Happy Holidays 2024

 

These beauteous forms, 

Through a long absence, have not been to me

 As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye; 

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

 Felt in the blood and felt along the heart; 

And passing even into my purer mind,

 With tranquil restoration—feelings too

 Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

 As have no slight or trivial influence

 On that best portion of a good man’s life,

 His little, nameless, unremembered acts

 Of kindness and of love.

 Nor less, I trust,

 To them I have owed another gift,

 Of aspect more sublime; the blessed mood

 In which the burthen of the mystery,

 In which the heavy and the weary weight

 Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood

 In which the affections gently lead us on…

William Wordsworth

King Chaos

This was the Time cover in January 2021,
an artist's acid rendition of the chaos
Homegrown Hitler left behind. This
December 2024, Time named him
Man of the Year.

After the election there was talk of a Resistance but what we've seen so far is the opposite.   Late in the campaign  Jeff Bezos was accused of "anticipatory obedience" in caving in to Chaos by dumping the Washington Post's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.  It's the historical lesson that wannabe dictators consolidate power when people not only fail to resist but rush their compliance without being asked, let alone forced.

Now even some of the people who warned of anticipatory obedience are openly engaging in it.  More than that, they are among those fawning all over him.

  Billionaires like Bezos and Zuckerberg were first in line, the owner of the LA Times quashed another editorial criticizing Chaotic cabinet choices, and of course Elon is relishing his power over the federal money that supports his ventures (he just wants to deny that money to anyone else, not only the aforementioned Bezos and Zuckerberg, but the poor, the sick and the old.  Just about everyone. And he sure doesn't want to pay any of the tax money he's eager to spend.)  Elon himself has made over 90 billion dollars since the election, without lifting a finger.  That's billions with a B.  Update: Make that 200 billion new dollars.  My apologies for shortchanging him.

CEOs including Tim Cook of Apple are lining up behind them to genuflect, as banks and billionaires produce millions in donations for the inaugural party.  They're apparently hoping to be part of an oligarchy, with or without a dictatorship.

 Meanwhile in Washington, instead of making Chaos fire them, FBI director Wray and Special Prosecutor Jack Smith are quitting. The federal cases have already gone away, the 34 felonies are to be swept under the rug in New York, and ABC has settled a Chaos suit against them, blowing off the First Amendment.

And on the day that Wall Street invited him to do their ceremonial opening or closing or whatever it was, Time Magazine named him Man of the Year.  It's his second stint with that designation, which equals the number of times he was impeached.

And where is the Resistance?  Whose voice is raised in opposition?  None other than Mitch McConnell, the embodiment of evil who helped enable the rise of Chaos, no longer leading the Senate but still in it, loudly opposing Chaos foreign policy (namely the surrender of Ukraine to Russia and the dismantling of NATO) and the Chaotic proposal (for Chaos now includes not only the man but those he empowers) to deny approval to polio vaccines.  

So what's the problem?  Well, let's start with hypocrisy.  Either people really believed that Chaos is an unparalleled danger to democracy, to the American people and to the future, or they didn't, and don't.  And it's not that Chaos is repudiating much from his campaign.  He's still bent on mass deportations, tariffs that will spike inflation, taking an ax to health care, Medicare and Social Security; he's said again that he believes everyone on the commission that investigated the invasion of the U.S. Capitol and his role in it should be jailed, and that's a message that his attorney-general is not going to miss.  He's already started the lawsuits against opponents, his congressional puppets are smelling investigations of Liz Cheney.

He's busy appointing far right ideologies and incompetents to wreak havoc on every function of the federal government that materially affect every last person in the United States, not to mention a drunk to run the Pentagon--what could go wrong there? And a history of at least allegations of sex offenses appears to be a qualification.

So apart from hypocrisy--not exactly unknown in politics--what's the problem?  Isn't it fair to just wait and see?  Well, we're going to.  But in larger terms, this all goes beyond normalization towards valorization, and only increases the power of Chaos.  He doesn't have to wait to be inaugurated President--he's fawned over like a king.

And therefore that power eases the possibilities of the next steps.  If Chaos actually aspires to dictatorship that goes beyond four little years, those steps include empowering armed supporters and taking control of the military. 

Take his FBI appointment for a start. Appointing someone whose chief qualification is his loyalty to Chaos already corrupts justice. Doubtless attention will focus on the use of the FBI and Justice Departments to go after the enemies of Chaos.  But there's something else: appointing someone who says he wants to cripple the FBI may well have the function of releasing the right wing militias, the armed hate groups and white supremacists from the efforts of the FBI to restrain them.  I wouldn't be surprised to see them marching at the Inauguration.  Given enough encouragement, they are the natural candidates to become the equivalent of Hitler's brownshirts.  And of course there are those insurrectionists who will be pardoned out of jail.

But control of the military is the most important, and Chaotic supporters are out to rid the Pentagon of anyone who might oppose them.  A purge may be in the offing.  It will be worth watching out for--because it's the Chaos style to say a lot of outrageous things and do a lot at once, misdirection by publicity and exhausted attention.  

That's the dictatorship playbook: neutralize opposition (or just watch the opposition neutralize itself), create chaos, get control of the engines of force, which includes the law and power over lives that depend on Social Security, Obamacare, and the work of a thousand agencies, but definitely includes stacking Justice, the FBI, IRS and other punitive agencies, and the military with far right ideologies and just plain lackeys.

Chaos may be too chaotic to pull this off, but this anticipatory coronation isn't going to help stop it. It only makes it more possible.  

People who have to deal with him have to deal with him, but symbolic resistance is necessary at this point to encourage the real kind when chaos really gets started.  Democrats, including the President and Vice-President, staying away from the Inauguration would say something big.  Some congressional Democrats are reportedly already organizing such a boycott.

And it's not like Chaos has any respect for norms. Does anyone remember how Homegrown Hitler treated President-elect Biden?  He did not invite him to the White House, he subverted the transition and he did not attend Biden's Inauguration.

 President Biden may want to show that he's a better man, and of course he is.  But let's not continue normalizing Chaos. For one thing, any Democrats (should they be invited) who attends the inauguration of Chaos are doing just that.  This is the time to stop normalizing.  This is not normal.

Advice for the Age of Chaos: As Well As You Can, For As Long As You Can

 On January 18, 2017, three days before Homegrown Hitler was inaugurated, Margaret Atwood's essay on "What Art Under Trump" was published in the Nation magazine.  It now appears in her latest collection, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004 to 2021.

As we consider life once again under Homegrown Hitler but this time (as they say) on steroids-- a figure I refer to simply as Chaos, I offer the concluding words of that essay.  Directed specifically to artists and writers, it perhaps has broader application, and broader wisdom.

“As once-solid certainties crumble, it may be enough to cultivate your own artistic garden—to do what you can as well as you can for as long as you can do it; to create alternate worlds that offer both temporary escapes and moments of insight; to open windows in the given world that allow us to see outside it.

With the Trump era upon us, it’s the artists and writers who can remind us, in times of crisis or panic, that each one of us is more than just a vote, a statistic. Lives may be deformed by politics—and many certainly have been—but we are not, finally, the sum of our politicians. Throughout history, it has been the hope for artistic work that expresses, for this time and place, as powerfully and eloquently as possible, what it is to be human.”

Margaret Atwood

Thanksgiving 2024

 The Thanksgiving dinner I'm thinking of this particular year is the one in the 2021 movie Don't Look Up.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays a midwestern university astronomer whose graduate student (Jennifer Lawrence) discovered a new comet. When he realizes the comet is on a collision course with Earth, and its impact would kill most life on the planet, he tries to warn everyone. 

