In case you are asked, Kamala is a name that means "lotus" or "pale red" in Sanskrit. Kamala is also the name of a Hindu deity, better known as Lakshmi. Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of prosperity, good luck and beauty.
Sanskrit is one of 445 Indo-European languages that have a common ancestor. The group includes English, Spanish, Greek, etc.
I can't say I ever paid much attention to my own generation, known as "the silent generation." It was a great generation in which to be a white man in America, perhaps the best ever. The destructions of World War Two had swept the ground of world competition. America was the last prosperous place on earth. Jobs went begging.
This was also the time of the Beat Generation, and I saw this morning that mother and poet Diane Di Prima had died. So she hasn't quite been forgotten. In writing about how women get broken, she was the one who asked, "How did we come to be contained/ in rooms?"
I was listening to Pres. Obama giving a speech to a parking lot filled with honking cars in Florida. He brought up some good advice that had been given to the young Joe Biden by his mother.
"Joe," she had said, "remember that no one is better than you, and you are better than no one."
Startled by what Obama had said, I suddenly understood why Susan and I had recently voted for Joe Biden. He is better than no one.
This morning tRump seems to be edging up a little. There is a week to go. Let's encourage kith and kin to vote. Let's try to keep the planet habitable.
Last year many people vowed to support anyone but Trump, and now it looks as if Joe Anyone may become President. I have already voted for him. The nation is in trouble. If Anyone can lead us to a better place, he will try.
Anyone is not just anyone. He's been around a long time. Former Republicans and Wall Street centrists in the Democratic party were the first to support Anyone, but how he will govern is anyone's guess. I don't know what Anyone will do next. Not much, probably. Maybe. He might have the opportunity to do something good and make a real name for himself.
The last century's most interesting philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, looked at what constituted a mistake. If memory serves, Wittgenstein used the example of someone who took a test in addition and got every answer wrong. Had the man been making mistakes? No. The man didn't know how to add. To make a mistake in addition, you have to know how to add.
Don Trumpolini presents us with a related problem. "Lying" is a word that goes back to the 1300s. It has several meanings today, but the oldest one is that lying is the opposite of telling the truth.
Trumpolini quite literally does not know what the English word "truth" means. Observers have commented on this. Trumpolini believes that anything he says is, at that moment, true. He can comfortably contradict himself in the same paragraph. Of course, "anything the President says" is not a definition of "truth" in the English language. But not being able to correctly identify the truth makes it impossible for Trumpolini to lie. To lie you must understand the concept of truth.
His inability to tell the truth or lie is, I suppose, a symptom of a much deeper mental disorder. A language is kept in order by other people who tell us if we have used a word incorrectly. But for Trumpolini other people hardly exist except as weak projections of himself.
As near as I can tell, 220,000 people have died from coronavirus in the United States in recent months.
Meanwhile in Taiwan seven people have died. Of course, Taiwan has a smaller population. Everyone knows that. The USA has about 15 times the population of Taiwan.
To be fair, then, we should multiply the Taiwan figure by 15, which gives us 105 deaths there compared to 220,000 deaths here. That is mass murder. Nevertheless the American President will get at least 45% of the votes in November, many of them coming from people who believe that Joe Biden is a cannibal.
In 1968 I was married and in graduate school. And I became a foot soldier in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, teargassed in Buffalo and the District of Columbia. I'd had teargas training in the army. Not a problem.
Tonight Susan and I watched "The Trial of the Chicago Seven" on Netflix. It has about ten great actors in it, sharp dialog and a good look at how things don't change without cost. The movie is quite entertaining even if you were alive at the time and know how it all turns out.
Let's say that a thousand years ago you wanted to buy a small notebook and keep a journal. If you lived in Europe, the first step would be to round up about 35 sheep and have their skins processed into parchment. And so on. Only the top 1% could afford a blank notebook.
