Technology-Enabled Savagery

In The New Yorker  John Cassidy wrote about America:


"Despite a rising tide of gun violence and political extremism, it has repeatedly failed to adapt its institutions and its laws—particularly those relating to guns and the online spread of hate speech—to an age of technology-enabled savagery." Cassidy's point is that our country is malfunctioning.

I'll add this. We are now down to one political party, and  it is out of power.

Saps We Admire

There's a category of saps we admire. This, of course, is a topic that will annoy people. It certainly annoyed my wife. Or some might want to add to my short list.

The classic example, I suppose, is Paul Henreid in CASABLANCA. Ingrid Bergman flies off to the safety of London with this noodnik at the end of the film when she could have had Humphrey Bogart. She does this to bolster a dude important to the Czech resistance. What? you may ask. Does the overthrow of Hitler really depend on a Czech's girlfriend?  Or George Patton?  

Don't misunderstand. Bergman's inexplicable and terrible decision is what makes the film shockingly great.  Without it, what would be left would be good but ordinary.

We've all seen people do that kind of thing. "My god," we think, "that decision ruins three lives or more lives if there are children, and I've made a few bad choices myself."

Another example of a noodnik is Mr. Rogers. I saw film of him on the news today, brought back on TV by the massacre of Jews in his Pittsburgh neighborhood. He assured me that we live in a wonderful world. 



 Czech Resistance leader,

The Globalists

Trump and Kevin McCarthy have stepped forward as classic anti-Semites, denouncing billionaires George Soros, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. Soros has been accused of funding the group of Central Americans slowly walking toward our southern border to seek asylum. The right to ask for asylum is settled law. Soros has funded none of this.  But he is a rich Jew who supports liberal causes. Trump's base of Klansmen and Nazis and deranged potential killers get the anti-Semitic message. Unstable men will continue to act on it. Soros is a marked man.

No doubt Trump and McCarthy and other Republicans will be quick to say that some of their best friends--and even some children--are Jews. How can a dear friend of Bibi Netanyahu be an anti-Semite?

Two days after a bomb was sent to Soros' house, the National Republican Party ran an ad denouncing Soros. The Republican anti-Semitic campaign continues this morning. It will not stop.

Who your friends or relatives are doesn't define you. If you encourage anti-Semitism, if you pass laws banning Muslims, if you ignore the lethal targeting of Barack Obama, you are a bigot. If you denounce "globalists" we (and Nazis) understand that you mean Jews. This is not complicated.

The Jewish Vote

(I wrote this the day before the Pittsburgh massacre, the worst mass murder of Jews in USA history.)

My wife is a Jew, and who the Jews are matters to our family. I can hear Trump's cruel voice mincing on TV as I sit here. He's supported by the KKK and the American Nazis. We understand that our bloated President and Bibi work hand in hand. So where do America Jews stand on all this ?

About 71% voted for Hillary. Current polls show that in 2018, 74% of the Jews plan to support the Democrats.  They may be only 2% of our population, but their impact on elections matters.

Verdict First!

President Spank-My-Bottom has called for the death penalty for the Pittsburgh shooter. This is perfect ALICE IN WONDERLAND.  

Verdict first, trial second!

Death in Pittsburgh

Yesterday we saw the quick arrest of a Trump supporter who sent more than a dozen bombs to political leaders, the largest American assassination attempt since the murder of Abraham Lincoln.  Copycats were expected. This morning we saw an anti-Semite murdering people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the police gathered there to engage the terrorist. Three officers have been shot, many Jews dead, shooter in custody.

Conspiracies of hate are not new, but our current President, a mentally ill slob, has emboldened the KKK and American Nazis and the violent Right. What stands between us and them is the police. Many of us have a somewhat adversarial view of the police, and people of color fear law enforcement with good reason. But how quickly we turn to the cops when the need arises. Patrol officers run into gunfire because that's part of their job.

The Herd and William Morris

Near Monterey, in the old days, the cattle would gather into a herd on November 11th of each year to discuss how they'd like to be eaten. Some would argue for all-beef franks while others spoke for ground chuck or prime rib and so forth.  Then one year a longhorn named William Morris made his way to the stage and announced he had a shocking new idea. "I would like not be eaten," he said.

Morris was mooed off the stage. The boss bulls voted to eliminate the right of longhorns to speak at meetings. The bulls talked about the need for animals to be practical if they hoped to enjoy the feed lots, something Morris admitted he had not considered.  The debate restarted and sensible bovines soon compromised and reached a consensus: barbecue.

