Mark Meadows, Backstroker

In case you have forgotten (as I had), Mark Meadows, the Tea Party congressman accused of racism on television yesterday, is an outspoken racist. 

Back in 2012 he said,  "We're going to send Mister Obama  home to Kenya or wherever it is." He supported the racist theory that no Democrat of color could actually be American-born. My view is that Meadows should be horsewhipped east out of D.C. until he reaches the Atlantic and then backstrokes himself to humanity's original home in Africa.

Where on earth is San Francisco?

My family has been in California for five generations, since a time when San Francisco was called "Frisco" and Los Angeles was a sleepy, murderous village. For some time my ancestral cowboys and sharp-shooting women lived in the Central Valley and visited San Luis Obispo and San Francisco when they wanted to cool off and drink and start fights.  I have long maintained that San Francisco is a resort in Central California, but nearly everyone around these parts claims it is in Northern California. People are adamant. It's as if they lack access to maps. 

Today I went online to get a CALTRANS report on highway flooding. It's raining hard. The San Francisco and Marin County information is found online in a section that the state itself designates as "Central California." Of course. 

Sonoma County seems to be a border area, and Northern California begins in Mendocino County. Just sayin'.

The Green Book

I have my way of watching the Oscars, first recording the show and then speeding through the speeches and ads, pausing only to identify the winners. I can do the whole 2.5 hours in twenty minutes. It isn't nearly as boring as watching the whole thing, watching the rich people in $500 seats in the auditorium. 95% of them are frantic to get the bore over so they can stop smiling,  pick their noses off camera and get to the booze and blow. Or just go home and get in bed.

I had seen more than half of the major films involved and enjoyed them. That includes the winner, which was the usual white savior film. The Academy loves movies in which some relatable working-stiff white guy saves an educated, high-falooting black guy and teaches him to appreciate jazz. But for some reason Viggo Mortensen, who carried the movie, got shut out. 

The only film I saw all year that had genuine weight to it was Roma. Unfortunately, the first hour of Roma is a pretty deadly slice of life, the life of a house servant in Mexico City. It's about as interesting as the daily work of a cleaner. Most of the people I know left the movie before the first hour ended. The second hour gets explosive. But it wouldn't work without the tonnage of the first dull hour. 

Roma won some major awards. It will be around for decades. 

Feinstein Takes It Easy

Some will have read the report by Lisa Friedman in the NY Times about a confrontation between the doddering Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a group of school children on the Green New Deal. "There is no way to pay for it," Feinstein told the  children,. to which one replied, "We have tons of money going to the military."

Feinstein responded graciously to the child by telling her that no bill could be passed in the Republican senate and,  "You can take that back to whoever sent you here. . . ."

We sent Feinstein to the senate, and I'd like to take that back. She's a surrender monkey who supports rational causes as long as they aren't hard. If a cause is difficult to sell, and she loses an argument with a ten-year-old, she throws an insult, backs off and goes home exhausted for a long afternoon nap.

Why I Vote for Democrats

Why do I, an independent, vote for Democrats?  Well, for one thing, the  national Democratic leadership has made elected independents like Senators King and Sanders welcome in their caucus. In a sense they represent me, and I vote in a state in which a third of the people registered are independents.

It's hard to say who speaks for independents, so it might as well be me. 

Below are three reasons I vote for Democrats in Presidential elections.

1.  The third party candidates, sometimes excellent people, are not qualified to serve as President. They lack the experience needed to run our dubious system. I don't cast protest votes--think about the protest votes in Brexit and the 2016 election of President Spanklyn T. Borderline. 

2.  We should make fighting global warming our first priority. The Republicans pretend not to believe in science. The Democrats, in contrast, will make global warming a middling priority if it doesn't raise gasoline prices.

3.  People deserve health care. The Republicans will let them die. The Democrats will support health care for a majority of people if it doesn't cost a lot.

My strongest argument is that the Democrats are on the right side, sort of. They will take stands on progressive issues if they aren't too hard. So vote for Democrats instead of Trump.

Dixie!

If you set out to find people who are not racist, carry a big flashlight. Fear of difference (which leads to racism) is part of the human condition. Everyone of every color is, to some degree, a racist. 

People harmed by racism sometimes tell us that we will never end racism.  Good people don't want to hear that, but it is, as far as I can tell, true. 

I can't completely escape being racist, but I can resist it. We can be racists who fight against racism. Alcoholics fight against being alcoholic. We can become aware of who we are and what we are doing. We may always be racist, and we can always resist racism.

