Adventures in Evacuation

Sonoma County's biggest fire ever is still burning, but my electrical power is back on. I have returned home.

We had to leave Santa Rosa when our power was shut off by some damned fool working for PG&E. It's difficult to live in a cave without light or heat.

1. Management of our complex of about 200 apartments bugged out immediately, warning no one, fleeing, and leaving a sign on the door that said the office would be closed until further notice. Meanwhile maybe 10 of the renters are more-or-less apartment-bound or close to it. Lucky for them that a tenant in a helping profession stayed behind and provided warm lunches, cooking on the bar-be-cue on the pool deck.

In general the balmy power shut-offs stranded many old or ill people in the North Bay Area, customers left behind  by PG&E  to suffer whatever fate awaited them. This included old women upstairs in electric wheelchairs and dependent on elevators.

2. At our motel near the zoo in San Francisco, Susan came upon a toothless woman at the desk telling the clerk that she had accidentally thrown away her teeth. She apparently wanted the clerk to climb into the dumpster and search. He explained that dumpster entry was contrary to company policy.

3. I ate a wonderful chunk of apple pie at Butter Love, a bakery in SF everyone should visit.  

The Last WASP

Many of the Founding Fathers believed they were putting together a nation that would be ruled by dour, Harvard-educated, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These leaders would be voted into office by lesser white males, grateful for the chance to choose between the Cabots and the Lodges. I suppose the end of that line of smirking, burned-out alcoholics was George W. Bush, our fifth-worst President. And he pretended to be a bowlegged cowboy.

Today Harvard is the sort of American meritocracy that might admit a talented Hindu from Moosejaw if her parents make $500,000 a year. A mentally-ill sociopath whose grandfather was a pimp and whose father supported the KKK is President. WASPs have been replaced by the Snopes of Faulkner, cunning pussy-grabbers lacking any pretense of class, education or rationality. 

The WASPs, who figured in so many sociological conversations when I was young, are history.  

You Know How to Order

In San Francisco, refugees from fire, we had lunch today at a Chinese place recommended by our son-in-law. We drove to a small Asian enclave on Balboa, where we ordered a large meal for about eight bucks each. This was one of those places without any barbarians present, except for us, and, as often happens, a Chinese customer said to us, "You know how to order."

The first time that had happened, I had swelled with pride. Today I wonder what the speaker means. It's pretty clear we do not know how to order to best advantage in a Chinese restaurant. We always order too much food, so maybe "you know how to order" means "You ordered way too much food."

Or "you know how to order" may be ironic, meaning that we don't know jack from soy sauce. But the Chinese who say it are usually loud, warm and friendly, which suits me. They seem to be a confident and intrusively social bunch, my kind of individuals.  

Maybe "you know how to order" is just a welcoming cry intended to encourage barbarians in general.  In my case it is often followed by an offer from someone at the next table to teach me how to use chopsticks.

The Axis Powers

Syria is now being divided up by the new Axis powers: Russia, Turkey and the USA. 

Turkey gets to move its border 20 miles to the south and dump a bunch of Arabs-in-exile in there to serve as a local population. They will replace the ethnically cleansed Kurds.

Russia gets to insert tanks into what was a temporary Kurdish homeland. Putin can pretend to be Great Power. 

tRump gets to do the opposite of pulling American troops out of Syreia. He is added new troops and, for the first time, tanks. The assignment of this new fighting force is to control and protect the meager Syrian oil fields. This completes a tRump campaign pledge, to grab some oil belonging to another people and keep it.

Also he will allow the Kurds to move into a featureless desert shaded by oil derricks. 

Americans Love Art

Americans love art. Adam Gopnik in the October 28 New Yorker points out that more Americans enter art museums each year than enter all their sports arenas combined. We care how art is housed. (Sonoma County has several thousand people living in tents along a bicycle trail.) Also we love basketball more than childhood education, which is why the highly skilled Draymond Green earns more than a junior high science teacher. 

