Black in Sonoma

Sonoma County had, until this week, two division  heads who were Black. They both quit, citing racism as the reason. This county went for Biden by more than 70%, but. . . . 

More than 20% of the citizens here voted for tRump. We are talking about stupid, angry racists. Imagine how they acted when a Black county leader instituted a policy not to their liking. 

The Black leaders also cited daily micro-aggressions. People like me experience micro aggressions about once every 20 years. Imagine that happening every day, much of it really tiresome and clueless. 

Sonoma County is about 25% Hispanic but only 2% Black. A competent leader of color can always get a job someplace more diverse.

de Selby's Wife

At de Selby's 89th birthday celebration, Figgie, his wife of 63 years, told the assembled relatives and friends that she had never read a word her husband had written. No one, not even the press, responded at the time. No one knew what to say. Later several friends speculated that de Selby's wife might be illiterate, so of course she'd read little. One historian suggested that Figgie suffered from erotomania. 

de Selby himself found it difficult to process the new information, which the unkind might see as a dismissal of his life's work as a prominent scholar and exemplar of wisdom. But he soon realized that Figgie had deliberately set him free to write anything he wanted about her. He'd never mentioned her in print. Figgie valued her privacy. Now he could write whatever he pleased, and she would never read it. This was the last great sacrifice of a loving partner, maybe. 

The Passive Boys

Nicole Wallace, an ex-Republican on MSNBC, asks fairly often why the Democrats, faced with the monstrous Trump, aren't as angry as she is. Why don't they coordinate an attack on him? And this is repeated by other ex-Republicans, who learned in their old party how to crush rivals. 

I discovered the answer to Nicole's question some time back. 

About ten years ago, as the least among volunteers, I was answering the phone at a local Democratic HQ, and a drunken woman called in. She wanted to talk to President Obama and tell him he had no balls. When I proved unable to arrange this interchange, she told me that I, too, had no balls.

The secret answer to Nicole Wallace's question is that the Democrats have no balls. There are exceptions, of course, people like Nancy and Bernie. They struggle to get anything done. But they face a wall that is ten feet thick, made up of even thicker lobbyists who guarantee candidates more campaign funds than all the Trumps in Hell. 

Camus Again

Back in the 50s and 60s, young people were reading Albert Camus with great interest and some puzzlement, because most of us had little background in philosophical questions. I'm a little surprised 60 years later suddenly to be seeing references to Camus and to the myth of Sisyphus.  Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill was Camus' central example of how life consisted of work that was pointless and difficult yet good enough.

In brief, Camus was an active participant in the underground resistance to the Nazis in France. He won a Nobel prize for his writings. He said repeatedly that he was not an existentialist. He owed a lot to Nietzsche. He was one of the few leftists in France to denounce Stalin's brutality. 

Now an interest in Camus is back. He started from a belief that everyone (deep inside) sees no evidence that the universe has meaning. Apparently it just exists, as does our small planet. Camus's philosophy is an examination of how people cope with nihilism. 

The most common way of coping is to invent a meaning for life. Perhaps you commit to Leninism or Zeus or to composing operas--that is the leap of faith. Camus regarded the leap as self-deception, as philosophical suicide. His solution was not to deny meaninglessness but to try to live the fullest life possible, to maximize your experiences, which proved hard on some of the people he loved. What is the fullest life? Is that goal a self-deception? 

The Silent Generation

In the October 18th New Yorker, Louis Menand kneecapped authors who write books on imaginary differences between named generations. For the most part generational differences do exist but in small, privileged pockets unrepresentative of the generation as a whole. 

I was interested in my generation. According to Menand, the term "Silent Generation" was coined in Time magazine in 1951, where it referred to people born between 1923 and 1933. But eventually the term "migrated" to those born between 1928 and 1945, which includes me and Susan, my wife. 

Menand notes that the Silent Generation includes such wallflowers as Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, MLK, jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol, and on and on. 