It's a serious subject, a kind of updated remake of the 1951 movie When World's Collide, but it's also a political satire very much akin to Dr. Strangelove.  The President (played by Meryl Streep) is a female Trump, and in an suddenly more accurate addition, her right hand man is the tech billionaire (Mark Rylance) modelled mostly on Elon Musk.  

The astronomers try to persuade the authorities to take the extinction threat of the comet seriously.  At first they don't (nor does the news media) but when they need a political distraction, they pretend to address it--until the tech billionaire convinces the president that he has a way to divert the comet and still exploit its mineral riches.  (Spoiler: he doesn't.) Eventually the President makes ignoring the comet into a political fetish. She whips up her adoring rally crowd, adorned in a baseball cap with her motto, "Don't Look Up."  It's already visible but if you don't look up to see it, the comet won't be there. It won't be real.  Instead, look down and check your Black Friday deals.

One analogue to the comet is the Covid pandemic, but mostly it's climate distortion. Climate distortion is the comet that will destroy civilization and life as we know it on Earth.

Eventually the comet crashes into Earth, but by that time the president and her billionaire have left the building, though their prospects on a distant planet appear dubious.  Still, the point is made: the super rich and the ideologues who serve them, fuck things up and let everyone else suffer the consequences.  As usual.

The dinner is at the astronomer's middle class home. It may not actually be Thanksgiving Day, but it seems like that kind of meal.  Gathered around the table are his family, and the strays that became a family in trying to save the Earth.  They've finished the meal, and are praising the quality of the coffee, when the DiCaprio character looks around and says, "We really did have everything, didn't we?"  And the next moment the table shakes and the walls implode.

In comparison, our apocalypse is in slower motion, but it is underway.  Due in part to the short time left, when squandering four years could be fatal, the chances of doing much about climate distortion as a society, as a global community, have just about disappeared. That's thanks to the results of a corrupted election, bent by illegal foreign interference by Putin and others, and Musk's money and power over a major information medium, and perhaps a lot more than that. 

With a Harris presidency we had a chance of a useful approach to the inexorable effects of climate disruption, and prospects for humanity in the farther future.  For one thing, Kamala Harris as v.p. is the only official I've ever heard speak of the crisis in terms of causes and effects. She knows her stuff. She had the potential of finally articulating the known dimensions and the tasks ahead.  

 We don't know for sure but it's likely that we are almost out of time to do much even about the far future.  We still had a chance to get ahead of the effects in the nearer future--and the present we're ignoring by not looking up--instead of trying to only deal with each disaster as it occurs. Those effects are certainly coming.  But on the federal level and in many states, addressing and anticipating those effects isn't likely to happen either.

It seemed that this slow- motion apocalypse presented opportunities to address its effects and its causes.  But the fact that it was a slow-motion apocalypse also made it easier for some people to ignore what is really happening.  Now the institutions that we would depend on to clarify what needs to be done, and to organize our resilience, are going to be bled dry if not completely destroyed.  The stability and strength necessary to deal with the international problems that are already happening--such as the pressures of climate migration--may be willfully and needlessly destroyed.  What would have been chaotic may now become chaos.

For the past 40 years or so, each Republican administration that screwed the economy and weakened government's ability to meet needs of the people was followed by a Democratic administration that spent 4 to 8 years undoing as much of the damage as it could.  But that's going to be much harder this time, even if the growing electoral college disadvantage (and the Supreme Court) can be overcome.  

Because--enter Chaos, formerly known around here as Homegrown Hitler, and more generally as the Orange One.  The extent of the destruction his administration is already planning for the federal government would take a long time to restore, and might never be undone.  The place of America in the world-- economically and politically (as a great power, but also a beacon to the world for its stability and the rule of law)--may be ended.  We'll be lucky if in four years America is not a client state of Russia. 

The last time Homegrown Hitler was elected, some had the excuse of not knowing what he would do.  This time everybody who cared to listen knew what he planned to do. Severe damage to this country and to many other countries in the world will be self-inflicted, and hard to forgive or forget. America might never live down the humiliation of electing a wannabe dictator and what amounts to a criminal organization to run the country.  A lot of other things this country has never experienced suddenly could be possible, like a dictatorship, and then even a military coup or a revolution.

Apparently there were enough voters in the swing states to elect a criminal, a sexual predator and de facto rapist and de facto traitor, who is appointing a government led by other criminals, sexual predators, de facto rapists and de facto traitors--a group notable for truly alarming ignorance as well as suicidal ideology.  Those voters effectively voted against democracy, and as Margaret Atwood said, now we'll see how they like it.

So good luck to those voters in Georgia and North Carolina the next time there's a hurricane and they sit in the rubble of their homes for months before they see a FEMA representative throw them a roll of paper towels. Good luck to them in Arizona and Nevada when they can't get fresh fruit and vegetables from Mexico. Good luck to them in Wisconsin and Michigan if the inevitable next pandemic hits soon and the federal government does not permit a vaccine. Good luck to them in Pennsylvania and all the swing states when prices go up, and then unemployment, and the economy hits the danger zone again, with no one in power with the sense to do anything but make it worse.  And therefore, good luck to us all.

 And good luck to those voters in PA and Ohio when they feel the effects of losing seniority and savvy in the Senate, and in Montana they watch a senator who knows nothing about their state and cares less, or in Texas they endure another six years of a coward co-conspirator in insurrection, interested only in his own power and comfort.

Good luck to the small dying cities revived by immigrants who see their lifeblood drained, and to an America that thinks highly of itself as good and humane, as families are torn apart and more women die for lack of medical care that is standing there, too afraid to act.  Good luck to an America that thinks itself peaceful and well-ordered by law and not racist at all when the high tech hobnail boots come to their towns and cities and drag people from their homes.  Then we'll see how well this philosophy serves them: don't look up. Don't look at reality.  Keep your eyes on your lying phones.  

Taken all together, it's hard not to conclude that the apocalypse timetable has been sped up.  It may turn out to be more like collision with a comet that it seemed it would just a month ago.

So this Thanksgiving we can savor what we have now, and what we've had.  Probably no generations since the Pleistocene had it better, especially materially, than those who lived in America after World War II until now.  Despite a rough ride through those decades, we really did have everything.  

Happy Thanksgiving.

Life's Tallest Order

 

“There is a solace in finality and a grace in resignation, no matter what one is resigned to—death, helplessness, the end of chance, resignation itself. But life’s tallest order is to keep the feelings up. To make two dollars worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can’t do that. So fiction does. And there, right there, is the real-- I want to say ‘only’ morality of fiction. Not much, is it? It’s all there is.”

Stanley Elkin

A Long Time Coming

“…We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime."

Franz Kafka, from Conversations With Kafka 

Been Here Before, Sort Of (Ending with a Joke)

 

In a personal sense, obviously I've been here before.  An incomprehensible election result, anticipation of at least four years of consternation and despair.  

This one of course is incomprehensible on steroids, as are the likely consequences. (And what suggests itself as comprehensible is almost too ugly to contemplate.) 

But the consequences are yet to come, and the task now is to tamp down the adrenal panic, and proceed prudently.  Part of the panic is not knowing how to protect ourselves.  There doesn't seem to be much we can do, especially at our age.  Flight means different sets of difficulties, for few places on Earth are going to be untouched.  We're vulnerable, but so are many, many others, including those far more vulnerable than we.

So now it's just occupying ourselves, attending to the moment at home while at same time living for awhile in other worlds in books etc.  When I've been out this week--walking, at the nearest grocery, a hike up Trinidad Head--people have been unfailingly gentle, polite and kind.  It may be the last calm before the onslaught of storms, and since we suspect it is, it has a sense of unreality that goes with life going on as before.