(also on Facebook)

Please Lie to Me

Someone has noticed that President Spanky's voters do understand that he lies seven times a day. Of course, they do. And they love it. 

Spanky's lying endears him to them.

I'm guessing that the Trump voter has a belief system built on denying reality. In this post-factual galaxy, white men have the right to grope women of every race, white people are smarter and more moral than people of color, old people are more worthy than young people, cruelty is kindness, feminism is toxic, your status is determined by a new car, Latinos are lazy and an imaginary wall will block inferior and criminal people from arriving in the States on boats and planes. 

Maintaining this weird belief system requires constant lying to yourself. A President who lies with authority, the most powerful white man in the world, who lies seven times a day, dominating the media, is a buttress that keeps the ceiling from falling on nutters. So nutters love him ten times as much as they did Reagan or Nixon, who settled for half measures. 

Gender and Sec

President Dribble-Cup Spanky, in his daily effort to harm voters and to stir up the most base among his base, is threatening to make it government policy that the words "sex" and "gender" mean the same thing (and it isn't "gender"). His political method is to make it federal policy that transgender people don't really exist and to pretend that the sexual and gender categories that actually exist are really fictions. 

My guess is that most Americans don't have a firm grip of the two key words and already tend to blur them together. I see the words misused daily. 

Sex is a name for the differences between the male or female of a species, distinguishing them by the reproductive organs and the behavior dependent on these famous organs. Note the word "behavior." The definition is beginning to blur.

When a word is vague or blurry, it can be a mistake to attempt to sharpen its definition. Vague words have their uses. 

Gender is a person's internal sense of all this. Gender identities are, in reality, many: but in Spanky's truncated world view, that of a five-year-old dimwit, there are only two genders, female and male or spanker and spankee. 

How all this will end no one knows. Languages apparently have minds of their own and develop out of my control. I resent that. So does the French Academy, which pretends to be in control of French.  

Spitting on Lindsey Graham

Senator Lindsey Graham complained recently that people are spitting on him. That's just wrong.  It aroused my compassion, certainly, but when I looked into the matter, no one near Graham had damp lips. He has presented no spitting evidence to date. He's been accused of lying. Also, why is he named "Lindsey"?

(This reminds me of Tucker Carlson's complaint that when he eats in a restaurant, other customers call out things like "Fuck you, Tucker," which ruins his meals of fried butterfly antennae. His response is to eat our of a can at home. Also, why is he named "Tucker"?) 

In my high school, we had  a potato-shaped vice-principal who walked the halls at every recess looking for potential truants,  shouting, "Clear the halls!" He had a broad torso and a tweed suit,  and some scholars would walk along close behind him and silently spit on the back of his coat. I'm just saying that certain lads developed certain skills.

I'd hate for anyone to think Lindsay Graham is a liar, so I am volunteering to spit in his face, thus proving his complaint well founded. Also, when he dies, I volunteer to pee on his grave. 

How to Fight

The Saudis have concluded their investigation and announced that Jamal Khashoggi entered their consulate in Turkey and started a fist fight with 14 security experts,  one of whom had a bone saw. As it turns out, my family has a history of fist fights that goes back more than one hundred years, and here are some maxims my family taught me that Khashoggi should have known.

1. Always throw the first punch. Many fights consist of one punch. 

2. Never punch a guy with a bone saw.

That must be why, when I look back on the more than ten fist fights that are part of our lore, including my last effort at 67, which must be the age record in my family, not one of us has been dismembered once the fight ended. 

It's common sense.

A Stunning Movie

Last week I stumbled across what might be the best movie made in Spain, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. I’ll guess that students of film know all about it and studied it and so on, but my circle has not heard of it. I won’t tell the story of the movie, but I suggest that you find a copy and view it.

The film is set in Fascist Spain in 1940 in a lonely village surrounded by empty fields. It’s about a family in which the the father is a poet and a beekeeper. The beehive is there to represent the dull decadence of a moribund society where individuals mean nothing and don’t connect and nothing changes. This is a simple, plain and gorgeous movie. Two little sisters see the weekly town movie, FRANKENSTEIN  and set off through empty fields to find the monster. In contrast to the beehive is the inner life of a six-year-old, played by Ana Torrent, whose dreams, hallucinations and creativity dominate a haunted landscape marked by forboding. 

Comment on Voting (revised)

Some friends have asked me to comment on voting, so I will. Do not take me seriously.

California has a jungle primary in which the top two candidates go on to the general election. Sometimes that results in two Democrats running against each other.