This brings to mind a turbulent school district in Marin County named Dixie. Some say that the district was named Dixie by a Confederate sympathizer in 1864. That could be right. I don't know what really happened.

Others say that the district was named for a Miwok Indian, Mary Dixie, (whose descendants today are named Dixie). The argument might be about whether to change the name of those descendants. Is their Miwok name racially insensitive? Or is the argument about changing the name of Mary Dixie? Or changing the nickname of the Confederacy? Or should they change the name of the school district? Should we change the name of the Mason-Dixon Line? Or erase possible evidence that a Miwok woman once mattered?

One of the Miwok Dixies, Marge Grow-Eppard, told the school board that she "did not realize my family's name was so offensive." And "I don't see no confederate flags here. You're going to change Mary Dixie's name, you dishonor all of us." 

Binding Beliefs

In Europe in the 1500s people were being staked and burned alive if convicted of Protestantism or Catholicism, depending on which city was involved. Atheism might get you burned in any city. Religion mattered. 

Scholars who had picked up doubts by reading the ancient Greeks were burned alive. So were shepherds, who had developed doubts about virgin birth while watching sheep and so on. My own forebears kept their mouths shut and eyes down. Otherwise I wouldn't be here to write this brief history. 

Religion was the original belief system with the power to bind together gigantic groups of strangers and inspire these strangers to live together in peace or to ransack and murder outsiders. In time we would add some new, effective, binding belief systems (like nationalism, racism and corporate capitalism). 

Hemings

Recently I watched "Finding Your Roots," a TV show created by Henry Lewis Gates Jr., in which a celebrity is introduced to ancestors he or she knew nothing about. In this recent episode a famous black actor discovered that one of his enslaved direct ancestors had been taken by his master on a trip into Canada. A band of abolitionists had captured the black man and attempted to persuade him to remain in Canada, where slavery was illegal. Instead the black ancestor followed his master back into the United States and voluntarily returned to slavery (until the Civil War freed him again).

My assumption is that this sort of thing happened from time to time. The man probably chose not to be separated from his wife and children. 

A similar incident can be found in the life of Sarah "Sally" Hemings and her older brother.  Thomas Jefferson had them sent to join him in France, where slavery was illegal. They apparently found out that they did not have to return to Virginia, but they did, after striking bargains with Jefferson.

The brother had been trained as a French chef.  Jefferson agreed to free him in Virginia after he had trained a replacement chef for himself. The brother had learned a really good trade and could support himself. (Imagine the two of them working out this arrangement in Paris.)

I don't know what the laws on freed slaves were in Virginia at the time. In some states, freed slaves had to go north etc. 

Sally Hemings, enslaved and greatly under-age, was Jefferson's dead wife's half-sister (they had the same father) and looked like her. Hemings was three-quarters white (her children with Jefferson looked white and three of the four passed into the white community). In France, at the age of about 15, she apparently bargained with Jefferson. She would return with him to Virginia provided their children were taught a trade and freed, an agreement Jefferson kept.

Sally was not freed, because as an attractive free black woman, her presence in the Jefferson household would have violated the pretenses of Virginian gentry. When Jefferson died, Sally moved into town as a retired person, more or less, and lived to see a grandchild. 

I've wondered about the relationship between Sally and Jefferson's white daughters, which was apparently good. Maybe it was partly because they were all related, and the daughters wanted no step-mother to deal with. The hypocrisy in this culture (where black women were regularly owned by white men and no one would comment about it out loud) was astonishing.

No! on Klobuchar

I have taken a vow to vote for any candidate the Democrats nominate for President, but I have to amend that. I will not vote for Senator Klobuchar. She did her best to take wolves off the endangered species list and trap and kill them instead. 

Wolves are not everyone's issue, but some facts might help. Wolves are the original dogs, the first useful animal our ancestors tamed. Wolves and domestic dogs still breed and produce viable young.  In the written history of the United States, there is not a single human death attributed to wild wolves. Wolves are part of the balance in the natural world. 

I'm not afraid of wolves, but I am afraid of a leader like Klobuchar, who is either stone ignorant or, more likely, one more sell-out.

Netflix Hacker

My granddaughter informed me yesterday that my Netflix account had been hacked. I suspect now that someone had gotten hold of many Network passwords, including mine, and sold them or something. 

That left me at a considerable disadvantage, because I didn't remember my Netflix password. 

After a long struggle I managed to reach a smart foreigner several continents away and asked him to cancel my subscription. Instead he led me through a hundred maneuvers over a two-hour period, and we managed to get me a new password and to delete three of the four strangers from my account. I could not delete the fourth stranger, but I did change his name to Poop and his language to Portuguese. 

