Racism Is The Issue

Last night was the latest Democratic candidates debate. It focused on the views of a bunch of dudes with 1% support. Those views were mainly Republican talking points. But the election of 2020 is not likely to hinge on health care or infrastructure or trade or the minimum wage. It won't be about global warming, which threatens billions of people, or about student debt, at least not centrally. It's going to be about race, which went unmentioned by the questioners. 

tRump became a racist in childhood--his family was darkly racist. He ran as a racist in 2016, and he's doubling down on racism in 2019. He believes he can win that way. tRump's impulse is to be racist, and it is his impulsiveness that has charmed white voters who lack reason. He's like them. He's "honest," they tell us.  For tRump the campaign will be about race.  

The Democrats are doing a better among white people. They can expect to get about 45% of the white vote. If they add the votes of Latinos, Amerindians, Black people and Asians, they will find a massive combination. They can win that way.  

tRump's racist comments are not a canny distraction from important issues. They are the issue. The 2020 election will likely be an up and down vote on American racism.

Biden's Fastball

When Joe Biden was at his peak, about 35 years ago, he had what was nearly a major league fastball. He threw 88 miles an hour, and, if he had to reach back, he might throw 89, if he got both cheeks into it. 

Biden's slider took him into the majors, where he served as a middle-innings reliever. He was always manly and balding for a few years until he discovered hair plugs. People liked Joe. They didn't entirely respect his changeup, but no one wanted to hurt his feelings. His main role on the team, I think, was to be the catcher's best friend.

Joe got involved in a few controversies like the beaning of Anita Hill.

Now certain umpires are saying Joe's lost a yard off his fastball, which was always kind of straight and fairly easy to pound for doubles. But is that true? We'll find out next month when he again takes the mound. 

Adventures in Borderline Logic

An American citizen,  Francisco Erwin Galacia, was grabbed by immigration and held in one of those crowded cages for three weeks. He had showed immigration his passport and so on, so they grabbed  his papers and charged him with carrying false documents. Weeks later, when they had to let Francisco go, they explained that he had never told them that he was an American.

Francisco Erwin Galacia did not find this explanation reasonable, but at least they returned his passport.

Triangulation: the key to victory

The Clinton White Shack was famous for what insiders called "triangulation." What Clinton did was consider the New Deal position on an issue and consider the Republican position and then support a position somewhere between them. Triangulation.  

This enraged the Republicans. It's why they hated the Clintons beyond all reason. Clinton stole half of the Republican talking points, sort of. Also he got a lot of employee-based sex. 

We can learn from that. We start by nominating Chelsea Clinton for President. Her platform will include building a wall along our southern border and Mexico will pay for it, but the wall will be short, about two adobe bricks high. Imagine the Republican reaction when Clinton goes on TV and promises to build a wall. We're talking full diapers.

A Vote On White Male Supremacy

In some ways the election of 2016 was about race and gender, but Imperial Wizard Trump flooded that process with nonsense about how he would provide cheap, universal health care, fund a new and better infrastructure, bring back the jobs now done by robots, etc. 

Trump's cruelty, racism and abuse of women for the last 50 years are documented. They are fundamental to his appeal. He will insist on running on them again. 

Nonsense will mislead fewer voters in 2020. I expect an up and down vote on white male supremacy. White males make up (I guess) about 30% of the voters, and some of them do not want to be supreme. The Imperial Wizard is in trouble. 

How did Trump get this far? My assumption is that his father's money bought him his early positions on the ladder of life. He probably started out as a "kickard" or lecturer on the supremacy of  whiteskins.  The next step may have been to Exalted Cyclops,  presiding over a klavern. I'm betting it didn't take Trump long to make King Kleagle (manager of a state) and then Grand Goblin and now President of the United States (Imperial Wizard). 

I remember once I smoked a joint and told the novelist John Barth about my suspicion that dregs were floating to the top. He smiled and corrected my diction.