In China, at the same time, your grandmother could buy a blank notebook at the corner store. The Chinese had invented cheap paper. They had also invented the brush (used to write with) and someone (perhaps a man named Pi Sheng) had invented moveable type made of porcelain.
Several centuries later, word of paper and moveable type reached Europe, where Gutenberg used a relatively simple alphabet to produce a best seller in the Bible. Soon cheap books were everywhere. There was an information explosion. Science developed, and Europe was made great.
About a hundred back, my grandfather joined the California KKK for one year because they promised free beer at their meetings. That never happened, and, indignant, he quit a year later.
That 1920s version of the KKK was, I think, largely a pyramid scheme. It cost ten dollar to join, and if you brought in a new member, you got to keep five of the dollars. Recruiters did a lot of lying.
The original KKK and related terrorist gangs were murderous thugs, of course. President Grant used the army to crush them. But white supremicists have popped up again and again, today calling themselves "militias," as if private armies were legal. To be blunt, they are armed American terrorists. They should be prosecuted.
Republicans and some others try to compare the terrorist militias to Antifa, which is nonsense. Antifa is not an organization. It is a name for antifascists who wear black pants.
According to my father, Butch and Helen Thomason moved to the desert near Death Valley in the 1930s to try their hand at gold mining. Around 1940 they built a small cabin and outbuilding. They had electricity provided by a windmill and a generator. They took drinking water from a nearby spring.
In 1955 the Thomasons sold their ranch to Jim and Arlene Barker, who had moved to the desert from Oklahoma. To accommodate family gatherings, the Barkers enlarged the cabin and constructed more outbuildings.
Today what remains of the ranch belongs to the National Park Service. A fire in May, 2009, destroyed most of the cabin, leaving only the cement and rock parts standing. The famous bathroom vanity under which Charles Manson attempted to hide from law enforcement is gone.
Inyo County sheriff deputies and National Park Service rangers captured the Manson family on the Barker ranch in October, 1969. One of the deputies (later elected sheriff of Kern County) was my uncle by marriage, Merrill Helm Curtis (1908-1992).
The deputies arrested Manson thinking he might be responsible for some vandalism in the Death Valley National Monument. Later the authorities realized he was a homicidal maniac. Once locked in the county jail, Manson climbed up through a 12-inch vent, entered a crawl space and attempted to break a hole in the wall with a piece of re-bar, Curtis told my father, Lee Goss.
Merrill Curtis was my Aunt Ardith’s first husband. She went through a lot of men fast. I think we once counted eleven marriages. At Christmas my parents would bring along a general present to give to Ardith’s husband, not knowing who would show up.
The men in the family liked to box and fight in the street, and my father, growing up, greatly admired Merrill Curtis’s skills. Merrill was a little older and willing to spar with him. My father was an athlete and a tremendous puncher (he was offered football scholarships to USC and Oregon State). He said he couldn’t lay a hand on Curtis. Too clever.
My grandfather once said that where he came from, everyone was tough.
Susan and I have settled in, back from being evacuated from the Glass fire. We're waiting for our ballots to arrive. For the last year I've been saying that tRump has no chance. He's been killing Americans. He's a threat to my life. He has, as Homer Simpson might put it, gone mad with power and syphilis. (Well, it isn't syphilis, only coronavirus.)
Covid-19 Donny, a super-spreader, is also the worst wheezing butthead ever seen on television. It's true that he solidified the butthead vote, and nothing will destroy that allegiance, but buttheads are not a majority. And some are turning on their idol.
Presidents' wives are usually more popular than their husbands, but now the networks have a phone tape of Melania saying, "Fuck Christmas." Nothing is working for Covid-19 Donny.
We got evacuated, drove two cars south to the City, and we have finally returned to Smokeland. No harm done. Motels are boring. Like everyone we are watching the President's progress in the hospital. I will seize this moment to remind myself that a belief in karma is based on faith (like the belief that Mary was a virgin). Buddha did not believe in karma.
