The Answer

Suppose someone tells you that the basketball star Lebron James owns two gigantic mansions in Los Angeles. He doesn't even play in California (so far). Why does he need two mansions? you ask.

My brother's answer: Lebron bought one 20-bedroom place, and his wife's relatives joined him there. So he bought a second mansion for himself.  And soon he will be buying a third.

John McCain owns seven mansions.

Treason

A few reasonable experts on TV are beginning to say that Trump is another Benedict Arnold. Putin’s got something on Trump. He’s playing Trump like a juice harp. Putin owns him.

That might be the case. The current Republican leadership has become morally bankrupted by its quest to retain power. If staying in power requires treason, so be it. They won’t save the country.

The Democratic leadership is ancient and feeble. If called on to confront treason, they may opt instead for longer afternoon naps.

Americans better get out in the streets on the 30th. 

Our One Hope

It’s more than 150 years since the Civil War ended. Lincoln and Grant were, at that point, determined that Black peoples’ votes would count. But we have a Supreme Court today in which a 5 to 4 majority is set on supporting the New Jim Crow and anti-Black gerrymandering. The Court also favors barring Muslims and Latinos, keeping America White and Christian. 

We can chalk the situation up to Nixon, who developed the Southern strategy for the party of Lincoln and Grant, corrupting it utterly until Trump is now its true example. Spanky has the backing of 90% of Republican voters. They like him because he is heartless, nasty and pointlessly vicious (which they call leadership), and because he flails about incompetently, refreshing the voters’ hate for diversity (except for Mexican food),

The alternative to outright, enforced bigotry is the Democratic Party, led by dated, compromised, national weaklings and servants of Wall Street. Deal-cutters. That’s our one hope in 2018. They have my vote. 

The Holocaust Style

If you haven't seen this yet . . . the controversial "I don't care" shirt that Melania Trump wore to visit Trump's orphans in Texas was made by a company called Zara. This stylish manufacturer is best known for having made and sold a fetching Holocaust victim's shirt, like the ones worn in Nazi death camps. The Zara version features a gold Jewish star on the chest, just like the originals, against background of stripes that, in truth, pleases the eyes in ways that the 1940s original can't match. 

This is a fact. 

I wonder how this product ended up on Melania. She is mostly a mannequin, I guess, and a walking ad for Botox, but I doubt if she chose a Holocaust shirt-maker knowingly. Probably the junk was pushed on her by one of the proto-fascists hanging around the White House these days who wanted to promote the products of a Trump-supportive manufacturer. That's my guess. 

Someplace

When young I studied analytical articles and thoughtful histories that explained why Germany, a cultured, modern nation, had produced the Holocaust. What had made the German people capable of such staggering cruelty? What had made Germans different from everyone else? Apparently, severe German toilet-training practises were to blame. (I’m not making this up.)

This morning, 60 years later, Americans were ripping infants from the arms of their mothers and shoving the children into wire cages, where they sob and tremble with fear. The mother gets deported. We keep the kid. Someplace. 

Nomads

For the first 90% of human history, we were roaming hunters and gatherers. Then we invented farms, villages, permanent homes, empires, ruling classes and so on. Anyone who remained nomadic no longer counted. 

When Europeans reached North America, they classified the Indians as nomads and took possession of the land, claiming it wasn’t properly owned and used.  Never mind that the Indians in many cases had farms and villages. 

Toward the end of World War II, progressives like FDR and Truman decided to support the movement of European Jews into Palestine. As Americans saw it, Palestinians were Arabs, and Arabs were nomads who would roam off into the desert and not mind if the Jews built cities. That did not work out—the Palestinians were not nomads and had already built cities—but what interests me here is the stigma on those who move around like tinkers or gypsies. Or get moved around, like the homeless in Sonoma County. They really don’t count. The homeless haven’t counted for ten thousand years. Along our state border, they especially don’t count. They aren’t even three-fifths of a person.

Principle IV

On a bicycle ride today, my cousin and I came across a group of people marching to protest the Trump government’s kidnapping of children at the Mexican border. This reminded me of Principle IV. We joined the march. 

After World War II, as the Allies prepared for the Nuremberg Trials, they agreed on the following principle: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to an order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

Taking a nursing baby away from its mother because she crossed a border or asked for asylum is illegal under international law.

People working at the border with Mexico are taking children by force from their parents, doing it because they were ordered to by Trump’s government. Those who grab babies are making a moral choice. They should—like the death-camp Nazis at Nuremberg—be charged and tried.

A Connection

I'm dog-sitting Rocky here on Level Three, a connected group of apartments, town houses, parks, skyscrapers, a movie theater and a comedy club in San Francisco's financial district. 

All this is twenty feet above the city streets. It extends  (with foot bridges) for many blocks. 

I'm thinking about the connections between dogs and people, which go back maybe 30,000 years. 

There is new evidence and new thinking about this connection, much of it tentative. DNA shows that all dogs descend from wolves (dogs and wolves are closer in DNA than some groups of humans are). That's not in doubt. If the connection to humans is 30,000 years old--maybe 20,000 years older than any other domestication--then the connection began when humans were Stone Age hunters, before there were villages. Apparently small families of humans connected with small families of wolves. A wolf pack is a family, structured much like a human family. Probably the two groups found they worked well together. Loyalties, alliances began to build. People learned to hunt like wolves and with wolves.

Now Rocky and I sit together, maybe 20 feet up, looking out at the Bay Bridge. Rocky is content to rest for a while, taking in the breeze. He's eaten well.

On Cursing the Coward

To Hell with the complaints about using bad language on Trump. Anyone who is still backing President Bonespurs cannot be reached on any level of discourse. Curse them. They don't belong in civil society. Outvote them in November. Shun them.

Bonespurs

President Bonespurs has, amidst his cruel and dangerous folly, accidentally advanced my knowledge in several areas. I now grasp that porn actresses are credible women, entitled to the respect every citizen deserves. I now have a better understanding of personality disorders, having watched a loony act out on television month after month. And I’ve had to give up my optimism about my own rationality and rationality in general. Nearly half the voters in our system cast ballots for a creepy near-lunatic. His approval rate, after nearly two years of stupid, puke-provoking behavior, is now 44%. 

We should admit that natural selection selected delusion. Delusion is what enriched and unites Americans (and divides us). We take our spears and march out of the cave to kill people who don’t respect an imaginary Father who lives in the sky. Or we think the President is our Great Father in Washington. In fact, he never met us and could not care less. We believe it matters if one more nation has a nuclear weapon. We fear that feeding children will make them dependent (make them Democrats) and so on and on. 

We run on emotion, and we always will, but we can try to understand our emotional base, and we can learn to use reason—a weak tool—sensibly. 

Bits of Democracy

There is, of course, no such thing as a “free market.” Markets are created, sustained and regulated by well-paid governments. And Adam Smith, the founder of economics, immediately argued that markets needed rules and regulations as checks on unbridled greed.

What we call a “free” market in our system is, as far as I can tell, a market with weak regulations. The result is a market that is crueler than many citizens can tolerate, driving them—for relief— toward authoritarians, including frauds like President Spanky Bonespurs.

With a republic and a well-regulated market, billionaires are absolutely safe and can do as they please. In a dictatorship, they live and die according to the whims of the Leader. Some billionaires recognize this and push to keep our usual oligarchical arrangement with its small bits of democracy. But other billionaires push toward an authoritarian system, which is not, finally, in their interest.

La Cucaracha

When one of the characters in the comic strip La  Cucaracha learned that the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations are persons, he tried to get a date with Victoria’s Secret.