Not Going Quietly

He may go gentle, but he's not going quietly.  In his last weeks in the White House, President Obama has taken important action, and has made important statements.  That process may climax Tuesday night with his farewell address, but even then, he has 9 days more.

The NYTimes listed some of those actions:

He has banned oil drilling off the Atlantic coast, established new environmental monuments, protected funding for Planned Parenthood clinics, ordered the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo Bay, criticized Israeli settlements and punished Russia for interfering in the recent elections through cyberattacks.

Mr. Obama is continuing to fill the ranks of the government with his own appointees; since Election Day, he has named 103 people to senior Civil Service jobs, boards, key commissions and oversight panels, including the National Council on Disability, the Amtrak board of directors, the Holocaust Memorial Council and the boards of visitors at military academies.

Probably the most important--and lasting--was banning offshore drilling in the Arctic and much of the Atlantic seaboard.  As Time Magazine reported: "The White House maneuver relies on a little-used 1953 law that gives the President authority to block indefinitely oil and gas drilling in some waters controlled by the U.S. federal government. The move may be impossible to undo—at least in the short term. The law does not include a provision for a future president to undo the decision and no president has ever tried such a move. But energy interests could challenge that in courts or a Republican-dominated Congress could revise the original law."

In designating "two new national monuments in the desert landscapes of southeastern Utah and southern Nevada to protect some of our country’s most important cultural treasures,"  President Obama also protected not only physical but spiritual resources for Native peoples in the area.  Russell Begaye, President of the Navajo Nation, wrote:

"Today, President Barack Obama has signed a proclamation to protect this land as a national monument for future generations of Navajo people and for all Americans. Thanks to his action, this land will be finally given the legal reverence and protection it deserves.

This action reflects the President’s profound record on conservation: He has done more than any other president in history to set aside more land and water for the future."

Other actions may be ones that Rs will want to reverse, but it won't always be easy.  It will likely be politically difficult to reverse all of President Obama's measures to punish Russia for its (successful) efforts to control the US presidential election, which he announced in late December.

Probably the boldest foreign policy action was the US abstaining from the UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements as a substantial and aggressive barrier to a two state solution in Palestine.

Meanwhile President Obama has publicly and--meeting with members of Congress--privately talked about healthcare.  Publicly he's challenged Rs attempting to repeal Obamacare to say what their plan is and begin the process of improving the healthcare system, instead of undermining it and taking away coverage from millions of Americans.  He also urged those Americans who have benefited from Obamacare to tell their stories in public, especially in their own communities.   His long meeting with congressional Democrats reportedly got more political, as he urged them not to not help Rs devise a new health care law, and make them own any changes.

After all that, President Obama has been doing a series of interviews, including a personal one with David Axelrod, but also cogent policy statements such as the Vox interview on healthcare.  He also became the first sitting President to write a feature for Science magazine, in which he argues that the shift to clean energy is irreversible.  Whatever politicians might do, industries and the market are already committed.  There are twice as many people employed in clean energy than in jobs related to fossil fuels.  The US economy has grown in direct proportion to the drop in greenhouse gases emissions.

The Science article is here.  By including seed funds for clean energy in the 2009 Recovery Act to get the country out of the Great Recession, President Obama jump-started these industries. White House support for them continued throughout the Obama administration. They have their problems, but this move may turn out to be his greatest accomplishment.

Defining the Darkness.13

This almost unnoticed act could turn out to be the most serious of recent GOP moves and announcements, and the first step to reactionary totalitarian rule.

Washington Post:

"Members of Congress awarded themselves the power to slash the annual pay of any federal employee to as low as $1, thereby essentially telling government workers to forget about civil-service protection: Their jobs now may rise or fall on political whim."

"The Republican-led House voted to reinstate a procedural rule devised in 1876 that allows Congress to retrench agency spending by singling out a government employee through amendments to appropriations bills. Prior to adoption of the Holman Rule, named for the Indiana congressman who devised it as a hedge against the political patronage that then dominated government programs, an agency’s budget could be broadly cut but specific employees or programs couldn’t be targeted. Now it can be open season."

A Little Light

Defining the Darkness.12

Washington Post:

"Russia carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and ultimately sought to help elect Donald Trump, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a remarkably blunt assessment released Friday.

The report depicts Russian interference as unprecedented in scale, saying that Moscow’s role represented “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort” beyond previous election-related espionage."

"In the report, the CIA, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded with “high confidence” that Russian intelligence services penetrated numerous computer systems tied to U.S. political parties and then “relayed” the email troves to WikiLeaks."