But Gopnik was not focused on our values in general. The question he addressed is where do we want to live? And what should we do about the homeless?

In the last century well-intentioned progressives thought poor people wanted to live in huge towers of concrete surrounded by a brutal plaza. These projects failed. No one liked them.

Gopnik points out that what most (but not all) people want is to live in a local neighborhood. They want to be able to walk to small businesses, the bakery, the cafe, the movie theater. They want some big shade trees and a fountain. That is what people like. Not a secret.  I live in such a place.

We could build like that. The French restrict the size of small businesses in certain neighborhoods. It can be done. We could build the neighborhoods people seek.

The Slurs

Niner fans are happy. Yesterday their football team beat the Washington Racist Slurs 9-0.

The Slurs have been asked to change the team's name, but tradition, you know. What stronger Washington tradition is there than American racism? The team's billionaire owner insists on honoring the past.

More on Honor

I don't write about my honor. It's not appropriate. I am aware, of course, that there are lines one shouldn't cross, but it takes a family of degenerates like the Bonespurs to clarify honor for me, once a PFC.

What the President did to the Kurds--abandoning a fighting friend to a mortal enemy to be crushed--was dishonorable. It defines the term. This isn't the first time America has behaved dishonorably, but this time seems particularly hard to swallow.

The Kurds lost 10,000 troops in the winning local fight against the bloody chaos of ISIS. We lost six.

I agree that we should get our military out of West Asia, including Syria. How we do that matters. Shifting troops from Syria to Iraq, as Bonespur has done, pushes them farther from home.

The explanation for the brutal treachery by President Bonepsurs is that "I guess I'm an unconventional person." But he's not a person. He'll die a cruel, cowardly, dysfunctional lump of privileged lard (many people are saying).

I am honored

One of tRump's boys, on hearing that the G7 meeting would be held at a failing tRump resort this year, said, "I am honored."

I think he felt honored because the President awarded a government contract worth millions to himself.  He trusted that the money would be well spent. The President's confidence in the recipient of the contract seems clear to me. The money is good, too.

Reality

There were European philosophers who argued that we create the world with our minds. That's paranoia, but maybe all they meant was that we perceive the world from a human point of view. Of course,  if they said it that way, without exaggeration, who would buy their books?

The Nazis believed that if you told a big lie often enough, people would believe it.  The lie would become real. Later we had post-structuralists who argued that there are no facts and no genuine truths. The Bush folks mocked Democrats for their belief in a "fact-based world." And so on. 

Right now we have the Trumpfolk telling us that the Democrats do not have a genuine impeachment committee working in the House. They seem to believe that if every Republican says this three times, the impeachment process will vanish.    

The Republicans are in for a surprise when Trump gets impeached.

As Peter Viereck, a conservative thinker of the last century, wrote, "Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away."

Hunter Biden, Prey

Now Hunter Biden is on television apologizing for  being on a company board in China, which is the opposite of what he should be doing. What he did is ordinary capitalism, where the sons of famous men join boards and get paid large sums for nada. That's normal oligarchical stuff.  Trump's sons would not apologize  for it once in a million times. 

You do not beat Trump by apologizing. Instead you talk about how great it is to be rich and tell Trump to go back got Florida and jack off. But the Bidens have no idea how to respond effectively to Trump.

Please, Democrats, do not nominate a weak centrist no one gets enthusiastic about, unless you seek a low turnout and a loss. 

Truth

Historian Sophia Rosenfeld talked yesterday about the uses of truth in a democracy. In the Age of tRump,  discussions of truth are playing a major role. Rosenfeld argued that there have been two competing views of truth in America from the beginning.

One view was that educated experts know the truth about various things. They rely on verifiable facts. The problem with this technical approach is that experts tend to lose touch with the wishes and needs of ordinary voters. 

The opposing view is populist, the idea that the impulses of ordinary people lead them to truths not available to expert verifiers. This leads to faith-based truths and global warming.