There are maybe two things different about it this time.  The first is about the country and therefore the world, which is that this is a more thorough catastrophe.  Maybe the nation will be so fucked up that in four years the Democrats take power again, but...they'll have to reinvent themselves first.  Everything about politics and elections--political operatives and campaign theorists, pollsters and media--are all utterly discredited.  That's even just assuming that what just happened is political in that sense.  It feels more societal, and that doesn't bode well for change.  In fact, given the pressures on our system that nature will provide, as well as wily dictators, it bodes well for chaos.  From what little news I've allowed myself to see, that's already begun.  But it may take some time to reach critical mass.

The second, since I'm taking a personal perspective here, is age.  The aging life is likely to make its own demands on my time and attention, forcing its priorities.  What's going on in the outside world probably won't help, may materially hurt, but eventually it all becomes part of the same thing: living in time.

So if I'm fortunate I can find the inner and outer resources to complete the work I want to do, the final acts of witness to the world I've experienced, a world now almost totally gone.  And live partly in those alternate worlds of story, of memory, of my remaining capabilities. 

But for now it's one day at a time.  Or one hour, as I deal with sleep and other physical issues, the day is seldom predictable.  I'm also finding that shorting out the anxiety during the day seems to simply move it to when I'm asleep.  I can feel it strongly then, making sleep lighter and more broken at best.

 As I cast about for things to occupy me away from all this, I was provided with the sight of a book on a shelf I didn't remember putting there, in plain sight of where I walk by several times a day.  It was an account of Paul Newman directing a film version of The Glass Menagerie in the early 1980s.  I'd not read it before.  And also, when looking for something  I didn't find, I saw that I had a film version of this play on VHS I'd never watched, a library discard.  It's the same Paul Newman directed film.  So I'm now reading the book, and then I'll watch the film.

Margaret suggested I also look at film comedies I have that I like (and mostly that she doesn't); the Marx Brothers and so on.  So far I've reveled in some Rocky and Bullwinkle (the administration of Whatsamatta University is meeting because the school is going broke.  "Why don't we give Daddy Warbucks an honorary degree?"  "Daddy Warbucks is a fictional character," the president scoffs.  The guy who suggested it looks stricken.  "You mean we're real?")

I've also got DVDs of a great unheralded Italian comedy, "Big Deal on Madonna Street," and a package of 1980s comedies including "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun."  And the Marx Brothers, of course.

Margaret also learned a joke going around now, likely in European circles:

Q. What borders on Stupidity?

A. Canada and Mexico.

Kamala's Call

2025

 “Beings are owners of their actions, heirs of their actions; they originate from their actions, have their actions as their refuge.”

Majjima Nikaya, 

Buddhist teaching

There is nothing about this election I understand, except its very dire consequences.  

I guess I'm not alone in this.  Half the country seems to be having a nervous breakdown today.

For me, I realize that this hasn't been the world I've known for some time, but now it is a truly alien country.

America is in disgrace today.  Our system has failed, beginning with the judiciary, that sent hundreds to jail for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, but failed to bring its leader to justice.  The result is we have a man who was impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, who is guilty of 34 felonies and charged with what amounts  to multiple treasonous acts, handed fateful power again.  Now everyone is endangered (except perhaps a few billionaires), including the selfish saps who voted for Chaos.

2025 was always shaping up to be a fateful year.  For the international effort to address the climate crisis through the Paris Agreements, 2025 is a benchmark year. Several targets for that year are almost certainly going to be missed.  Needless to say, the new US government will officially not care. Meanwhile the emission of the main greenhouse gases reached record levels in 2023, after one of the highest one year increases from 2022 despite international commitments to lower emissions.

In all the campaign fuss, a few relevant news items were obscured, such as the latest UN climate conference which called for "no more hot air" instead of action, and a "quantum leap in ambition" if the goals of limiting greenhouse gases sufficiently is to be attained.

 And the story that half a million people around the world were killed since 2004 in natural disasters made worse by climate distortion--more deaths than caused by wars, terrorism and malnutrition combined.  The predicted expansion of formerly tropical diseases has also begun, with outbreaks of malaria, cholera and dengue in new regions.

Now of course we've elected to have multiple other very dangerous crises and soon.  Perhaps even before the US commits economic suicide with global consequences, we've learned that Russia is enlisting North Korean troops to fight Ukraine, coupled with the kowtowing to Putin by Musk and of course Chaos himself, threatening Ukraine's existence, the western alliance and eventually the sovereignty of the United States.

I could go on but who's listening? I haven't slept since Monday night.  Every time I started to fall asleep, another terrible consequence would attack me.

 On November 6 the sun came up on the beginning of a very different world, for everyone.  And really really really, not in a good way. 

Numbers V. The Vibe

 The day has come.  My impression of it as the voting begins is the stark difference between the so-called numbers and the vibe.

The numbers people, the data people, parse what they continue to call an extremely close race.  Ace NYT numbers guy Nate Cohn worries aloud that the polls may underestimate Chaos again, and ace NYT numbers guy Nate Silver sees the Chaos shadow everywhere.  No momentum for Kamala, a dour razor thin election.

But out there on the campaign trail for the past week or more the contrast has been almost mythic.  The Harris campaign is exuberant, expansive, joyful.  She sounds like a winning candidate talking to the electorate that will soon be her constituency.  Chaos sounded broken, dazed and depressed.  She sounds like a winner.  He sounded like a loser.

 The Harris campaign, fusing Democrats, Republicans and the unaffiliated, is unified.  The federal and state Republican organizations are detached, the Chaos campaign itself is riven with public infighting.  

The momentum has been visible, palpable. Kamala Harris drew ever-increasing crowds.  Huge crowds everywhere--20,000 was not unusual.  75,000 in Washington.  The sprawling crowd for her last event in Philadelphia may have been upwards of 30,000.  The last Chaos rallies showed empty seats, people leaving.  

The numbers people say it's a tossup.  The vibe says that America is finally done with him.

To be sure, there's plenty of good news in the numbers for Harris.  The final Marist poll puts her national numbers at 51% to Chaos 47%, which has been the number that has sounded right to me this week. (Reading between the lines, I think the Harris campaign is figuring on a 50/48% split.)  The NYT & some other big polls are tied nationally, and the swing states very close.  But even in the NYT poll, Harris is ahead in more of those states.  The same in other polls, though it's not always the same states.  Then there's that surprising Iowa poll with Harris ahead there, which may suggest layers and movement that other polls aren't picking up. 

And there are the other numbers: the number of Harris staff and volunteers, the number of calls they're making and doors they're knocking on, vs. the conspicuous absence of Chaos workers.  A superior get out the vote effort is worth at least half a percentage point, they say.  Once again, these numbers suggest the vibe--the enthusiasm that is motivating, that could create the bandwagon effect of an obviously winning campaign.

And it seems that nobody but maybe Nate Siler and Nate Cohn believe Chaos will win.  Observers as different as Michael Moore and Bill Kristol not only foresee a Harris victory, but one that will be clear by midnight tonight, though a lot of votes will likely still be uncounted.

What to expect?  The first crucial results will probably be Georgia and North Carolina, either or both of which are expected to have definitive results by say 9 or 10 p. EST.  If Harris wins one, the most direct path to victory for Chaos has been severed, and it's time to put the champagne in the fridge.  If she wins them both, then something big is happening. 

Michigan and Wisconsin may also report enough votes by say 11 p. to show the shape of votes to come.  If she wins those as well as Georgia and North Carolina, it's time to to pop the cork.  If she has won one, then it may take awhile for her to officially get the two votes she needs.

If results are mixed, then the wait for Pennsylvania returns, which could be late Wednesday or Thursday.  Nevada and Arizona could take a week or even two to complete their count.  Any or all of them could be projected by the networks before the night is out. But if margins are truly razor thin, the suspense will continue past the weekend.  