The big contest in California is for the senate seat, where two Democrats are on the ballot, incumbent Dianne Feinstein vs. State Senator Kevin de Leon. I voted for de Leon in the primary. He’s to the left of Feinstein. But de Leon has run a misleading and unscrupulous campaign, so I am switching to Feinstein. I’m fed up with political nonsense.

In candidate races where there is a Democrat and a Rapepublican, I will vote for the Democrat. (No third party candidate survived the primary.) In the races where two Democrats face each other, I will vote for Hernandez for  Lt. Governor because he is experienced. For State Senator I will vote for Mike McGuire, the incumbent. He’s a skilled, professional progressive I once knew. As usual I know nothing about any of the judges up for election.

I will vote for Jim Wood to return to the assembly because he is rational, a scientist and progressive enough, although I may disagree with him on some issues. 

When it comes to the propositions I look at who is for them and who is against. If the proposition is supported by The Richey Rich Taxpayers To Hell With The Poor Association, Hooray for Greed, I know what to do. If the proposition is supported by the nurses union, I’m inclined to agree. If I’m conflicted I vote no, on the grounds that the state legislators should decided the matter—that’s what we pay them to do. 

Prop 1: Yes.

Prop 2: Yes.

Prop 3:Yes.

Prop 4:  Yes

Prop 5: No

Prop 6: No

Prop 7: Yes

Prop 8: Yes

Prop 9: This was the one designed to divide the state into three parts, giving us six senators. It was removed from the ballot.

Prop 10: Yes

Prop 11: No

Prop 12: Yes

Why vote at all? That is a fair question. If you live in a state and county that is always won by the same party, your vote for or against that party will change nothing. I live in such a place, a Democratic county and state. When we retired my wife specified that we move to a place where Rapepublicans lose. My voting here has no practical value, but it says that I remain committed to developing a democracy sometime in the distant future. 

Please pay no attention to any of the above.

My Father-in-law and Frederick Douglass

My father-in-law told jokes about my kind (the Irish) and how they were drunken oafs and so on.  When we named one of our daughters Maggie, he objected, saying it was a servant's name. In nearly all ways he had sound working class, progressive politics, and this Irish thing was just a minor hitch. It didn't bother me, because I was raised to believe that there were only two kinds of people, the Irish and those who wished they were Irish.

The early women's suffrage and black suffrage movements, it seems, had the same hitch, and that's probably where my father-in-law got it.  They argued that it made no sense to allow drunken, ignorant Irish oafs to vote while denying suffrage to dignified men of color or good women. Douglass did hold that suffrage for men of color was more crucial than votes for women, because when women protested for the vote, they were seldom lynched or burned alive. 

Frederick Douglass made after- dinner jokes about the Irish, and this country has not produced a greater man than Douglass. 

Douglass embodied both of the main bodies of black political thought. He was a pragmatist who understood that people of color were a minority who need majority support. He worked with Lincoln and Grant. He also militantly advocated violence when (and only when) it would work (the Civil War, in which one of his sons fought). Douglass was Malcolm  X and King combined. Yet, like us, he was imperfect.

The World's Oldest Babysitter

A year ago a city wild fire swept into Santa Rosa, a fire driven by huge winds throwing sparks over the city and county. About 40 people died. The morning it started, my wife called me from San Francisco at about 6 AM and said that she smelled smoke. San Francisco is 60 miles to the south. So I got up in the dark and went outside and saw that the mountain east of us had turned red. 

We're in a huge apartment complex, but the only people we knew were a young couple from Italy with a small daughter. I was a little worried about them not knowing what to do, so I knocked on their door and told them what was happening. We all had to leave, but our place did not burn, just lost its electricity etc. 

Anyway, last night I was home alone. My wife was staying with a friend who is recovering from a hip replacement. The young Italian woman knocked on our door and told me that she had to go to a parent-teacher's conference, and her babysitter had canceled. She asked if I would sit with Sophia, her three-year-old. This came as a considerable surprise. Sophia does like me, for no good reason, and I said yes. But how strange. Here I was, an 83 year old, suddenly with a 3 year old to entertain for 90 minutes. We did fine. I found SpongeBob on the TV, and when Sophia said she wanted to draw, I came up with some printer paper and pens, and she did about ten portraits of her mother and several of her father. She found a collection of rubbery plastic bugs my wife has, so I gave her one bug and told her she could use it to scare her mother. Some music came on the TV; Sophia did some dancing. When her mother returned from the meeting, Sophia immediately began chasing her around with the fake bug and so on. Sophia is very lively and self-assured (and bilingual).

The Intolerant Left

My radio is a sap.

