Long Train to Nowhere

No doubt you have seen one of those long trains, the ones with two or three engines in front and one in back (no caboose these days). You look down the track, and the train rumbles on, hundreds of cars, out of sight. You might ask yourself how many workers are on board.

The correct answer is: one.

Everyone else has been replaced by automation. If that one engineer falls off the train, no one will be on board. Or if the engineer takes out a bottle of whiskey and drinks straight shots, a drunk will be aboard. Or if the engineer grows lonely for a human voice and calls his wife, one inattentive dreamer will be on board. Automation will take care of safety, except when it doesn't.

We're headed for a time when there will be one person working at the General Motors plant, flipping an on/off switch. Meanwhile the unemployment rate for Blacks is about 20%.

Maybe we should start to talk about this.

The South Secedes Again

The first time the South seceded from the United States, two of my great-grandfathers fought as privates to free the slaves. Make no mistake about what and who caused the war. Most of the rich people of the South had most of their money tied up in valuable slaves. That was their capital. They seceded to protect their investment.

Slavery was, as General Grant noted, as bad a cause as anyone ever supported.

In a way we are still fighting the Civil War today; The Tea Party, someone said on television, represents secession. The Tea Party is united around an issue that reminds me of the South in 1860: escape from the federal government. This escape takes many forms: hating people of color and immigrants and viewing women as inferiors (the government offers them some protection); home schooling rather than school district education; crippling all government by cutting its income; ending social security and Medicare; threatening to secede; arming vigilante militias; claiming the government is not legitimate; claiming to represent the original founding fathers (a tactic copied from the South in 1860); freeing itself from a belief in history and in science, including economics, climate studies, biology, geology (the earth is 6,000 years old)--in short, freedom from facts. The object of all this is to prop up a jumbled ideology that is unrelated to reality as our species understands it. Like slavery, Tea Partyism can not be defended rationally.

The good news is that Tea Party represents a minority of voters. The bad news is that we are still fighting for the sanity of a nation.

It's rumored that Rick Perry, a governor of a once Confederate State, who has threatened to secede, may run for the Republican presidential nomination. The Tea Party loves him. I hope he wins the nomination--that should make the situation clear to the majority of Americans, including the 400 families that form our oligarchy. They supported and used the Tea Party in the past, but things got out of hand. Monopoly Capitalism vs. Radical Right Populism--it might make a good monster movie.

The 600 Pound Gorilla

The other day I heard a history professor talking about what had caused the Civil War. At the start of the war, he said, the Southern orators spoke of nothing but the need to protect slavery (slaves were the most valuable property owned in the United States, worth more money than the railroads and manufacturing plants combined). Ten years after the war, the Southern orators began to claim that the war had been started because of many important factors, of which slavery was only one. The war had been fought over states' rights, for example (the right to own slaves) and Northern financial dominance and so on.

You see, the South is no longer quite as certain as it once was that slavery is humane and uplifting and sanctioned by Jesus Christ. So the claim is that the Civil War was fought for many reasons.

The historian drew an analogy. Suppose you went to see King Kong for the first time. Someone later asked you what the movie was about. "A gigantic ape," you replied. Ten years later someone else asks you the same question. "King Kong?" you reply. "It's about many things. The movie is filled with interesting characters."

A Liberal Plot

We pay a heavy price when we elect fools to public office. I remember reading, about ten years ago, that scientists had determined that Sonoma County was undergoing climate change--it was getting hotter at a rate faster than average for the nation as a whole. It occurred to me that this might not be good for premium wine grapes. Much of the economy of Healdsburg depends on fine wine grapes. When I tried to discuss this with the City Hall Old Boys at the time--mostly Republicans--they told me to ignore science. "Climate change is a liberal anti-business myth," they insisted.

Today the main headline in the Press Corporate Democrat is "WARMING CALLED MAJOR THREAT TO GRAPES." All you really need to read is the first sentence: "Global warming could leave half of Napa Valley's famed vineyards unsuitable to grow premium grapes by 2040," according to a Stanford study.

For some vintners, that sort of news is best met by denial. There is one problem with denying the plans of Mother Nature, however: what Mother Nature wants will happen. The consent of vintners and goofy Republican ideologists is not required.