But the vibe says no.  It says that women--including a healthy minority of Republican women, a plurality of unaffiliated women, have not forgotten the abortion bans.  It says that young voters are excited, Black and Latino voters are motivated, older voters are disgusted with and alarmed by Chaos, so they will turn out to vote for Harris.   It says that many former Chaos voters may be like Chaos campaign staffers who would be glad if he just goes away. They may stay home. At his last events, it was clear that if Chaos was trying to appeal to anyone, it was right wing conspiracy fringe.

The vibe says Texas and Florida may not be out of reach.  And yes, Iowa.  It says that the Dems may squeak out a Senate and House majority.  

Even some of the numbers people suggest that the polls aren't picking up late registrants, their models might not work anymore anyway,  and in an election with a coalition of Ds and Rs (and a Generation Z that prefers to register unaffiliated), how people will actually vote based on registration is even more unpredictable than usual.  The vibe says that even if the numbers are even, there are enough ways to "overperform" them to win.

The vibes were all on display on Monday night. They say President Harris.

If you haven't voted, vote.  Be grateful you experienced the Harris campaign.   Soon we learn our fate. Let's hope the vibes are right.  Because what's at stake is the future.  Possibly all of it.   

Harrison Ford Adds His Voice

one of the two campaign ads Harrison Ford made for Kamala Harris.  It's how he says it, right?

Freedom 2024

 On Friday October 25, Kamala Harris held an impassioned rally in Houston that focused entirely on the issues involving reproductive rights.  The next night, in Kalamazoo, Michigan (temporarily renamed Kamalazoo), Michelle Obama spoke for 40 minutes before Harris, also focusing on women's health issues.  These were powerful events, on an issue that thanks to what's happened as a result of the Chaotic supreme court decision erasing the rights affirmed in the Roe v. Wade case decades before, has assumed great importance. 

If Chaos was not threatening to trash the Constitution and fully become Homemade Hitler, it would easily qualify as the issue of paramount importance.  Even with this, it's right up there.  Because it is about so much more than a woman's right to choose.  It's about a woman's right to live.

This was revealed earlier in the campaign with the report confirming that two women had died in Georgia because they were not given medical care by doctors terrified of arrest and incarceration under one set of the extreme laws passed by a number of states that criminalize medical care.  It was further emphasized in the days following these speeches with the confirmation of a similar--and similarly heartbreaking--case in Texas in which an otherwise health young woman in distress was left by doctors to suffer and die.  This woman did not enter the hospital to have an abortion; she was there to give birth.  But there were tragic complications that required procedures that had essentially been outlawed.

That this is happening in America should shock every American, and every American should demand that these cruel laws be abolished.  Reproductive rights for all women is at the center of this, but because of these laws, the danger goes far beyond restricting abortion.  Women who get pregnant with the intention of bearing the child can suffer from miscarriages.  That is tragic enough, but add to it the denial of care that has been routinely offered for as long as it has existed, because of these laws.  It has led to young women bleeding to death, alone and afraid.

Michelle Obama was eloquent also on the ripple effects of the Chaos abortion bans.  They are driving women's health facilities out of business, and so denying routine care to millions of women, including preventive care and early diagnosis of cancers and other life-threatening ailments.  They are discouraging doctors from specializing in women's care, and medical students from learning it.  

As both women emphasized, this is an issue not just for women but for men who have women in their lives--including their mothers and sisters and daughters.  It is in fact a human rights issue.  This is an abrogation of human dignity in America that is morally on the level of slavery.

The solution is the return of reproductive rights as guaranteed under the Roe decision, but this time written into federal law so that no corrupt court or repulsive legislature can deny them.  That can be accomplished by electing Kamala Harris to the presidency, and Democrats to both houses of Congress. 

  Among the avalanche of revealing statements that Chaos is making in the last week or so of this campaign was his assertion that he would be the protector of women "whether the women like it or not."  Spoken like a true sexual predator and supreme misogynist.  There are signs that this issue as well as others are driving women to the polls in record numbers.  That includes Republican women and the many primarily younger women who register to vote as unaffiliated to any party.  There are so many issues of such great importance that this one has slipped to the background in media coverage and analysis.  On November 5, that may really change, big time.  

Haunted by 2016

As we careen closer to Halloween and a fateful election day, I'm not the only one who is haunted by the specter of 2016. 

 I have the advantage--if you can call it that--of this blog, which was very active during the 2016 campaign.  My 199 posts speak of shock and outrage and disgust at the lying and vitriol of the Republican candidate's campaign--a figure who I soon began to call Homegrown Hitler, a dictator wannabe.  

But Hillary Clinton remained comfortably ahead in the polls, and it seemed inconceivable that she would lose against a so clearly unqualified, unfit and utterly vile opponent.  And there's plenty of other resemblances to this year's campaign.  There were warnings of the dangers he posed.  Towards the end of the campaign, amid big rally appearances by Barack and Michelle Obama and, yes, Bruce Springsteen, Hillary told voters, "I'm all that stands between you and the apocalypse."

Pollsters and their ilk began to offer percentages of probability on the outcome.  Hillary was touted as having a 90% chance of winning.  One site--was it the Huffington Post?--gave her a 100% probability.

I was so disgusted and disheartened by the tawdriness of the campaign and the media coverage of it that I began to post videos of various versions of the song, "On the Sunny Side of the Street,": everybody from Gale Storm to Willie Nelson with Tony Bennett, and Esperanda Spalding's performance of it at the Obama White House.

So I sang that song to myself as I walked to my polling place, encouraged by the actual sunny day, and I voted (as it turned out, for the last time in person on Election Day as I had for every election before it since 1972.)

That night I started out on my computer staring at the New York Times now infamous needle of probability.  The evening began with Hillary having more than an 80% chance of being elected President.  Then it began to slip away.  Suddenly it was at 50%.  Then it fell to the other side of the dial, never to return.

To call that night and the subsequent weeks traumatic is to suggest why I am still haunted (and as I mentioned in my Halloween origins post, haunted means to be inhabited by.  These days we say "lives rent free in my head", which does not quite evoke the same emotional weight.  Haunted says it better.)

So much is different in 2024, and yet so much is repeated.  The candidate I now refer to as Chaos is even more openly running for tyrant, even more obviously unhinged and vile, with no limit to the ugly pernicious lies.  His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is saying, though in different words, that this time she really is all that stands between us and the apocalypse, and with overwhelming evidence that this time it may be literally true.

Commentators may say that we're in the classic campaign mode of Republicans being overconfident and Democrats dizzy with worry.  Maybe so, but once traumatized, twice shy.  Haunted by 2016, we anxiously examine any evidence that we're for an even worse shock this time. 

 In conventional political terms, by every measure, there has never been a worse candidate than Chaos.  But the conventional wisdom is that the election is still up for grabs, and at the moment, I detect the sense of the New York Times, for instance, and other mainstream media outlets that Chaos is more likely to win.  It may be that after stories about the women's vote and abortion, the youth vote, the absolutely unprecedented flood of Republican former officeholders and even current officeholders continuing to come out for Kamala, their reporters have rediscovered working class discontent, now (perhaps) moving beyond white men.  Or they think they know something.

That impression is bolstered by the utter cowardice exhibited by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times--and especially their billionaire owners--in preventing planned endorsements of Kamala Harris and suddenly deciding not to endorse for President (despite endorsing for other offices.)

 Think about the ignominy of this.  Who in this world risks less in speaking their minds than multi-billionaires?  There are Republican politicians who have seriously risked their careers by endorsing Harris.  There are women who have risked retribution by telling their stories of the deadly effects of abortion bans, and publicly endorsed Harris.  Yet these billionaires who fear that regulation, taxes, investigations might cut into their profits when they already have obscene amounts of money, don't want to offend Chaos more than they have. They dishonor the traditionally great newspapers they own in the bargain. But their cowardice also looks like an indicator that they believe Chaos has a good chance of winning. 