I heard on the radio recently that the Left demands tolerance but is itself intolerant of Nazis, racists, misogynists, homophobes and their supporters. What the Left should be doing, the radio told me, is respect differences and welcome with a smile the Nazis, racists, misogynists, homophobes and their supporters. How else, the radio asks, can the Left  ever win an election?

In short, the message is that when confronting evil, be polite. Anything less is gross and not expedient. Remember, if you insult a misogynist, he may not vote for you (if he figures out what you meant).

Lock Him Up

This is how President Spanky got rich, as a kind woman explained it to me.

Fred Trump, Spanky’s father, was enormously rich; his problem was how to pass hundreds of millions of dollars to each of his children without paying inheritance taxes, allegedly.

All the figures below I just made up to illustrate the trickery.

The family invented a shell company, which I will call SHELL. The job of SHELL was to purchase the items Fred Trump needed to run his real estate empire. Fred was a builder, so maybe he needed 100 stoves for 100 apartments. SHELL would buy the 100 stoves at $1,000 each. Then SHELL would sell them to Fred Trump for $100,000 each. The profit to SHELL was $99,000 per stove. This money would be divided among the owners of SHELL, the Trump children (including Donald). The children would then use the cash to buy into various safe investments that to this day feed them millions of dollars each week.

This tax fraud and investment plan was and remains the source of Spanky’s money. It explains how a balmy dope has remained rich while losing money on gambling casinos, which is nearly impossible to do, they tell me.  

Beers for Brett

Today the Republicans will be swearing in The Boofer for the second time in four days as a Supreme Court Justice. I guess the first time didn't take. Or maybe the Republicans love rubbing this degenerate in the faces of America's women. It felt so good the first time, and it solidifies the Mitch McConnell vote. All that they need now is to slip something into beer that will render white women unconscious and compliant and keep the snappy old power-freaks in charge.  

The No Damn Good, 2

These are strange days, and it's not because we have mentally impaired leadership. That's something we're used to: Wilson was incapacitated, Nixon was paranoid. Reagan was senile, W. was out to lunch. What is different is a new political party and many voters willing to destroy our national institutions in order to (1) stay in power or (2) regain control of women's reproductive capacity.

A friend wrote: If I could have lunch with anyone living or dead, I'd choose Lindsay Graham, dead.

It isn't Boofer Kavanaugh who makes me sick. I feel sick.  It's the senators and voters who support Boofer. It's the ugliness of old white men and their wives, defending white women's privileges. The ugliness of Hatch and McConnell and Kennedy and Graham, who push the darkest aspects of human nature into the foreground. The irony is that as progressives we have maintained a focus on the bright side of human nature, while genuine conservatives have always warned us that people are no damn good. And now people calling themselves conservatives (actually weird, far-right radicals) are defending humanity at its worst and promoting the no damn good to high office. What could be more absurd than calling Mexicans racist while transforming a known preppy rapist into a Supreme Court judge?

Useless Thoughts

Useless thoughts:

We owe Boofer Kavanaugh this much fairness, that we apply to his appearance before the Judiciary Committee the same exact standards we would use if Ruth Bader Ginsberg had appeared and wept in self-pity. 

Does the Supreme Court need another justice who believes himself the victim of a conspiracy? Of course. Absolutely. But this time he should be named Noemi.

If I write something scurrilous like this, who should be blamed? I blame Facebook.

Hamilton, the Musical

Not having seen "Hamilton,"  I am completely neutral about the musical and an impartial judge. I did see "Oklahoma!" last summer, a version in which all the cowboys in Oklahoma were gay, so I am not put off by the idea of a musical in which George Washington is black.

I don't suppose Washington was actually very black, maybe just a little. Historians generally agree that the musical gets all the facts wrong, but in a musical, a work of fiction, that doesn't matter (see "Oklahoma!") Think of the play as science fiction about a parallel universe. Enjoy. That's what I do. 

I know little about Hamilton other than that he owned slaves in New York City, not uncommon, and hoped to use military force to keep the dumb guys in their place, which was on small farms.  I know more about Jefferson, the most intellectually sophisticated President in our nation's history. I assume he's in the musical, too, probably the hero.

I've heard only one song from "Hamilton," and it was charming. I understand little about music, but I did watch a group of black athletes, including LeBron James, discussing the rap in "Hamilton." They thought it sucked, but can I trust LeBron James on this kind of music?

My conclusion in this report is that "Hamilton" will make a good movie if they cast Joy Reid or Idris Elba as our first President. I assume Elba can do an American accent.