanish names as Latinos and not counting them as whites. That's a little weird. But racial categories are flawed at their base.

Dividing people by the color of their skin is like dividing people into groups based on the shapes of their little toes. We are one species.

In Mexico about 5% of the population has a genetic background that is entirely European. Of course not all California Latinos came from Mexico.  Some have come from Argentina, where roughly 85% of the Latino population is of European descent.  Some immigrants have come from Spain.

Many Latinos from Argentina have Italian names. Maybe they weren't counted. 

In other  words, demographers have made a deliberate category mistake. They have contrasted people with Latino names, many of whom are genetically European or part-European, with people who are also genetically European or part-European but do not speak fluent Spanish.  Heck, I have known Latinos who don't speak Spanish but have Latino last names, which seems to be what matters to demographers. If I changed my name to Jaime Gonzales, I would be counted as Latino.

Why did demographers do this?

In assigning motives to people I don't know, I'd do well to be positive. I don't believe that demographers make their pronouncements in an attempt to encourage racism or Donald Trumpery.  By saying that Latinos outnumber whites, demographers are probably hoping to reinforce the respect Latinos deserve. I'm of Irish descent and Peruvians invented the potato. You know where I stand.

 

Fort Slavery, CA

Yesterday Susan and I returned from a visit with friends in Fort Bragg, about ten miles north of Mendocino. I had commented to our friends on the absurdity of naming a California town for Braxton Bragg.  Bragg was a famous traitor,  a famously vile personality, a famously failed Confederate general and the owner of 105 enslaved human beings he worked like robots on his plantation. 

Today I opened my newspaper to see a headline stating that a state senator has authored a bill that would strip the names of civil war traitors from state public property. Unfortunately it will leave the names of political entities like towns untouched.

Fort Bragg was founded and named before the Civil War. Bragg had been a minor hero of the Mexican War, in which the future generals of the Civil War took California from Mexico at gun point. President Polk wanted good ports on the Pacific. In the later Civil War, California supported the Union, but that support came mostly from the southern end of the state, where many Latinos, including the last Mexican governor, Pio Pico, were partly black.  Pico managed  Lincoln's re-election campaign in the state. The northern half of California housed a great many traitors, and their descendants, many of them meth heads, are likely to cling to the name of the nasty-tempered slave-owner known for fruitless head-on charges into fortified American positions. Innovative military leaders like General Grant were grimly pleased to hear that on the field of battle their opponent would be Bragg. Victory was at hand.

My suggestion is that Fort Bragg be renamed Fort Arnold. That's a compromise. Benedict Arnold fought half the Revolutionary War on our side and half for the British. He wasn't all bad.  

If Taylor Swift Were Shakespeare

 Eric Didriksen, not someone I know, has a web site called Pop Sonnets (I think)  on which pop lyrics get translated into Shakespearean terms. This illustrates that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Consider:

My reputation’s sown with rumors’ threads:
it’s said that I carouse, am void of wit,
and have amassed more beaus than Hydra’s heads
yet cannot make a single one commit.

For just as bakers must their loaves create
and thespians put on their fictive acts,
the ones who live in scorn shall always hate
I’ll from my shoulders shake their vile attacks.

(shake it off)

The Supremes

Here's a thought on the Supremes, not the ones who sang "Stop! In the Name of Love" but the ones who form our highest court. Most Americans seem to think that the Court has the final say on what is constitutional. That belief springs from civics classes taught in high schools. 

The Founding Fathers, in the belief that power corrupts, divided  the power to govern among the President, the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court. In effect they set up a permanent but shifting four-way tug-of-war. All four entities keep trying to gather more power, and all four interpret the Constitution. When the Affordable Care Act was passed by the House and Senate and signed by the President, all three were claiming that the act was constitutional. Millions of people gained health insurance. By the time the act reached the Supreme Court, the justices had only one workable choice, which was to go along no matter what they might believe. Events had put the interpretations of the other branches of the government in charge. To rule against the ACA might have crashed the country and its economy, and that would have destroyed the Court. First, the Court protects itself. Something similar happened in the Court's vindication of gay marriage. A situation where a same-sex couple was married in the city but not in the desert was ultimately unsupportable. It was nuts. The nation couldn't work that way. The Court had to make marriage rights legally universal. 