There are more conventional issues that could go against Harris. I've written before that in my lifetime the one economic phenomenon that most upsets voters has always been higher prices.  Grocery prices, housing, fast food prices-- there are going to be voters for whom this is paramount in voting against somebody that is associated with somebody they think is responsible.  Such issues link up with latent misogyny and overall resentment.  And it's true that a society that continues to operate with the very rich getter immeasurably richer and everyone else sliding down is going to face a reckoning sooner or later.  That this is precisely the wrong way to express it--that it will only make matters worse and further empower the very rich--is a true thought, but not a feeling.

At the Atlantic, Tom Nichols argues a variation on this: he writes that some of this resentment is so strong that anything that Chaos says that outrages those perceived as better off pleases them, and makes Chaos more attractive.  It's the old "owning the libs" refrain, but extended.  He loves Hitler?  He says he'll send armed soldiers after television personalities who criticize him?  That's taking it to them.  The more chaos that Chaos creates the better--that is, until prices go up 20% and recession hits, Social Security goes broke with a 30% cut in current benefits, all results of announced Chaos policies economists predict.  

Chaos pushes his extremist lies about immigrants, but Democrats only ignore these statements and their effects.  They talk about Chaos as a fascist.  But judging from his huge Madison Square Garden rally, right out of the Hitler playbook, there is a market for fascism.

They don't even need to be a majority.  We're forced to accept the reality that this election is going to be determined in a few swing states, and therefore by a minority.  The last Republican candidate for President to win the popular vote was GW Bush in 2004 (and he didn't win it in 2000.)  Hillary won the most total votes for President.  But it didn't matter.  (I should add that this year, there is some possibility that another state or two beyond the designated swing states could turn out to be surprising and decisive.)

Now most political analysts still feel Harris will win, but until recently, people like Nichols and Nate Silver haven't said out loud that they feel it will be Chaos.  So it's time to listen to somebody like Simon Rosenberg. 

 He's a numbers guy and veteran of nearly 40 years of Democratic campaigns.  He warns against the flood of specious Republican sponsored polls that are again trying to screw with expectations.  He says that a real pollster for the Republican party recently told him he sees the race shifting back to Harris.  Some analysts see evidence in recent polls of a late break towards Harris. Rosenberg also notes that Chaos got fewer votes than his opinion polls suggested he would in nearly all of his primaries--which means that this flood of Republican support for Harris has some political basis among Republican voters.  

Rosenberg touts the Democratic ground game, money for ads, Harris being seen as more likeable than Chaos, her drawing even on the economy, and the massive enthusiasm for the Harris campaign that has the potential of bringing in new voters and motivate them to vote.  That's in addition to the expected power of women voting especially on the abortion issue, as evidenced in virtually every actual election that's been held since the deep-sixing of Roe v. Wade freedoms.  He praises the Harris campaign as the most skillful and savvy in modern history (as do others.)  Harris held the largest Arizona rally in that state's history, and the latest in Atlanta was 23,000.

While the folks Nichols references are happy with unhinged Chaos, Rosenberg cites focus groups that show other voters are increasingly disturbed by Chaos rhetoric and behavior.  He believes--as the Harris campaign evidently believes--that this is a winning issue, especially with Republican voters who can no longer stomach Chaos.  (The Harris campaign is also hammering the issue of reproductive freedom, which I'll expand on in a later post.)

 To me Rosenberg is a little less persuasive in talking of the Harris campaign money advantage, especially for ads, because Hillary had a similar advantage, and there's a huge amount of dark money being spent on Chaos.  But undoubtedly the bulge of official contributions to Harris financed hiring staff for sophisticated voter outreach, organizing events in swing states that go way beyond the big rallies and so on. Getting out the vote is not necessarily going to show up in polls (although the latest national poll, by ABC, shows a Harris surge.)  But closing strong is the key to the Harris campaign strategy.

 Rosenberg is a persuasive and articulate voice--he even advises on how to survive the negative noise, and maybe even the haunting of 2016.  (Like don't dwell on it, as I've just done.) "Worry less, do more" is his closing mantra. In addition to his videos he has a campaign news site called the Hopium Chronicles, which I'm certainly going to be checking.  

I've voted by mail, and my vote has been confirmed and is on the books here in California.  I've contributed to the campaign.  All of my eligible family members in western PA are voting Kamala. I'm getting "President Harris" on repeat in my head. Despite my 2016 haunting, I'm daring to once again direct my feet to the sunny side of the street. 

Origins: Halloween

 

Halloween has got to be the weirdest holiday, and is now among the biggest.  At least it is here in northern California. The influence of the major Halloween parades and parties in San Francisco has spread, along with commercial exploitation, so I started seeing Halloween house decorations going up in mid-September.  In my youth in western PA it was mostly for children to toddle around cutely in stuffy costumes in the cold, mostly unable to see, then to stand mutely in the suddenly hot doorways of strangers while holding out a bag for candy.  That's steadily changed.  Young adult parties are more frequent, and their costumes can be very elaborate.

Halloween is weird because, among other things, it's about death and dead people.  That is indeed part of its origins, but it was also mixed up with harvest celebration, masking and mischief-making, the coming of winter, and treats.  These days it seems also to be about sex and death.  Weird.

Many cultures have designated days to commemorate the dead.  By tradition, they tend to be in late autumn, as winter approaches--the season of cold when plants are dormant, and food can be scarce. Today's Halloween on October 31 appears to be a very ancient tradition of Celtic Ireland and Scotland, dating to the fifth century B.C. That day was the official end of summer and the harvest season, with November 1 marking their New Year.  It was believed that this was a kind of liminal day in which the dead could visit the Earth.

There are different accounts of what this day actually entailed.  The tamer version suggests a festival, in which villagers appeased the departed with gifts of food left outside their homes, or places set at their tables for their honored dead.  Bonfires were lit to purify, as well as to ward off evil spirits.

The darker version suggests the belief was that those who'd died the previous year could return to choose the body of a person or animal to inhabit for the following year, before they passed over permanently into the afterlife.  This is the literal meaning of "haunting":  not to scare someone, but to inhabit them (as we speak of our old haunts.)

 To prevent this haunting, people dressed up as demons and witches to frighten the dead away. They had extinguished their hearth fires so they wouldn't attract the dead to their homes, and paraded wildly to a big bonfire outside of town, where some unfortunate (and probably mentally ill) individual whose behavior might suggest possession by spirits would be sacrificed in the fire, to warn the dead that possessing one of them wasn't going to work. As these traditions spread in Europe over the centuries, the human sacrifice transformed to the burning of effigies.  Halloween these days dilutes this a little more, with effigies but not much burning.

Whatever the mix was, it probably reflected the perennial twinned attitudes towards the dead: an empathetic desire to honor and help them on the one hand, and fear of them on the other, with malevolence towards the living projected on them.

A Celtic carved turnip--or space alien?

The Celts appear to have originated a few other lasting Halloween traditions.  In Ireland they hollowed out turnips and carved scary faces on them. In southern Ireland, young men would go door to door reciting verses.  If they were fed, the house could expect good fortune; if not, not.  In Scotland, this approach was modified to something closer to today: the youths would go to houses dressed in scary costumes with faces blackened by fire ashes, and threaten mischief if they weren't properly welcomed.  

It's said that these traditions accompanied the Irish and Scots to America.  Lacking the right kind of turnips, however, they turned to pumpkins.  