Omar

Grand Wizard Trump's odd re-election strategy so far is to defeat Rep. Omar, a naturalized citizen, who is not eligible to serve as President. It's unlikely that the Democrats will nominate her.

More broadly, the Grand Wizard is running against immigrants in a nation composed of immigrants and their offspring. Even our first people, the Amerindians, came here from somewhere else. But that is true of nearly every nation. We are a migratory species, people in motion.

 I've seen godawful Presidents in my time--Richard Nixon (a crooked paranoid and traitor), Ronald Reagan (dementia), George W. Bush (a stunted dimwit)--but it's the Grand Wizard who horrifies me. Trump is inhumanly, weirdly evil, a lumbering cancer.  You cut out cancer or die.

Pogrom

My wife tells people that her father's parents were Russian Jews;  I met them. They said they came from "Tehteeve" in Russia. There was a large immigration around 1905, when 400,000 Russian Jews journeyed to America. Many "Tehteevers" settled in Cleveland. where Golda Meir came to my wife's mother's wedding, and the "Tehteevers" had a large and active club. 

It took me years to track down "Tehteeve." For one thing, it's not in Russia. I didn't have the correct spelling. Tetiev or Tetiyev is a small city south of Kiev in Ukraine. (In 1905 Ukraine was controlled by Russia.)  It turned out that Tetiev is a famous site. In 1920 an anti-Soviet band conducted a pogrom in Tetiev; about 4,000 Jews were murdered and the district set on fire.

The Logic of Democratic Leadership

The current leaders of the Democratic Party argue that it would be a waste of time to impeach Grand 
Wizard Trump, because the indictment would fail in the senate. Instead, they will be doing the people's business and pass needed legislation, which will fail in the senate. 

Census Counts Citizens!!!!!

I have in my hand a copy of the 2019 census form to fill out. It came to me in the mail.

Question 10 is: "Is person 1 a citizen of the United States?"

Wasn't this question blocked by the judiciary? 

What the hell is going on?

The Democrats Split

Politicians on the left have been split since the founding of the republic. What it comes down to is that one side is okay with minor repairs that don't rock the boat and the other side wants to build a new fleet: Nancy Pelosi vs. AOC.

To win, the Democrats need both factions. Great political leaders  work with both sides: Washington, Lincoln and FDR.

The DNC (Democratic National Committee) changed during the Clinton years, moving into the gap left by the demise of the Liberal Republicans. Today the Democratic Party Liberal Republicans are reinforced by the Anyone-But-Trump former Republicans; jointly they back Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden on TV and oppose universal health care, tuition-free public universities, etc. They aren't bad people, especially compared to tRump. But the political world, as they see it, consists of two parties, the tRump party vs. centrist liberal Republican-Democrats. For them the New Deal is dead.

I defended Pelosi for a many years, and I assume she means well, but her time has passed. The issues have changed. She's out of touch. The Democrats need a better leader, presumably the person they will nominate for President, someone who enthuses the young and people of color to turn out and vote.

Free Speech

Today I watched three well-educated twits defending free speech on the tube. They claimed, essentially, that free speech is an absolute right, which makes me wonder how they are connected to the real world. 

In the real world, if you call some woman an n-word, she may kick you in the shin. Privates practice saying, "Yes, sir!" Assistant professors don't contradict deans. Most of us have bosses.

We all understand that free speech is highly qualified. The three twits know it, or they wouldn't still be alive and on TV. But blah blah blah hate speech blah blah.

You Never Know W;hat Might Happen

When I started teaching college English, one of my first students was an ancient Jew with a tattoo on her arm, a row of numbers. I know what you're thinking--why was someone that old taking college courses? And she was quite old. I'm going to assume that she was born around 1900, but here's the thing. It's not unheard of for a senior person to go to college after retirement. 

In the 1950s, when I was an undergraduate, the UCLA English department had a successful old Ph.D candidate who was world famous as a novelist and screen writer. Later on I would teach a middle-aged undergraduate student who was a medical doctor. He'd never completed his bachelor's degree. He'd been jumped into med school as an experiment. 