What is new today in American politics is the voter who just doesn't care about the truth. He recognizes when a politician is lying and applauds it. He likes it. And he has a cousin, the voter for whom truth is entirely personal, "my truth." His personal truth is as good as anyone's truth because the God made all of us equals. 

(There is a failure to grasp that "truth" is a social construct.)

The Soul of David Brooks

I've been asked more than once if  columnist David Brooks is an intellectual.  I think he is--he's just not a good one. Put it this way. Some gynecologists are excellent doctors, but we knew one whose nickname was "Ironfinger."

In his latest column Brooks sets out to tell us what makes us equal. We aren't equally smart or tall or rich, but "all humans have souls."  These items "make us all radically equal." And if citizens "lose the concept of soul, they have lost everything."

This argument looks somewhat logical if you believe souls exist, in which case I have a tooth fairy I'd like to sell you. The claim that our souls make us equal is sometimes taught in introductions to 18th century American thought. Brooks' discussion of souls today resembles Trump's discussion of Frederick Douglas.

But let's agree that souls do exist. Why believe that all souls are equal? What evidence is there to back the assertion that Billie Holiday and Rudy Giuliani are equally soulful?

The Mandate of Heaven

Soon we (fanatical centrists like Joe Biden) will be facing a key question. Is President Trump guilty of the crimes he confessed to on national television? The Republicans say no. Nancy Pelosi wants to see more evidence. 

Rick Perry might be to blame for the confessions. Or the President, in his great and unmatched wisdom, might have been joking with the press. I have never seen him smile, but maybe he enjoys a night out and a good laugh with Rand Paul. 

I noticed that Pat Robertson is not laughing. When informed that the President was abandoning our allies, the Kurds, to be slaughtered by the Turkish army, Robertson said that Trump was in danger of "losing the mandate of Heaven."

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell is still dead.

Thaddeus

Back in the 1950s, when I was being badly educated, I learned that Thaddeus Stevens, a prominent congress member in the Civil War era, was a horrible man. I was taught that Stevens was a "Radical Republican," who pushed hard to punish the South for its sins, making knitting the divided nation together in 1866 difficult. Thaddeus Stevens wouldn't let the wounds heal.

That made good sense if you didn't know that Stevens had devoted his life--and risked it--to fighting slavers. He was a working-class guy whose mother somehow managed to put him through Dartmouth, which led him to a leadership position. He was known for what we now call empathy and generosity. Once when he learned that a widow was about to lose her home, he bought it and gave it to her. He was also known for brilliant maneuvers and sarcastic wit on the floor of congress. 

The negative view in California history texts of the Radical Republicans went along with admiration for the chivalrous Robert E. Lee,  who once had an enslaved black woman whipped for insolence. 

What had actually made Thaddeus Stevens a villain in American history texts--I discovered many years later-- was his absolute insistence that black men be given citizenship and the right to vote, to sit on juries and to own property after the Civil War.  Stevens--who lived with a woman of mixed race and left her a pension when he died-- had no doubt that all men are created equal. At the time (and for the next hundred years), many white men considered that view radical, absurd, even evil.

A few years ago there was a popular movie about a short section of Lincoln's life, and in it, Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, was accurately portrayed as a tough and witty progressive who knew when to compromise. The times they are a'changing. 

   

Repeating the Narrative

Trump fabricates to control the narrative. George Lakoff has written about that. If we respond to Trump's stream of claims and conspiracy theories, he controls the news cycle.  To respond thoughtfully, we must repeat and re-enforce his narrative. We argue with an idiot.

That cuts both ways. Right now Trump and his goblins are complaining about impeachment, which strengthens the Democratic narrative through repetition, making impeachment seem more normal day by day. 

Finlandia

Watching Colbert I became aware that tRump had missed his chance yesterday to ask the President of Finland to find some dirt on Joe Biden. That was a massive mistake. The President had already asked Ukraine, Italy and Australia to look for dirt, and this morning he asked China, which may or may not owe him a favor. What is Finland, a nothing? A Lindsay Graham? Be fair, Mr. President.