By then, the Catholic Church had long established its own ownership of this time of year for remembrance of the dead, stipulating October 31 as All Hallow's Eve (from which the name Halloween probably comes): like Christmas Eve, it was a vigil of an actual holiday, which in this case was All Saints Day on November 1, a holy day when Catholics are obliged to attend Mass.  And for good measure, All Souls Day was designated for November 2.  

Various countries and cultures have incorporated their folk traditions in ritual observances around these days to honor the dead.  But the biggest observance by far is Halloween, shorn completely of conscious intentions or comprehended ritual.  America has never figured out how to honor the dead beyond funerals (though that practice is itself waning), with the possible exception of those killed in wars.

But even in the guise of fun, Halloween reveals a lot of complicated if unconscious feelings about the dead and death.  Elaborate costumes and trick or treating (from which the tricks have largely disappeared) function as many other festivals did and do--they create a time and space outside the normal, a permitted indulgence in whimsy, allowing for expressing different identities and generally loosening the normal constraints: unrestrained life as the answer to death, perhaps.  

 The dance with death is complicated.  I once participated in an annual event in Pittsburgh, the "Night of the Living Dead" (Pittsburgh being where that iconic movie was made) in which various dead rock stars performed.  I was Buddy Holly.  I refused, however, to don the pale death makeup.  I wasn't going to make fun of one of my musical heroes: I wanted to honor him and the life of his music. I could do the voice. It was great fun. 

Loosening restraints and taking on new identities has led to sexy costumes.  In the 1970s I frequented a bar and restaurant where at least a dozen beautiful young women worked as waitresses.  At the restaurant's Halloween party they all showed up in costume: about half were dressed as provocative witches, with the other half as classic Ladies of the Night. 

 That may have been more a comment on their jobs, but it does seem that in sexy costumes and make-up, particularly in variations on the traditional horror figures of witches, ghosts, ghouls, vampires, zombies etc., there is again an uneasy convergence of sex and death. The thrill of the transgressive must be part of it, maybe even the mocking of death, but beyond bravado it's not clear there's much consciousness of the reality behind the techniques.

I've never fully understood the entertainment value of being scared, or especially of scaring people.  I get it that children (and others) learn to deal with their fears through experimentation, and that the rush comes not from the scare but from the moment afterwards, when it's clear there was no threat.  But haunted houses for kids, or bloody horror movies for adults--both now apparently part of Halloween--aren't anywhere near the top of my list for ways to have fun.  What I'd be afraid of is traumatizing a child--or myself.  Like many holidays, it is very far from its origins, while still raising profound issues but mostly without clear or meaningful rituals to explore them.  So Halloween as a holiday itself scares me a little. 

We're Not Going Back

Already it has disappeared into the American amnesia, but it was a little less than four years ago: Inauguration Day 2021.  This is what it looked like.  

Before that day, Chaos had reigned for four years.  Covid-19 was an unchecked epidemic, the American economy was in shambles, as was the western alliance of the US and Europe. Remember?

We remember the world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Iraq wars and Afghanistan.  We remember the history of the Civil War, in which more Americans died than in all of those wars put together.  We do not remember the year of Covid, in which more Americans died than in the Civil War, which took four years.  Maybe the trauma is too fresh, maybe we're snowed under with so-called information.  But, you know, it happened.

Under pressure, President Chaos did allow government financing of a crash program to develop a vaccine, though he later repudiated it.  He advised American to drink bleach instead.  

Then came the elections of 2020.  Chaos could not abide the outcome, and fomented chaotic violence that came to a head on January 6, 2021, with the trashing of the US Capitol, endangering the lives of the country's highest legislative officials.

So for the Inauguration in 2020, there was no parade, just as there had been no rallies during the campaign, because of the danger of Covid infection.  For the Inauguration itself, the principals (as in the photo above) wore protective masks.  

Because of January 6, there were also at least 20,000 National Guard troops in Washington, probably more.  They were no longer sleeping on the floors of the Capitol building to protect it; they were guarding the Inaugural against the forces of Chaos.

But on January 20, 2021, after Joseph R. Biden was sworn in as President, and Kamala Harris as Vice-President, the following happened:

The U.S. rejoined the Paris Accords, the global effort to address the global climate crisis.

 The U.S. rejoined the WHO in a global effort to address the global covid crisis.

 Laws to prevent evictions and to delay student loan payments during the covid crisis were extended.

 The Keystone pipeline permits were withdrawn, among other reversals of anti-environment policies and regulations, including a moratorium on fossil fuel leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

 Masks and social distancing on federal property, by federal employees, and on airplanes and other interstate travel were mandated by federal law.

 DACA was bolstered. The “Muslim ban” on travel was ended. Diversity training returned, anti-discrimination policies in the federal government were strengthened, and the notorious far right 1776 Commission disbanded.

 All of the Chaos cabinet had resigned, and several of the worst sub-cabinet officials were fired, including the guy who turned the Voice of America into a MAGA shill factory.  Competent and experienced career public servants were appointed to run the various departments until cabinet officers were confirmed.

Joe Biden took over the Oval Office, where he pointedly installed a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt directly across the room from his desk.

Because Americans had also elected a Democratic majority House of Representatives and (with the election of the first black Senator and first Jewish Senator in Georgia history) a Democratic majority in the US Senate, President Biden was able to enact the American Rescue Plan, which funded the initial distribution of Covid vaccine and additional measures to combat Covid as well as measures to re-start the US economy, especially with the first of several direct payments to citizens, known as "stimulus checks."

These payments worked better than anyone had even hoped. With further legislation and executive efforts over the next four years, and despite a nasty round of inflation caused chiefly by supply chain issues and the usual opportunistic greed,  the Biden administration fostered an American economy which last week the Economist magazine called "the envy of the world," with the lowest unemployment, lower inflation, and lower interest rates in years, along with the highest stock market closings in history.

Also last week, the Wall Street Journal published the results of an annual survey of economists, in which a majority (often a large majority) forecast a better economy, lower inflation, higher employment, more American manufacturing and higher incomes under a Harris administration than under a return to Chaos.

The western alliance is healthy again, and stands together defending the sovereign nation of Ukraine against Russian invasion.  Bob Woodward's new book credits Biden and his cabinet and other officials with the most competent handling of world affairs he's seen, and counsels that Chaos was the worst President in history--far worse than Nixon--and is not fit to take power again.

Those are today's judgments.  But try priming your memory of what is was like long ago--from 2017 to 2021--along with the growing evidence of how much worse it would be if Chaos reigns again.

Voting is beginning.

October Surmise

 With big rallies designed to both demonstrate and create enthusiasm while signing up new volunteers, candidate Kamala Harris has also been introducing herself to swing state voters through local media coverage.  She's made several speeches on her approach to economic issues to business and labor audiences, and a speech at the southern border on immigration issues.  These have been excellent events.

Now that early voting and mail voting is beginning, she's said to be honing in on describing the dangers of electing Chaos to a second (non-consecutive) term.  He and his VP candidate are providing examples daily.  Their baseless charges have upended lives in a small Ohio town, and are complicating relief efforts in areas hard hit by hurricane Helene.  Relief to these people should be non-partisan, but in this election it provides a positive example of what the federal government can do for people--regardless of party--need this kind and scale of help.  If Harris is not elected, Chaos will rule in these situations as well as everything else.

The polls continue to show prospects for very close results.  How can this possibly be?  One answer is that it isn't really going to be that close, and there's a sense of that, even among those darkly citing the polls.  But assuming it is very close, it has to be because (in addition to those who vote out of racism, sexism and utter ignorance) a substantial number of people believe the country is worse off than it demonstrably is.  They believe the lies.  And Chaos and Vance are doing nothing but lying and lying and lying.  

Why are they believed?  Playing to prejudices is an ancient and still successful strategy, sometimes.  But the answer to how they can boldly tell obvious lies, easily disproven lies, is that people are used to being boldly lied to, many times a day, by commercials.  The same broadcasts that carry the lies of politicians, carry the absurd exaggerations and outright lies of commercials.  This is even worse on the Internet, especially on You Tube.