Decisions of 6-3 and 5-4 are carefully put together to give the loonier justices a chance to posture in front of their political friends. My guess is that only three justices are genuinely enslaved by weird metaphysical passions. Look at the most radical-right court we've seen in 80 years, and then look at how many times they've carefully carved off chunks of their own noses. They had no reasonable choice. 

A Transitional President

For the last six years, as friends of mine complained that President Obama has been ineffective and a centrist, I've been responding that these are the good old days. That is, we will look back at Obama the way some look back on FDR or I look back at the 1960s.

Obama has been a transitional President, helping to mold massive shifts in our national reality. We recovered from a Great Recession. Health care for everyone has been established as a human right. Gays have achieved something close to full rights. We elected an African-American President twice. We pulled our military back from massive vigilante invasions. Latinos have stepped forward. We no longer have to pretend that Robert E. Lee was a nice old dude who treated his slaves well and fought brilliant campaigns he inexplicably lost. Lee's flag is descending.
 
In our history we've had only a handful of good Presidents. In this lifetime we may not see the like of Obama for some time.

The End of Gay Marriage

Just when you think the nation is governed by greedy damned fools elected by lesser apes, the Supreme Court makes a series of pragmatic and sensible decisions. 

The court saved health insurance and made all marriages legal. Some right-wing governors in the South, responding to terrorist hate crimes against African-Americans, start hauling down the KKK's stars-and-bars flag. If it weren't for the drought, I might cancel my move to Canada (just kidding).

There is no such thing as gay marriage now, just marriage.  

Plumbing the Depths of Ignorance

Some of the controversy about the KKK / battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is based on god knows what. In a nearby town in my liberal county, a young fellow, saying he is nonpartisan, has raised the KKK flag to demonstrate his rights under the First Amendment.  From what I can tell, this man is not a racist or white supremacist. He's a Civil War reenactor who wears the Union (or American) uniform. I'm uninformed, but I'm guessing that the reenactment movement teaches that both sides of the Civil War, no matter how evil their cause, were equally admirable. General Grant did not agree. He thought that the South fought extremely well but for the worst cause possible.

Our local flag raiser seems to be too unschooled to have read that the battle flag was not the flag of the Confederate States. He's too out of touch with facts to understand that the KKK adopted the Virginia battle flag in the last century and made it popular. He doesn't seem to grasp how a KKK flag or a Nazi flag might offend people. Of course the First Amendment gives him the right to fly on private property his own choice of flag, no matter how foolish. (I'm glad he doesn't live across the street from me.)

The Races of Mexico

This is a brief history of races in Mexico. I'm no expert, of course, but I don't let that stop me. 

Mexico was first populated by tribes of Native Americans (immigrants from Asia).  The Spanish arrived and brought African slaves with them. The Spanish had an elaborate legal racial caste system. If a Spaniard married an African, the children would be mulatos, who had a higher legal status than blacks but lower than whites. If a Spaniard married an Aztec, the children would be mestizos, who had a higher status than mulatos but lower than the Caucasians.  If a mulato married a mestizo, then etc., etc. After Mexico became an independent country, the citizens junked the Spanish caste system and officially thought of themselves as a nation of mestizos.  Private prejudices continued. Today roughly 5% of all Mexicans are of purely European descent. The Vallejo family of Northern California were of Spanish descent, for example.

I used to wonder how just about any hapless American sailor in 1840 who deserted his ship in San Diego would end up marrying the daughter of the richest Mexican rancher in the area. Those sailors had blue eyes and blond hair.  They sunburned easily. The old Spanish prejudices still worked in memory. If you could arrange to get paler grandsons. . . . 