"Overall, the report describes a multipronged campaign that involved not only hacking, but overt propaganda on Russian-controlled news platforms and the extensive use of social media and even “trolls” to amplify voter discord in the United States and encourage opposition to Clinton."

Bloomberg:

"Even as intelligences officials looked back in their reports on the election, they also made a troublesome prediction: Russia isn't done intruding in U.S. politics and policymaking.

Immediately after the Nov. 8 election, Russia began a "spear-phishing" campaign to try to trick people into revealing their email passwords, targeting U.S. government employees and think tanks that specialize in national security, defense and foreign policy, the report said."

"Russia also used state-funded propaganda and paid "trolls" to make nasty comments on social media services, the report said. Moreover, intelligence officials believe that Moscow will apply lessons learned from its activities in the election to put its thumbprint on future elections in the United States and allied nations."

Defining the Darkness.11

The Washington Post:

"For weeks now, nightmares have been jolting Olga Perez Stable Cox awake several hours before sunrise. Sometimes she’s able to fall back asleep, but more often she finds herself lying in the dark, body tossing and thoughts racing, until she’s reduced to tears.

For as long as she has taught, Cox, a professor at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif., has prided herself on speaking freely. Then a clip of her calling Donald Trump’s election “an act of terrorism” went viral earlier this month, unleashing a wave of violent threats that forced her to end her semester early and flee her home in suburban Orange County.

Now she’s back home, but her life hasn’t returned to normal.

“Now, at 66, I’m paranoid,” Cox said. “It doesn’t feel good at all to be looking over my shoulder and wondering when an unfamiliar car pulls up across the street whether they’re going to take a picture of me or something worse — but that’s my life now. I feel like I’ve been attacked by a mob of people all across the country,” she added. “If they’re telling me over and over again that they want to shoot me in the face, how am I supposed to know if they’re going to do it or not?”

The mob Cox refers to doesn’t wield pitchforks and torches but hate-filled tweets, violent emails and threatening Facebook messages and phone calls. They are a virtual force with limited numbers but a seemingly unlimited supply of hate that has proved just as frightening for the longtime academic.

The harassment crested when Cox received an email from a man named Tim White that showed her home address, phone number and salary and threatened to spread the information “everywhere.” The email referred to Cox as a “libtard, Marxist, hatemonger, nutcase.” It was then, Cox said, that she could no longer stand to be in her home and decided to flee.

The professor turned her final week of class this semester over to a substitute, but Cox said her ordeal continued after the controversial video appeared on the O’Reilly Factor. The host referred to her statements as “gibberish” and “slander” and labeled the professor part of 'the totalitarian left.'”

Guess Who Really Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? (Hint: starts with an S)

The so-called controversy over who wrote Shakespeare's plays has always been irritating, based mostly on the uninformed and class-ridden assumption that a glover's son from little Stratford couldn't possibly have gone to London and written all those plays of genius.

While textual arguments may go on, a writer for the Guardian asserts that new research findings by manuscript scholar Heather Wolfe pretty much prove that the Shakespeare who wrote the plays was indeed the Shakespeare from Stratford, and not some Earl or other.

Whenever the "controversy" is resurrected, with everybody presenting their evidence, it's routinely asserted that alas nobody has the proof and the available information has been so thoroughly analyzed that it's unlikely to be settled unless something completely new turns up.

That turns out to be nonsense as well. Because Heather Wolfe found the evidence in the library. She just looked where earlier researchers didn't--in the controversy over the Stratford Shakespeare's attempts to get a family coat of arms approved. Though she doesn't make sweeping claims, she found enough to settle the matter--contemporaries knew that the Stratford Shakespeare and the playwright were the same.

This adds to what was already a pretty convincing case made by other scholars for Shakespeare as the author of his own plays. Opponents built their doubts on the class system. They assumed that someone brought up in a provincial town couldn't get an adequate education, but the Stratford Shakespeare had available to him a classical education more rigorous than most university students can get today.

So if it wasn't education, it must be because lower middle class provincials, perhaps even raised Catholic, couldn't possibly have that level of verbal expression, let alone genius.

Maybe a strange visitor from another planet with powers far beyond those of mortal men?

Show Me

Ever think at this point you'd watch an hour on healthcare?  I didn't.  And yet...I did.  And it gets better as it goes along.

Dark Age Ahead.2 Family and Community

Continuing discussion of Dark Ages Ahead (2004)by Jane Jacobs.  First part is here.

In warning of the dangers of a Dark Age ahead, Jane Jacobs singles out "five pillars of our culture that we depend upon to stand firm, and discuss what seem to me ominous signs of decay."

Her five pillars are community and family, higher education, "the effective practice of science and science-based technology," taxes and government, and "self-policing by the learned professions."

