Minority Rule

People can differ on whether America is governed by an oligarchy or a representative democracy or something in between, but from the start we have had a problem with minority rule.  

The Founders expected leadership roles to be limited to college-educated white males with financial assets. Women, people of color, poor males, the enslaved and Amerindians could not vote. A minority ruled.

What makes a representative democracy or even an oligarchy function is a shared belief that majority rules. Yet in my lifetime four American presidents have been taken power without winning a majority of the votes: Truman, Clinton, Dimwitted Bush and tRump. The last two actually ran second. 

What today's majority of voters wants (universal health care, no forced birth, an end to racism) has been attacked by Wall Street Republicans, allied with religious reactionaries, Fascists, white supremacists and morons. That's a shrinking vote. It's not a majority. But they win by hook or mostly by crook. Today that minority rules a teetering, top-heavy nation that may be about to tumble down.  Or change and become more sturdy.

Some Patronizing Advice

One of our oldest and whitest Democratic figures had something to say a day or two back. He was addressing (on national TV) black protesters who were outraged about the homicide of a young, unarmed black woman who had gone down in a gale of police bullets. He advised the protesters not to do anything "inappropriate."

I can't speak for people of color, of course, but I'm going to guess that many people of color are not looking for advice on what is appropriate from a 1980s empty suit. The Democrat should already know that, but he doesn't. White men giving patronizing advice to black people went out about 60 years ago. 

But what if he wasn't talking to black people? Maybe he was talking to people like himself who need reassurance that nothing much is going to change here.

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Death and Ideology

 Anyone voting for tRump in November is voting to risk lives. The President has already killed more than 200,000 citizens with more to come. But his followers are emotionally attached to a range of ideologies and are willing to bet the lives of their children. They are sending their own children to gather in schools during a pandemic, when isolation is the best defense. 

The president, a sociopath like his father, wants American children back in school, because he thinks that ignoring the plague will help his election chances and the stock market. He is a stupid man. Ignoring the plague has been a losing strategy.

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Ruth Passes

 My guess is that only three or four supreme court justices will be totally balmy. The outcome might go like this. The court will allow the red states to enforce laws suppressing women, people of color, gays, etc. But the blue states will not pass such laws. The divide will grow more stark. People will begin to move to states that suit them. The divide will grow more stark again.

Trump's Character

One evening, when I was in graduate school,  my wife and I smoked an adequate amount of Thai-stick in a small, metal pipe, and I immediately began to write a story based on a character I invented named Donald Trump. This character was terribly bloated in appearance and lacked courage or any of the virtues, which began to trouble him and made him suspect the worst. Trump demanded to know what plans I had made for him. 

In those days I was young and brutally honest, and I told Trump I planned to have him beaten in an alley behind a food pantry by a squadron of police, who would then stand on his back and choke him out until he expired in agony.

"That seems unfair," he said. "Here I am newly born and utterly friendless, entirely by your design, and you've already condemned me to nothing but pain, terror and misery the rest of my short life." He began to sob and sigh pathetically and beg me on two knees to give him at least a few positive moments before his time ran out. 

I finally agreed and added a chapter in which he became President of the United States. You know the rest. 

Iran!

 There may be a flood of pacts between the Arab states and Israel. I am guessing the Arab states have decided that nuclear Israel can provide help in holding back Iran. (The tRumps and kushners can pretend to deserve credit.)

Real

To some extent reality--for everybody--is a conspiracy against us and how we might prefer things to be. As we grow up, we learn to accommodate ourselves to what exists. But someone born super-rich may not have to deal with all of the usual encounters with reality. Even with a toxic personality he can rent a string of gorgeous, gold-digging wives. He can buy a medical doctor, develop imaginary bone spurs and avoid military service. 

President  Spanky can say on tape, "I played down the virus on purpose. I didn't want to start a panic." And the next day he can say, "I didn't play down the virus. I played it up." And anyone who objects to this obvious lying has "drunk the Kool-Ade." 

To Spanky and his supporters, reality is a conspiracy against them, led by "the deep state." Lying is a defense against reality. The more Spanky lies, the better certain people like him. He's their superhero whose special power is lying.  

Spanky lies about race, women, medicine and science. He's undaunted by facts. He tries to project an alternate reality, one that shifts instantly to meet his mood. This, Fitzgerald might have said, makes Spanky careless about what happens to others. Others are tertiary. In Spanky's novel, he is the only developed character. 

Tested to Obliven

Yesterday I watched a tRump enabler on TV explaining that the reason our death rate from the plague is 25% of the world's total is that we do the most testing. I'm not sure what this dope meant, maybe that tRump has been testing people to death? I would not accuse the (p)resident of that myself. He might try it, of course, but Fox News would have to think of it first.  

The Santana Wind

The Santa Ana or Santana wind of Southern California is a foehn, a wind that occurs on the downward slope of a mountain range. As far as I can tell, the Santa Ana wind originates far to the east and has  nothing to do with the city of Santa Ana. 

My generation in Los Angeles grew up calling the wind "Santana," although the other name is apparently older. 