As you might guess, when the Spanish conquered California, the soldiers and settlers were mostly mestizos and mulatos. The hoity toity stayed in the comfortable ruling metropolis, Mexico City. Los Angeles was settled by Latinos who were part-black. The most famous of them was Pio Pico. the last governor of Mexican California. Without leaving town he became the citizen of three different nations: Spain, Mexico and the USA. As governor Pico had dismantled the mission system, leaving the churches to perform their religious rites but freeing the Indians and redistributing the vast church ranches. Pico became quite rich and famous in his third nation, until he was cheated out of all he owned.  He lived well into the age of photography. I don't think people said this out loud, but by 1860 American standards he was black. That may have been one reason he served as Abraham Lincoln's campaign manager in California. 

Who Owns the Guns

In a given year, roughly 100,000 Americans are killed or wounded by guns.

Only one American in five owns a gun, but each owns an average or four or five guns. 

If only one in five Americans owns a gun, why is the gun lobby so powerful?

Horrifying

This morning the First Lady commented that the racist murders committed by nutter in South Carolina were particularly horrifying because they happened in a church.  Why "particularly horrifying"? Mrs. Obama didn't say, but what makes the church massacre particularly vile is a combination of white supremacy (nurtured by some Republican leaders) and God's inexplicable failure to protect hopeful houses of worship. Churches are frequently soft targets of home-grown terrorists and, for that matter, of hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. It's as if God could not care less.

Fox News, a grinning tick that sucks blood from the edges of white supremacy, would have us believe the South Carolina massacre was an attack on religion, but the killer has made it clear that he was after African-Americans, not Christians. 

Donald's Essence

Of  Donald Trump, Hadley Freeman wrote in THE GUARDIAN: "The truth is, he is the essence of the Republicans boiled down into the figure of a bullfrog topped with a Weetabix."

(Weetabix is British for shredded wheat.)

A Context for Rachel Dolezal

The media discussion of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who passed and became African-American, seems largely to have overlooked the context of what she did. 

The missing context is the history of passing in the United States, which goes back several hundred years. Our definitions of race are, as you know, shifting and arbitrary. The definitions are largely fictions. In our history many thousands of women have passed from the black race to white race and--this is the part that seems almost unknown--from the white race to the black race. Rachel Dolezal is one among many.  We don't know exactly how many have passed because we don't look at this phenomenon or count the people involved.

Every woman who changed races constructed a false identity and became, in a sense, a liar. This made them uncomfortable and led them to look for justifications or rationales for their claims. For example, white women who married black men used to cut the arms of their husbands and drink their blood. Then they could claim "black blood." (By claiming they were black, these women could avoid the problems that assaulted biracial couples.)  Rachel Dolezal, raised in a different time, has claimed a kind of existential blackness, an interior quality. She believes she was, in modern terms, born black in a white body. I suspect that she also believes she was born into a family that would betray her.

Black Like Me

About  56 years ago, a southern white man named John Howard Griffin took pills to turn his skin dark. For some time he lived as a black man and then wrote a book about his experiences called BLACK LIKE ME. I read it at the time. In my memory, at least, no one criticized him or called him deceptive.

This week the mother and father of a white woman in Spokane outed their daughter, Rachel Dolezal, a white woman passing as an African-American, who had become a leader and spokesperson for the NAACP.  Why the parents exposed their own daughter is unclear. The behavior of the daughter has become a huge topic in the media. Generally speaking, the reactions to Dolezal have been negative. Many issues have been raised. 

1. Dolezal has been accused of misrepresenting herself and lying. A woman who passes for black or white is lying by definition. The question raised here is one of existential authenticity. 

2.  The NAACP is backing Dolezal on the grounds that the organization has always been open to people of all races.

3.  Most authorities on race will tell you that race is a social creation. We define the races any way we like, arbitrarily,  but in nature the human race is one species. Dolezal's claim challenges a changing and arbitrary definition of race; it does not challenge biology.