The second element in commercials is relentless repetition, and Chaos quite consciously employs this technique, often upping the ante slightly to make the repetition "news" so it is again reported.  News media fall for this every time. 

The lies that Chaos tells support the notion that--as the poll question puts it--America is on the wrong track.  The number of those who say it is continues to be high, and this is disquieting.  Harris addresses this by positioning herself as a change candidate, a New Way Forward--and so a positive change.  Chaos promises stark solutions that clearly invite chaos and disaster.  And the problems he says he will solve mostly don't exist, at least not in the way he speaks about them.

I continue to believe that at bottom what Americans fear so much they can't talk about it is climate distortion.  So far the Harris campaign is strategically avoiding this issue.  It is imperative that she wins, so as a short term strategy I hope it works, and doesn't lock her into policies that make climate prospects worse.  But this is likely to be the last election in which this strategy will be possible.

As if the prospects of Chaos being elected aren't terrifying enough, there is J.D. Vance.  Chaos is looking like a soon to be spent force. Some in the psychiatric profession say that he is showing classic early signs of dementia.  Can a President Vance be too far behind?

Voting ends in about a month, and Chaos is seeing his best chance in creating weeks and months of chaos beginning that day.  So enjoy the enthusiasm and the hope of the Harris campaign, vote and encourage others to vote, and hope for the best.

Breaking News: Breaking Addiction

 So the reporters, the commentators and pundits were nearly unanimous in providing the wish-fulfillment headline: Harris Destroyed Trump in their debate. Some said it was the greatest performance in presidential debate history.  The instant polls said Kamala Harris won by a lot, and the first audience figures said a lot of people watched.  

So the next day, whose picture do we see on front pages above the fold?  In the NY Times it was Trump. In the Washington Post it was...J.D. Vance.  No politican made it atop the San Francisco Chronicle.  Whose picture did we not see? The unanimous winner of the debate the night before, Kamala Harris.  She earned the moment to let people see her with new eyes, to get used to the idea that this might be the next President.  Just not on the front page, apparently.  (These are the online front pages, late in the day, the only ones I can access.)

It's more than the predictable bait and switch of the new media.  On her post-debate podcast, WPost columnist Jennifer Rubin nailed it: after pumping up the significance of the debate for a week, the story the next day would be that it may not matter all that much.  That conclusion may be prudent--but the contrast with the preceding hype is stark and totally predictable.  

And it's not even the usual ego first.  Like Thomas Friedman writing that there are 23 words that Harris has to say to be assured of winning.  And by writing them, making it impossible for her to say them.

No, what I see is the continuing knee-jerk addiction to pictures of Trump.  Between the Harris triumph at the Democratic Convention and the debate, it was Trump's face on the front page way more often than hers.  ("way more often" being a technical term in statistics.)  These outlets are so used to using Trump to sell papers and attract clicks that it's become mindless second nature, and an addiction that's hard to kick.     

And much of the time, the story highlights something awful that Trump has said or done.  Even the leftish Guardian does it regularly.  The day after the debate they did have a photo of people watching the debate with a split-screen of the two candidates.  But the only solo photo above the fold was...Trump.  And that's pretty typical of the Guardian.   

Why is this potentially important?  Because after his thoroughly discrediting debate, Trump and his campaign are going to go on the attack with new and more scurrilous lies, probably about Kamala Harris personally.  The question is: will the news media give them prominence, or are they finished pretending that Trump's outrageous lies--so clearly untrue and vicious from the start--need to be aired and evaluated, like the charges by a normal candidate?  They've always done it.  Will they keep doing it?

The few instances of fact-checking during the ABC debate were a heartening precedent.  The general refusal so far to repeat some of the ugliest assertions Trump is making at his rallies is also hopeful.  But Trump's Big Lies attract eyes, they sell papers, they get clicks.  It's the media version of a high.

Apart from reviving latent racism and sexism we'd hoped wasn't there anymore, Trump won in 2016 by successfully making Hillary Clinton the issue.  (The director of the FBI helped alot with his late campaign announcement of a re-investigation of Clinton that quickly exonerated her, again, but too late.)  His only chance now, other than suppressing votes and causing chaos at the polls and afterwards, is to make Harris the issue.  

Nobody knows what's going to happen; they don't even know what's happening now.  The polls are so full of different methods and political skewing that even an average is not reliable. The "undecided" voters interviewed on TV are professionally undecided--it's the only way they can get anyone to pay attention to them. So they don't represent anyone.  We can be pretty sure that there's a core of voters who could watch Trump eat a dog and a cat on television and still vote for him.  On the other hand, I don't think Harris loses a swing state where there's a choice amendment on the ballot.  Apart from Taylor Swift, I think Harris is going to have to talk about climate distortion to win the youth vote big.  In general she's making it easier for people to take a chance on her.

The Democrats look focused, and the campaign is well-funded.  There's enthusiasm on the ground.   Trump will be aided by Putin's army of trolls, which is why Trump won't publicly support Ukraine.  He wants Putin to be sure that supporting him is the easiest way to win that war. 

 But things happen in a campaign, and exactly what they will be is always unknown until they happen. The news media has said before that they've learned from their mistakes (Willy Horton, the Swift Boat, etc.) but then they do it again.  If this election is as close as everyone says it is (which may be as reliable as the 90% chance that H. Clinton would win in 2016) even the news media could make the difference.

Dreaming Up Daily Quote

 

“Everything in the mind is in rat’s country.  It doesn’t die.  They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up and dropped again…You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself.”

Loren Eiseley

Shepard For The Day: Open to the Deep Past

 " Most people most of the time in the history of civilization have lived under tyrants and demagogues, cued to despair and hopelessness.  Today we are subject to progress, centralized power, entertainment, growthmania and technophilia that produce their own variety of "quiet desperation."  This desperation arises not only from lack of attachment to place, but also lack of kinship with the larger community of all life on earth.  History is not a neutral documentation of things that happened but an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past.  It is a kind of intellectual cannibalism which creates from those different from us a target group that becomes the enemy, upon whom we project our unacknowledged fears and insecurities."

Paul Shepard in Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998) pp.14-15

Projection of our fears about ourselves onto whatever Other is currently available is familiar to us even from our politics and even from history.   The mistake of history, especially when applied to the deep past of humanity, is to project a sense of "human nature" that in large part reflects the "nature"--or behavior-- of people as molded in the period we call civilization of the last 12,000 years.  But our species properly began some 300,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Pleistocene. What we call civilization--marked by the beginning of a farming economy and fast population growth--is a small fraction of the intervening time. For most of those hundreds of thousands of years, humans were what is commonly called hunter-gatherers.  And in that time, we were very different, partly because our relationship to where and how we lived was very different.

We were not ruthless savages--that is one of many prejudices of history that sees only the ruthlessness and savagery of civilization.  In The Wandering God, a mostly unacknowleded but valuably different riff on Shepard's books, Morris Berman urges great skepticism about such culture-bound definitions of human nature, as well as much of what was written (and later disproven) or is still standard though the evidence is contradictory, that has formed ordinary views of what we were like over the hundreds of thousands of years that physically formed our current minds and bodies. 

 Shepard's work--poetically summarized in this, his last book--seeks to provide a different view.  In doing so, he shows how human life and society can be better, in a world which we deeply share with other life, rather than mostly just use it and systematically destroy it.  We who are alive now will never have direct access to this way of life, except perhaps partially and fleetingly through an informed imagination.  So let's inform it.  And see that we may be a tragic species, but not a completely or inately evil or psychotic one, as the history of civilization up to this moment might suggest.