At the college where I worked, the average age of students was between 35 and 40. The college had been set up to serve people who had somehow missed out when they were young and quick. We were there to give them a second or third chance they probably hadn't counted on.

Yesterday

Yesterday  is a sci-fi romcom you might enjoy if you, like me, once sang "Hey, Jude" with Paul McCartney in Madison Square Garden. 

When the lights went out, the dude sitting next to me passed over a joint. My children, very young, noticed a lot of puffing in the dark, and one of them said loudly, "What's that smell?"

The Presidents

The President of the United States is a pervert in a social circle of rich perverts like himself who mostly operate above the law.

But consider this.  When women accused President Clinton of rape, I ignored them. The Republicans were furious.  I ignored them, too. Why would I listen to Newt Gingrich, who waited until his wife had breast cancer to tell her that he was boffing yet another and wanted a divorce?

Hillary and I decided Bill Clinton was okay, and look at where we are now.  (One of us has money.)

Tour de France

As usual this time of year, I'm following the Tour de France on television. My TV set captures it for me, and I later watch some of it (the programs can be five hours long). One reason to tune in is the French scenery. I see the back roads of Europe, two lanes swinging through forests and mountains. Much of the race is shot by the French from helicopters with views down of ancient forts and castles. Storks soar by, beneath the cameras.

The race winds though many small towns. I'm impressed by how many buildings (infrastructure) our species has accumulated over the last thousand years. The layout of the small towns is interesting. We are used to towns being laid out in grids, more or less. But in these ancient French towns, viewed from above, the old buildings seem to point in random directions, just piled next to each other, clustered without regard to streets or sidewalks, if they exist.  It's as if the towns were accumulated before humans developed a sense of edges and neatness. 

F-250

I had a kind of flashback today. The first new car that Susan and I bought was a massive Ford pickup, an F-250 with a limited slip differential. There was just one long seat in the cab, a bench seat, and we drove all over the United States and Canada on that seat with our wolf, Colorado, between us, often with his head on Susan's lap. That's the picture I had in my mind's eye. 

The wolf adored us. I only saw him angry once. We were in Canada, somewhere near the Athabasca glacier, and I stopped on the road to look at a bear. Colorado saw the bear and began to roar. He had never seen a bear before--this was pure instinct against a natural enemy. I had to drive on immediately. 

Cult of the Dead Cow

Back when the Internet was being invented, several groups of super-hackers developed. One of them was Cult of the Dead Cow or CDC. It might be the oldest group of hacktivists that still survives. My impression is that the members were interested in pranks, in maintaining freedom of expression and in serious matters. They stole some games and free phone calls, and they declared war on Scientology. One of the members of CDC was Beto O'Rourke. 

His candidacy doesn't look promising at the moment, but among Presidential candidates, Beto may be the most knowledgeable about trends in technology.

Champions Visit France

Today my wife and I got to watch the greatest women's soccer team in history win its second world championship at a tournament in France sponsored by FIFA.

FIFA is the organization that runs worldwide soccer. It currently holds a reserve fund of more than 2 billion dollars. The generous leaders of FIFA spare no expense when it comes to their own food, lodging, sex workers and decisions to award venues to nations prone to buying soccer votes, according to critics. 

There are people who claim that FIFA is a criminal scheme, while others argue that it is no more crooked that Trump's key Presidential advisers. Who knows, really.

At the moment FIFA ranks the American women's team first in the world and the men's team about 30th. The American women's team pulls in more money that the men's team. It's more popular than the men's team, but FIFA's prize money for the men is ten times the prize money for the women. And there is a good reason to underpay women. They are female.

There are those, allegedly, who argue that FIFA should not underpay women by 90%. You may be one of those western liberals who believe women should earn about 75% of what a man gets for the same job. According to FIFA, you live in a bubble.