4. Some on the left believe that people should be free to be whatever is genuinely themselves. Bruce Jenner took medicine and had surgery to give himself breasts (keeping his penis). Many who consider Dolezal a fake and mentally disturbed praise Jenner as a brave transgender woman who has become her true inner self. The argument is that Jenner was born to be transgender. Mother Nature required Jenner to undergo surgery. Dolezal was born white and darkened her skin and is a nut and a fake.

5. The question of who is legitimately black has been raised by those who believe that blackness is matter of experience. That is, all African-Americans have the same experience of racism from birth, and Dolezal has only experienced this as an adult. But is it true that all black people have the same experiences or are some blacker than others?

6. Dolezal could pass back into the white community, not a possibility for most (but not all) African-Americans. This makes her different from most but not all black people.

7.  Terry Southern, back in the 1960s, wrote a story about a white man who loved jazz and hung out all the time with black musicians in Paris, until they kicked him out on the grounds that he was "too hip." Has Dolezal become too hip?

Intolerance

 As you may have noticed, the North Carolina state senate and house of delegates, largely composed of reptilian dodos, recently overrode their own Republican governor's veto and passed a bill allowing public officials to stop performing weddings to which they had "any sincerely held religious objection."  This was a dim-witted attempt to block or stigmatize same-sex marriages. The legislative argument was that it is bigoted to limit a public official's religious bigotry.

Never mind that a bigoted public official is paid to serve every citizen and sworn to uphold the Constitution. In return he or she feeds copiously from the public trough. Now, in North Carolina, if it is his religious conviction that people with dark skin should not marry people with lighter skin or that Jews should not marry Gentiles, he can send couples away, while waving the American flag.

Today's Police Video

Today's police video shows a frantic police sergeant charging this way and that into some kind of fracas at a fancy pool party, then drawing his gun on some teenagers. Other officers attempt to calm him down. He ends up throwing a 15-year-old African-American girl in a bikini face-first to the grass and kind of sitting on her as if she is a trophy he's won by doing good works. Something obvious finally occurred to me. Many of us have been talking about how the police have been militarized and so on, about how things have changed. But has policing changed? Maybe it's always been like this, only now people have cameras. Are black and Latino Americans surprised by these videos?

Here's a weird thought. The sergeant pulled his gun but did not kill any unarmed young black people. He had just enough self control not to shoot. In the society in which we live, that's a happy ending.  

I Am Rachel Maddow's Filler Writer

Hi, I am Rachel Maddow, and today Rick Perry did someone few expected. We have news from Rick Perry. We did not anticipate this, not on a Monday. Rick Perry, of all the people in Texas, has made news. He's said something of importance. The former governor, Rick Perry, made news today. Coming up next. More repetitive filler to follow. Watch this space.

How to Spot a Terrorist

In the May edition of HARPER'S, we learn that the city of Jackson, Florida, produced an instructional video on how to spot a terrorist. Viewers are told to beware of people who display "average or above average intelligence." Watch out for folks who seem to have made a "conspicuous adaptation to Western culture and values." You should suspect any turkey who "demonstrate religious behavior" such as "mumbling prayers."

I can buy a lot of that, especially the part about mumbling prayers. Okay, I might have been for mumbling when I was a young hot-head and more radical, but that was decades ago.  

More important, from the above criteria we can deduce the sort of people we ought to trust.  Americans can depend on the man or woman of below average intelligence, like the guys who made this video.  Put your faith in those who can't seem to adapt to our culture and values and don't pray. Or maybe the trusted dude can pray if he enunciates clearly. That part isn't clear.
 

The Unarmed Dead

Have you ever had the feeling that the police are killing unarmed Americans about once a week? The unarmed dead are in the news constantly, or so it seems. But does that reflect reality? Now the Washington Post has published a study of American police killings of totally unarmed citizens (people not even armed with toys, broomsticks or balloons), and the number of dead comes to about one a week. Oddly enough a disproportionate segment of these unarmed dead are African-Americans. So far the NRA has no program to get these people some guns.  
 