 

How the Parties Respond

My wife will tell you I make the same prediction each year. If the world catches fire, the Republicans will throw gasoline on it, and the Democrats will authorize 25% of what is needed to put the fire out. If it takes 6.5 trillion, they will authorize 1.3 trillion. But I can hope that they will go to 30% or 35%. 

Remembering Colin Powell

Colin Powell left us with much to read, documents historians will be consulting a long time. He wrote the official report that covered up the My Lai massacre. That earned him a quick promotion. His ability to work with others shot him to the top in Washington, where he eventually became Secretary of State. 

“I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male,” Powell once wrote. “If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen (West Germany), Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”

(I'm probably just repeating things you've already heard on news outlets like CNN and MSNBC.) 

Bad Judgment

 

Do some occupations attract people with poor judgment?

About 50% of the Chicago police are refusing to be vaccinated against covid. Meanwhile about 95% of medical doctors in America have had two shots.

 

The American Moderate

In American politics a moderate is a candidate or official who takes money from a corporation in exchange for allowing a lobbyist to write the laws regulating and taxing the corporate entity. 

A moderate is often free to vote his conscience on issues not directly related to corporate wealth like abortion, gay rights and child abuse. He may be for or against these issues. This freedom elevates the moderate above the currant Republican politician  who represents the irrational right and death.

Liberals, progressives and genuine conservatives tend to vote for moderates, as I do, because the viable alternative is fascism. 

 

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Captain Streeter

I tend to think of my family as unnoticed, but what about Captain Streeter? My great-grandfather, Sylvester Streeter Strickland, someone I actually met as a small child and remember, was a descendent of Captain George Wellington Streeter, a name familiar to Chicago historians. 

As I understand it, in 1886, Captain Streeter's boat got stuck on a sandbar in Lake Michigan, so he declared the boat an independent territory and tried, through forgery and chicanery, to lay claim to 186 acres of waterfront property in Chicago. When the rich owners of the acreage refused to pay him off, Streeter turned to selling parts of the property to uninformed buyers. This somehow led my working-class grandmother to claim in court that she owned downtown Chicago. To this day an upscale part of Chicago is called Streeterville. 

Back to Normal

For me normal was when California had 12 million residents; if you wanted to camp in Yosemite, you grabbed your backpack and went.

Over the last 20 years we lost the global warming battle. We didn't try to win it. What's needed now is to mitigate the damage, and we're not ready for that, either. What the future holds is major changes. We will not be going back to normal. But as a medical doctor wrote in my newspaper today, there is a cure for stupidity: it's death. 

de Selby

 My son-in-law recently told us that when de Selby goes on Facebook, his usual comment is, "Why don't you mind your own business?"

Colors on TV

American TV news has a narrow range, mostly confined to the horse race between the Democrats and the Stupid Party. All politics, all day. But I noticed another major flaw, which has to do with skin color. If a news reader is bone white and he wears white cloth, he will look like a sensory deprivation experiment. C'mon, now. Get some color on. 

also on FB

Gerrymander--what is it good for?

When my wife and I were young, we had two friends who became members of the California assembly. Once there they created two congressional districts for themselves. Both remained valuable members of congress for the rest of their working lives. They were Democrats. 

That sort of thing can no longer happen in California.  Now independent commissions shape the districts, following state rules. 

In 26 states today the Republicans control the gerrymandering process, and the Democrats control it in about half that number. In roughly ten states an independent commission does the work.  

Some of the states are so small that they have only one member of the house (and, ridiculously, two senators). In states like that, no federal gerrymander is possible. 

Many of the Republican states (Mississippi, Alabama?) are already gerrymandered to the cockles of their bowels. It will be hard to make them worse.

Oregon is gaining seats that will likely go to Democrats. In New York the Democrats will be in control of gerrymandering for the first time in decades, and the Republicans may lose four or five rotten seats as a result. I expect the states where control has shifted to see the big changes. 

I have no idea how all this adds up.