Is Biden Racist?

There are those who believe that Gore, Kerry, Hillary and Biden are winning Presidential candidates, and they mean well.  

People in my generation grew up in a culture that was sexist and racist. It was in the bread we toasted. Biden and I absorbed sexist and racist tendencies we struggle with. We both oppose racism and sexism to the extent that we understand it.

Joe and I always detested the KKK. We genuinely believed that women were as smart as men. But there was something else absorbed into our bones. . . .  I  assume that Biden has struggled against internalized racism and sexism, and he thinks he's good, but his political record says otherwise. It's spotty.  If he recognized that, it might be okay, but he doesn't get it. As things stand he's not the person to unify the nation. Ask Anita Hill.

Pelosi Is Too Old

There's been speculation that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are too old to be in leadership roles. Maybe they could serve as a leader's best friend or something like that. 

Meanwhile we overlook the key leader who is too old, Nancy Pelosi.  

tRump flies around smooching monstrous dictators and putting brown children in cages without water. He packs the Supreme Court with warped nutters who ingest beer up the anus (boofing). tRump lives to transgress. He is intent, along with Putin, on destroying liberal democracies. 

Pelosi's reaction is to wait around. Her plan is: maybe the President won't be re-elected. The Congressional Democrats look craven. That is not as inspiring as Pelosi may think; unfortunately, Pelosi is too old to adjust. 

I'm older than Pelosi, and I remember something my mother said when she was about 70. "People don't improve with age."

Reparations

Reparations for black people in America has become a central but unpopular topic of discussion among Democratic candidates. 

I will skip the argument that black people suffered in slavery and Jim Crow. That should be evident to those who own their own shoes.

"Reparations" is a vague term, and that might be the problem. At this stage we don't know what form reparations would take or who would pay for them. It's too late to give people forty acres and a mule. My guess is that reparations might--in one case--mean building a hospital in an underserved area. But we aren't there yet. The discussion is just beginning. "Reparations" remains undefined, but that will change.

George Washington High

The first school I attended was George Washington Elementary in  Compton, California, which may be why I feel drawn to the controversy at Washington High in San Francisco. More important, Washington is the local high school near my talented granddaughter. (I'm hoping she gets into SOTA.)

The high school has a mural that is exactly as old as I am, a set of 13 panels illustrating the good and bad deeds of George Washington.  The Depression-era artist was Victor Arnautoff, a Marxist and a friend of Diego Rivera. Arnautoff was careful, in his depiction of the life of Washington, to include scenes of Washington's enslaved black people working for no pay and a dead Amerindian to represent certain genocides.

Those, according to the school board, are the bad scenes in the mural, harmful to students. The idea is that students of color find these depictions troubling. That may be true. That might provide a start for an education in social justice. But the school board would spare students the experience. They have voted to spend $600,000 in legal fees and whitewash and then to paint over the art. They don't like troubling art.

Art experts have protested, but the board is deaf.

Let me just say this about the school board. They appear to be ignorant in matters relating to art, psychology, education, history and reality. I'm just saying they don't deserve to wear shoes. 

                  

The Courthouse Poop

Every 40 or 50 years the fancy people who guide our city counsel set out to redo Courthouse Square in downtown Santa Rosa to make it more business friendly. About two years back they chopped down the big trees and pulled up the grass and then poured concrete over the space. 

I figure that this was supposed to help in two ways. The hideous flat area would support booths for an endless stream of pseudo events, drawing tourists etc. The rest of the time the area would be so miserable that the badly shod homeless would go sit somewhere else (which of course did not happen).

Now the Santa Rosa is considering putting a public restroom in Courthouse Square, and--no surprise--the fancy people object. They enjoy punishing the poor, making them hold it. They hope that having no toilet will force the homeless to walk to Petaluma. But the homeless already have no restroom. They haven't gone anywhere. They won't leave.

I no longer shop downtown. You have to pay to park there, and there is no public restroom.