Two Inconvenient Theories

Recently a middle-period Picasso sold for $179,000,000, which raised the question: how much money is art worth? Adam Gopnik has proposed an interesting hypothesis. What art is worth depends on income disparity. The more really poor people you have and the more multi-billionaires, the more a Picasso will cost. 

Another theory is better established. That is the correlation between global warming (which causes climate change) and social instability.  This idea has been around for at least 15 years. For example, drought in Syria led to desperate farm families swarming into the cities and demanding help. The government attempted to suppress them, and the nation disintegrated. 

If I were a billionaire, I'd be putting my money into efforts to mitigate global warming. What the swanky class needs most is stability.  The slower change occurs, the more safely the hoity-toity can enjoy great wealth. When masses of people get hungry and thirsty, they rampage through the gated communities. (I doubt if Wall Street grasps this.)

The Politically Correct Right

Swanky people think of political correctness as a problem on the Left. Meanwhile, on the Right, folks are not allowed to say "Democratic Party." Instead they say, "Democrat Party" to demonstrate their correctness.  They wear American flag lapel buttons so no one will mistake them for Colombians.  In fact, although most Righties call themselves Christians, they worship the flag as a holy object that can never touch the ground. They consider the Bible holy, of course, but  how many keep in mind that "sooner shall a camel pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter Heaven."

America's Geniuses

When young I used to hear, quite often, that a genius was someone able to hold in her mind two contradictory ideas at once. The examples were many. Count all the Christians eager to go to Heaven but afraid to die. Or count the Republicans who fiercely maintain that Big Government is inherently error-prone, corrupt, tyrannical, stupid and "the problem," but they demand that Big Government administer the death penalty and tell us who can marry whom, while remaking Iraq. What reassures me today is the plenitude of geniuses right when we need them most.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

When I was in the army, the first sergeant to get my attention told me about an incident in Korea. In a forward area he had come across a private raping a Korean woman. The sergeant drew his .45 and ordered the private to get off the woman. The private refused, so the sergeant shot him in the head. I'm okay with that. The private had a choice. The sergeant had a choice.

I'm not okay with having the government ponder at length and then execute human beings. It's not because I care about Tsarnaev. He had a choice. I'm not a good enough person to care about a terrorist who committed murder. But why should we trust the bureaucratic system enough to sanction the death penalty? We understand that some innocent people get executed. What is worse, the government-sanctioned death penalty makes brutish official behavior almost respectable. 

We are used to stacked decks, of course. A jury in a case like this excludes any citizen who doesn't favor death. As Albert Camus might put it, that's absurd. In a democracy the jury pool should include us all.

Bow to the Oligarchy

President Obama was elected to work for everyone in the country from the 300 million ordinary people to the swanky few who constitute the dominant oligarchy.  I've backed him, but I have to admit that his economic advisers have mostly come from Wall Street and represented the interests of the intelligent super-rich. Like Bill Clinton, Obama ran for President opposed to free-trade agreements and then supported the agreements once he was elected. We can expect Hillary Clinton to do the same. That is how the system works.

Meanwhile we have a secure room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol where members of congress are allowed to read the nearly 1000 page Trans-Pacific Partnership draft agreement. No notes or copies can be taken. The treaty is top secret. No discussion so far. And no amendments to the agreement, which was negotiated by the oligarchy, right? We retain the right to bow and kiss the whip.

Shelter

On Tuesdays my brother, my cousin and I bicycle about 17 miles, some of them along a beautiful, tree-shaded greenway that follows Santa Rosa creek. That puts us cheek-by-jowl with homeless people, who also love the bubbling creek. We say hello and talk about safe topics.