The Miracle Convention

 It was a political miracle the likes of which I've never seen, that Democrats even arrived in Chicago for their convention absolutely united on a nominee, different from the one they had a month before.  Perhaps it was a necessary miracle, if there was to be any chance that the dictator in waiting could be stopped.

But the convention itself, with one amazing speech and speaker after another, with the joy and enthusiasm in the hall, was itself a miracle.  It redefined the Democratic party and marginalized the Trump cult.  Those were happy warriors who returned to their states, ready to fight and win. 

The final miracle was Kamala Harris meeting the moment at exactly the right time.  Her acceptance speech was all but flawless in its content and delivery.  She was every inch a President.

  Among much that was remarkable were the Republicans who stood on that stage in her behalf, and what they said to their fellow Republicans: "You're not voting for a Democrat--you're voting for democracy. You're not betraying our party, you're standing up for our country."

There were two themes that were in fact one theme.  "We're moving forward"--that's a familiar political theme, aspirational but hard to prove.  The flip side is less common, and this year is certainly potent: "We're not going back."   

I was troubled by a few things: that everyone continues to act as if Covid doesn't exist anymore, and that there was not a full sentence out of anyone's mouth I heard about the greatest threat to the planetary and human future, the climate crisis.  Once again, other seemingly more proximate threats took precedence.  

But even that can partially be accounted for by all the time absorbed in stating truths and values that have so lately been lost.  This was the "You'd do the same for me" convention, reaffirming basic human compacts.  It was beautiful, but so sad that it was so necessary.  

That and the general tenor of this miracle convention made me realize just how demoralized we've become.  The idea that someone like Trump could take over the government, and together with this Supreme Court could rule us into an inhuman theocratic autocracy for the very wealthy, had us in the grip of such discouragement that we could hardly even notice how depressed we were.

That part is over.  The threat must still be stopped, but now we know we aren't alone, and we know what our committments are.  That has value in itself.  Now the campaign begins.  It could not have begun better.  

There's likely to be tough days ahead.  Voter suppression tactics are already in place in key states.  There's a lot to be overcome.  But go ahead and say it: we shall overcome.

I offer a bit of political analysis you're not going to see anywhere else.  As highlighted by Paul Shepard, primatologist Michael R.A. Chance suggested that one of two mental modes in primate brain structures  govern social relations: in the rhesus monkey, its structure favored aggression and submission. High tension, the importance of rank and sex symbolizing power are characteristics.  He calls this the Agonic mode.

The other, which he called the Hedonic, is typical of chimpanzee society.  It favors mutual dependence and problem solving without real violence. There is more equality. Disputes can end in "reconciliation and reunion."  "The group has a strong general sense of unity," Shepard writes, "even though it may appear in disarray to an outsider."  

Humans are among those primates who have the potential for both the Agonic and Hedonic modes.  This bimodality is part of our basic nature.  Which one predominates in normal times depends on "the social system that cues us and to which we apply its logic." 

It is striking how our politics is now so clearly divided between the Agonic cult surrounding Trump, and the Hedonic Democrats, who now are clearly trying to represent everyone else. Over four days, the miracle convention articulated in words and faces, in individuals and families and groups, the conscious committment to this Hedonic mode.  It is the kind of society we want, the ideal America--the true American dream, not of striving and succeeding, but of  empathy, justice, generosity, compassion, love. In practical terms, the America of "You'd do the same for me."        

Living with change

 When the government’s dull and confused,

 the people are placid.

 When the government’s sharp and keen,

 the people are discontented.

 Alas! Misery lies under happiness,

 and happiness sits on misery, alas!

 Who knows where it will end?

 Nothing is certain.

 The normal changes into the monstrous,

 the fortunate into the unfortunate,

 and our bewilderment

 goes on and on. 

 And so the wise

 shape without cutting,

 square without sawing,

true without forcing.

They are the light that does not shine.

Tao Te Ching # 58

version by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Nuclear Now

How can I save my little boy

 from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?

There is no monopoly on common sense

On either side of the political fence

 We share the same biology, regardless of ideology

 Believe me when I say to you

 I hope the Russians love their children too.

 There is no historical precedent

 To put the words in the mouth of the president. 

There's no such thing as a winnable war

 It's a lie we don't believe anymore

 Mister Reagan says, "We will protect you" 

I don't subscribe to this point of view

 Believe me when I say to you

 I hope the Russians love their children too.

--from "Russians"

a song by Sting

In her deeply researched 2024 book on the subject, author Annie Jacobsen posited a plausible present or near future scenario in which North Korea detonates a one megaton bomb at the Pentagon, that kills one million people.  The subsequent war—which lasts for all of 72 minutes—slaughters at least 2 billion people. The effects of nuclear winter and a sharply degraded ozone layer as well as the ruinous chaos that follows eventually destroys the rest of human civilization, and perhaps humanity itself.  The Nuclear Age is not over, and ignoring the danger doesn’t change it.

This possibility may come as a surprise for those who assume that the threat of thermonuclear self-destruction ended with the fall of the Soviet Union and the supposed end of the Cold War.  But despite reductions in nuclear weapons (which would be obsolete by now anyway) there is still enough nuclear firepower on alert to more than destroy everything we know.  But we don't hear much about this anymore.

 “Russians” was a song on Sting’s first album after he disbanded the Police, and was released as a single in November 1985.  The early to mid 1980s were rife with expressions of concern and alarm over new accelerations to the nuclear arms race.  These were the years of the Nuclear Freeze movement (to freeze the growth of nuclear weapons) and concern over Nuclear Winter, which Carl Sagan and other scientists theorized could result from even a limited nuclear exchange, creating enough dust high in the atmosphere to block out the sun for a considerable period, endangering all life on Earth.

  There was a 1983 exhibition in New York by 90 artists depicting the effects of nuclear war, and a collection of 44 such works that traveled to other cities.  A large group of poets held a reading in 1982 called “Poets against the End of the World,” and at least five anthologies of nuclear-themed work appeared in those years.   

 But most influential were the first television movies to graphically present scenarios of nuclear attacks and aftermaths: in the UK, the movie was Threads, which re-ran paired with the first such film to be made (in 1967) but never seen on TV, Peter Watkins’ War Games.  In the US the films were Testament and the one most remembered, The Day After, the only one made and shown on a major commercial network, and seen by more Americans on its first broadcast than any other program before or since.

 Then came the fall of the Soviet Union and a series of arms reduction agreements, and the public was eager to believe the threat was over. A RAND study begged to differ, though: suggesting the chances of accidental nuclear war to be greater.  By the early 2000s, in movies and in Washington and Moscow, nuclear weapons were defanged,  not so bad, just ordinary bombs but maybe a little bigger. 

 Without great scrutiny or alarm, nuclear arsenals have grown, more sophisticated weapons developed, one new nuclear power added (North Korea) and the treaty to prevent another one (Iran) wantonly and childishly destroyed. 

 As Japan, mostly alone, marks another anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear threat is yesterday’s news.  And yet it is still today's possibility, and in some ways the dangers are increasing.  The Russians make nuclear noise, showcase new weapons systems and drop out of arms treaties. There are always new flashpoints, and they get more volatile and dangerous.  One has reached into this year's Nagasaki memorial, which decided to not invite Israel to participate for fear of demonstrations and trouble at a solemn event for peace.  The US Ambassador to Japan responded by declining to attend. 

The basics have not changed since the 1980s or even 1945: nuclear war is madness, and could happen at any moment.  Nor has the basis for addressing this issue, stated most succinctly in Sting's lyrics: "We share the same biology, regardless of ideology."  These words are reminicent of President Kennedy's summation in 1963: “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet.  We all breathe the same air.  We all cherish our children’s future.  And we are all mortal.”