I don't doubt that smarter vintners are working on ways to mitigate the growing heat, and I expect public universities like Davis to find ways to help unless we close them down to save money. All is not lost. But what fools we be.

Our Candidate for President

It's no secret that progressives in general are disappointed with President Obama and that the Facebook Left tends to be outraged. This is not because Obama has accomplished nothing. He gambled his presidency on opening the door to universal health care. He integrated gays into the military. He ended our combat mission in our most pointless and stupid war (Iraq). The problem is that Obama is by temperament a thoughtful centrist who operates in slow motion. That's not what progressives voted for. He's not FDR, Truman, JFK or LBJ.

The Republicans apparently will nominate a daffy liar or an empty suit who caters to the Tea Party. That makes Obama our candidate for President in 2012.

Congressman Weiner

In the long line of political figures who mispronounce their own names, Hamilton Jordan (which he pronounced "Jerdin") used to be my favorite, but now Anthony Weiner, a congressman planning to run for mayor of New York, has pushed Jerdin into second place. Congressman Weiner first became famous as an aggressive defender of progressive ideas. Then he became even more famous for sharing photographic information about the bulge in his underpants and lying about having done this with the fervor of wolverine. Today he has few defenders because people fear the next Weiner surprise.

So far Weiner is guilty of tweeting some suggestive photographs of himself (not a crime) and then lying about it (not a crime). But many people believe his behavior is creepy and find his hard-nosed lying offensive. To date, no real sex has been uncovered, just minor exhibitionism. As a comic said, "Never has anyone lost so much in return for so little."

Should Weiner resign? I don't care. As our entitled political leaders go, he's probably average.

The truth is that men have all sorts of fantastic sexual notions, some of which are physically impossible--but most men don't act out the stupid ones. They grasp the difference between fantasy and reality. They hope no one can read their minds. Weiner lost his grip on the difference and did it in public--anything you put on the internet is public.

Apparently many political leaders cannot get it through their gongs that (1) no matter where they go, someone will be filming them with cell phone, (2) that if they tweet an underpants shot, it will end up on TV, and (3) that if they go on the Colbert show, they will look ridiculous.

--Gary Goss

Iran's Bomb

There is a new American National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Our own government experts state that there is no convincing evidence that Iran is building a weapon. None. Nada. Nothing.

We are boycotting Iran to stop a program that doesn't exist (as far as we know). And we have spies reporting to us from all over Iran. You can read about this. See Seymour Hersh, in the June 6 New Yorker, where he discusses the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

When you spot someone talking on television about when Iran will get the bomb, remember that, as far as our government intelligence agencies are concerned, there is nothing to back up the claim that Iran even has a program in mind. The talking heads are slicing pure baloney.

Two Nonidentical Parties

In case you missed it, yesterday the House of Representatives fell a few votes short of ending the war in Afghanistan. Democrats voted against the war by a margin of 178 to 8. The Republicans voted for the war 207 to 26.

Palestine and Israel

Two unrelated thoughts. . . .

1. President Obama ventured into the 3,000 year war between Israel and the Palestinians this week, suggesting that peace talks should begin with a discussion of the 1967 borders (with land concessions from both sides) and that the Palestinians not take this to the United Nations (why not?). He tried to give something to both sides and took a tiny half-step in the Palestinian direction. As a consequence he is under attack by both sides with the Republicans promoting comments somewhere to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The conflict remains, for now, intractable. Hamas, elected by the Palestinians, is still devoted to the complete destruction of Israel, while Israel. with its elected leaders, is still devoted to a humiliating apartheid repression of the Palestinians. But adults don't give up on peace. Obama deserves credit for attempting to move things along. In the end peace can come only from the Palestinians and Israelis, and my unorthodox view, approved of by few, is that this is one more war the United States should withdraw from.

2. Dan Walters, a conservative columnist for the Sacramento Bee, not often a favorite of mine, has published a piece on California's two-tiered economy. When he pointed out that Asian women in California have a life expectancy of 18 years more than Black males, it reinforced the truth that the rich live longer than the poor. If you value life, that's something to keep in mind. The two-tiered economy is not new, of course. The New Yorker recently noted that in 1887 the top one percent of Americans owned fifty-one per cent of the nation's wealth. That's worse than today, and it was the ideal Wall Street Republican nation, composed of the Rich and the wage slaves. Who needs a middle class?