In a fine op-ed piece in our local newspaper, Jason Tauches laid out why the homeless camp out along the semi-wild creek. Sonoma County provides enough public services to help about 20% of its 4,000 homeless.  The others often camp near the creek with a few friends. That's not legal. Every few days the police cite them, and we see the homeless moving to another partly hidden site. Or they go to trial and end up in jail for a few days. When they get out, their sleeping bags have vanished, their friends are hard to locate, and they need a tree to sleep under that evening. In short, our solution to homelessness is to drive these people from one grove of trees to another, confiscate their gear and jail them from time to time.

That solution is, needless to say, expensive. The cost of police time, court time, public defender time, jail time, etc., is roughly ten times what it would cost to house these humans as they do in Europe. But there's a catch. Providing shelter for the American homeless would not adequately punish them for their mental illnesses, bad luck, physical failings, low wages (some have jobs), etc. We pay ten times as much for a chance to sock it to them.

The Two Marys

We've been busy moving to Santa Rosa and downsizing, which verges on the impossible. I have been coming across lost items. When I was a child, I knew my great-grandmother, Mary Berry, which means I can remember my granddaughter's great-great-great grandmother. That seems odd.  I had always believed that Mary Berry came over from Ireland on the boat. But in my packing and sorting I came across a Xerox of a newspaper article on Mary Berry's death in Des Moines, and I realized I had conflated two Mary Berrys. The one who came over on the boat was the mother of the Mary Berry I had known. The original Mary had arrived here in 1865. The Mary my mother and father and I had believed was an Irish immigrant was actually the daughter of an immigrant, and all of our family history is now on tilt.
  

Andy Lopez and Freddie Grey

This is the tale of two district attorneys. In Baltimore the local state's attorney investigated the police homicide of a young black man arrested without cause. At the end of three weeks, she indicted the six officers involved. A year of so back, a terrified deputy sheriff near Santa Rosa shot a Latino child--shot him six or seven times--and killed him because the child was playing in a vacant lot with a toy gun. Our elected district attorney went into the usual long stall, hoping interest in the homicide would fade, and then eventually she ruled out an indictment. The scared deputy is back on patrol, so you may want to stay inside. And the strategy worked. The D. A. is doing fine, thank you, except maybe in the small hours of the morning.

Senseless Violence

The attorney general of Maryland, a walking buttcan, has described the riots in Baltimore as "senseless violence." Most people, black or white, agree with that, but we all understand what brought on the riots. They aren't senseless. 

How many times have we seen an African-American community, occupied by a militarized white police force, explode when the police kill a young black man (or woman or child) in a fit of, yes, violence? In these episodes, reminiscent of lynchings, the dead African-American is sometimes guilty of a minor crime like selling loose cigarettes or looking unhappily at an officer or playing in a city park while black. Next, young black people, dealing with a system that will not yield justice, burn down their own apartments and so forth.

These riots are a failed attempt to communicate. They aren't senseless, but they are futile. The leaders of the nation, the state, the city don't get it. For elected leaders, a riot is their opportunity to strut around demanding a return to the old passive order (called Jim Crow).   

Two Closely Connected Stories

In the first story, Edward Snowden, an American, leaks a zillion unread surveillance reports from our government's intelligence system. Leaking in public is against the law, but it proves that the government is watching each of us, reading our mail, listening to our phone conversations and so on. These days there is nothing Big Brother doesn't know about us. Nothing is private any more. And all of this is done in the name of national security. 

In the second story a postal worker, another American, decides he is going to fly a gyrocopter into Washington, D. C. and land it in the forbidden zone of the state capitol. Once there he intends to distribute protest letters to members of congress. This enterprise is against the law. Before taking off, the postal worker spends several days blogging about his plan and sends a letter to a newspaper, which publishes it. In the letter he describes what he intends to do. Next he vaults into his gyrocopter, whatever that is, and flies into the forbidden zone. His mission succeeds. The authorities are taken completely by surprise. The breach of security is astonishing. But can you blame anyone? I mean, who knew?