My wife and I moved to New York to work and then back west to retire in Northern California. I read in the local newspaper that Santa Rosa sometimes got a "Santa Ana wind." That made no sense to me--we were 500 miles from Santa Ana. I paid no attention until the Tubbs fire--driven by a foehn--three years ago killed about 50 people in Sonoma County. That's when I first became aware of the term "fire season."

California has always had massive fires, I suppose, during the part of the year when vegetation is most dry. With global warming, that period has become dryer and longer.  Back in 1957 a Santa Ana in Southern California blew from November 21 to December 4. Wind gusts reached 100 mph. Fires raged out of control. People died. It was a lot like the Tubbs fire. The difference today is that many more people have built homes near or in the woods. And we are experiencing wind-driven wild fires in towns.

About all this, Joan Didion long ago wrote, "The wind shows us how close to the edge we are."

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A föhn or foehn (UK: /fɜːn/,^[2][3] US: /feɪn/) is a type of dry, warm, down-slope wind that occurs in the lee (downwind side) of a mountain range.

Föhn can be initiated when deep low-pressure systems move into Europe, drawing moist Mediterranean air over the Alps.

It is a rain shadow wind that results from the subsequent adiabatic warming of air that has dropped most of its moisture on windward slopes (see orographic lift). As a consequence of the different adiabatic lapse rates of moist and dry air, the air on the leeward slopes becomes warmer than equivalent elevations on the windward slopes. Föhn winds can raise temperatures by as much as 14 °C (25 °F)^[4]in just a matter of hours. Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria have a warmer climate due to the Föhn, as moist winds off the Mediterranean Sea blow over the Alps.

tRump's Enablers

 Today we learned that the President's flunkies have been altering the CDC reports on the pandemic so that the science won't contradict the President's ludicrous ramblings. 

The President is playing with people's lives, feeding them misinformation and letting them die. He's a sociopath like his father, and he does not care.

When Stalin's enablers did that kind of thing, we disapproved. It's a problem inherent to dictatorships. The enablers must pretend that the dictator's absurd claims are realities. But reality persists when you wish it would stop, and dictatorships often (but not always) end in catastrophes. 

In the White House we have a troll surrounded by volunteers as evil as the nutter who attracted them. In the next election, evil will be supported enthusiastically by more than 40% of the voters. It's discouraging.

42%

Michelle Goldberg pointed out that when Herbert Hoover ran for re-election, he got 42% of the vote.  Hoover was a humanitarian and a total failure who had no grasp of how to deal with a Depression. It's not right to compare him to a murderous cretin like Donald tRump, but we can expect tRump to get at least 42% of the vote in November. Maybe more. That is the minimum.

I wonder what this says about human nature. It is the case that 42% of the voters are of below average intelligence, but they won't all vote for tRump.  Some will vote for other candidates. 

Jim Wood

Some years back our medical doctor opened a boutique practice for the rich, dropping my wife and me from her practice. Fortunately we caught on with our former doctor's nurse practitioner, whom we had long preferred anyway. 

Recently Assembly Member Jim Wood, a retired dentist, got a bill passed that will grant more freedom to nurse practitioners to work on their own. It's now on the governor's desk, and I hope he signs it. We need more people providing service in the medical profession, and my experience with a nurse practitioner has been excellent. She gives more time and thought to her patients than many overworked doctors can allow. 

Like most voters I don't really keep track of what my elected representatives are doing day-to-day in the state capitol. This work by Jim Wood  should be recognized, in my opinion, and commended.

Good and Evil

My grandparents believed that morality was based on organized religion. Later on religion began to fall out of favor in Clovis, California, which meant that morality was--some people believed--baseless, merely a temporary social contract. Joan Didion's response can stand for the dilemma all this caused. In the 1960s she surveyed the Haight and began to feel that the center no longer held, quoting Yeats.

Didion wrote, "You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing --beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code--what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' . . . ."

From Didion's standpoint, what we have instead of religious morality  is an agreement about how behave. She refused to call that morality, and she had a point. 

In short, some intellectuals believed in the 60s that morality had been created by God or that it had no compelling basis at all. But what if there are more than those two possibilities? 

What deters the hungry lioness from eating her own litter? Not the Ten Commandments. Not a social contract. 

How To Survive Election Night

Susan and I used to survive election nights by going to the movies. We'd watch Jeff Bridges for several hours, then drive home, turn on the TV and discover in a minute which candidate for President had run second and thereby won. 

In a plague year, our quick approach is not available. Movie theaters here are closed.  But I came across a passage in a Joan Didion essay that suggested another approach. In November we will watch early election returns at home after pulling brown paper bags over our heads. 

Many people say they will be doing this in November. There will be two likely outcomes.

1. The scientific object, of course, is to retain carbon dioxide in our lungs by rebreathing our own breath inside paper sacks. If we were to lose CO2 by shouting and hyperventilating into the open air, the tissues in our bodies might malfunction. 

2. Sadly, this approach brings with it distance and perspective. For example, I prefer to think of myself as an important vaquero-poet with a tame wolf as my sidekick. It's hard to maintain that image with my head in a bag.

Biden on Climate Change

"I am not banning fracking," Joe Biden said on August 31, 2020. So the joke is on us. Or on our grandchildren.