Be alert out there!

The Black Voters of Virginia

When it became obvious that Governor Northam of Virginia had a racist past, I suggested to my friends in the bay area that we should now listen to the black voters of Virginia. 

It wasn't that I believed Northam's excuses--I think he's been lying and evasive.

I predicted that black voters, unlike black political leaders on television, would support Northam. This claim met without much agreement, but today the first poll came out. About 60 % of black voters in Virginia want Northam to remain in office and finish his term.

My reasoning went like this. (1) Northam had been elected by black voters, who preferred him to openly racist party of Trump. (2) Black voters understood all along that Northam was an elite white Virginian who likely had a racist past, so his blackface photo surprised almost no one.  (3) My sense (from afar and unreliable) of the black voters of Virginia was that they tend to be pragmatic in their view of politics.  It makes sense to be pragmatic in some situations.

It seems likely that Northam, more than some others, will now work for racial justice. 

Slavery

Blackface is a product of slavery. Forcing a woman to have sex is slavery.

Blackface

Events in Virginia have led me to call for a Constitutional amendment that forbids any person who has worn blackface from seeking public office. I write this reluctantly because my younger sister wore blackface in elementary school more than 60 years ago and sang "Mammy." At the time her goal had been to enter politics and become a senator; the teacher told her no, she could not be a senator but she could marry one. Things change.  Today she could become a senator, except for my amendment. 

Blackface is often a deliberate mocking of people of color, who are portrayed as dark beings with rhythm who can sing well and love their mothers despite being dumber than people with lighter skin.  

I don't know what has twisted medical education, empathy and the ability to reason for centuries in Virginia. Some historians have suggested a devotion to states rights, which seems unlikely.

The situation now is that the top three offices in Virginia are held by progressives who may well be the usual suspects.  If all three can be shamed into resigning, the next governor will be a scoundrel from the Trump party. That would violate the key rule in my political thinking, which is that you support your own damned scoundrels, not some Trump bad guy, but we'll see what happens next.

The President's Teleprompter

The prose below was accidentally left on the teleprompter used by our President during his state of the union speech.

. . . (Chin up!) HORDES OF WOMEN DRESSED IN WHITE (pause. then chin higher for emphasis) IN CARAVANS (keep chin up!) ARE APPROACHING OUR SOUTHERN BORDER. (raise chin higher, stretching all sagging facial skin) THEY ARE GETTING THEIR PUSSIES GRABBED (jut your jaw, stare at ceiling) BY MEN WHO ARE NOT FAMOUS (keep chin higher! sound as if you had a pair!) (more chin!) MAGA! (chin higher, you fool!) . . . .

One Hour a Day

According to the news this morning, President Spanklyn T. Borderline spends approximately one hour each day at work, followed by around seven hours of watching Fox News, texting, phone calls to yes-men, etc. The remainder of his awake time is devoted to eating franchise food and sitting on a gold toilet.

One hour of work a week is a heavy load for a man born as rich as Spanklyn. When he was younger, he needed lots of leisure time, of course, to chase the kinds of sexual mechanics who find $100,000 a night makes any oil change attractive. Once, when he was young, there weren't enough oil changers in the known universe to drain that wide Germanic crankcase. You needed special wrenches. Things weren't measured in inches. But all that ended years back. The man's gone dry. Now he can afford a Presidential hour a day to run the world.

Cockroach

We were looking at Trump's orange pumpkin face on TV, and it occurred to us that there was no longer anything rational going on behind those glassy blue eyes. Trump has dwindled down into a bug. When you enter the room and switch on a light, he scurries in panic, looking for a safe place, on automatic, furiously afraid he has an appointment with the sole of a shoe.

A Whiter Shade of Pale

In 1911 Brazil participated in the First International Congress of Races in London. The delegate that Brazil sent, Joao Batista de Lacerda, was a brilliant scientist who headed their National Museum in Rio. He presented a paper in which he argued that by the year 2,000, Brazil would be entirely white. Black people and mestizos, then about 90% of the population, would disappear. 

When word of this paper reached Brazil, the country's leaders were upset by Joao's claim that achieving total whiteness would take as long as ninety years.

Why people believed in a coming whiteness isn't clear to me. Joao Batista de Lacerda is considered the father of pharmacology in Brazil--perhaps that explains it. According to the Internet, the man lived for 171 years, dying in 2017, so he did have a chance to see how his prediction turned out. Supposedly.