She immediately recognizes that these are not the most obvious, which would include "racism, profligate environmental destruction, crime, voter distrust of politicians and thus low turnouts for elections, and the enlarging gap between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class."

She feels these second five have been recognized, and also sees them as results of the first five.  Elsewhere she notes that while her choice of five may not be the biggest threats leading to a Dark Age, they are the stabilizing pillars of the culture that we depend on to make corrections in our cultural course---so if we're on the way to catastrophe, these in a healthy state would help us change direction.

 But if they are weak, we are less able to change culturally to confront such challenges as racism and environmental degradation, and so we're left helplessly watching ourselves head into the Dark Age, knowing what the problems are, but unable to address them.

At the end of the book, Jacobs makes practical suggestions to reverse some of the deterioration in these five pillars.  In interviews about this book she insisted she is basically an optimist, and that despite the title, this is an optimistic book.

First pillar (chapter 2) Families Rigged to Fail

Jacobs makes a distinction between the family as a biological unit (whether nuclear or extended family) and the household, which is an economic unit.  A household can include renters and boarders, or be non-families altogether--from monasteries to armies.

She discusses some of the threats to the nuclear family that are well known, but one of her particular virtues is how she uses statistics.  She finds averages nearly useless, as the so-called divorce rate at 50%, which is made up of averaging very long marriages with very short ones.  But she acknowledges that there are higher proportions of divorce across all income classes, and postponements of marriage and having children, which contribute to lower birth rates.

But her major emphasis is economic.  For 40 years starting in the 1930s, the median income (meaning half made more, half made less) of a family was sufficient to buy a median-priced home or rent a median-priced apartment.  That changed in the 1970s, and by the 1980s, 90% of America families could not afford a median-priced house.  Rents also took up larger proportion of income.

This led to an epidemic of homelessness, and a middle class dependent on low inflation and the paper wealth of mortgages on their homes.  Families depended on at least two incomes to support a household, but it was a losing fight, for expenses increased--especially the need for a automobile or two.

In addition: "Two parents, to say nothing of one, cannot possibly satisfy the needs of a family-household.  A community is needed as well, for raising children, and also to keep adults reasonably sane and cheerful."

Here we're on traditional Jane Jacobs ground, as she describes all the resources a family needs, including those usually provided through government (roads, parks, public health, schools, libraries, emergency services) as well as non-profits and commercial establishments.

Then there are "thoroughly informal, thoroughly intangible, and probably the most important [resources]: speaking relationships among neighbors and acquaintances in addition to friends."

She describes why these are important, and how they function.  But these relationships are less likely in car-dominated suburbia, which also tends not to have a diversity of residents.  She notes how highways obliterated city neighborhoods and how, without mentioning her own substantial role, that kind of city planning was defeated in New York, saving the now fashionable neighborhood of SoHo.

She also describes in some detail how the triumph of the automobile was hardly market-based, it was the work of General Motors in stripping American cities of public transportation, especially the more efficient trolley systems.  (I did a detailed article on trolleys and light rail including the history, and while Jacobs' stats are damning, the history is a little more complicated.)

Some people would find this nostalgia or a quaint memory, but she insists on trolleys as "quieter, faster, more comfortable and more durable and economic" as well as less likely to destroy neighborhoods, and reminds us that when China capriciously jettisoned its ships, people soon forgot them.

Other factors could be added to those Jacobs outlines to contribute to loss of community, but an important concept here is that it is indeed a loss, and not a theoretical one.  For her, the mark of the Dark Ages is a societal forgetting--so that the memory of what was lost is also lost.  That includes specific knowledge (how to do things, how to fix things as well as facts and theories) and it includes what once had physical form, like communities and their landmarks.

Now with more migration and immigration, flexible and strong communities are needed more than ever.  She notes that these observations are fairly obvious, and that she will return to the problem of communities again.  But she warned:

"If the predicaments of North American families continue mounting and climb further up the income ladder, I have no idea what kinds of households will emerge to deal with needs that families are at a loss to fill.  My intuition tells me they will probably be coercive.  This is already true of the most swiftly multiplying and rapidly expanding type of American households at the turn of the millennium--prisons."    

The First Lady

This is the last official event hosted by Michelle Obama as First Lady.  Besides some under-reported revelations--like the Obama administration making the largest total investment in higher education since the GI Bill immediately after World War II--her passionate championing of diversity, personal freedom, hope and the future in this appearance suggest the innovative efforts she made and the good she did in the White House. This moment is one among many for this beautiful woman in all senses, a woman among women in this video, and why to me she will always be The First Lady.

The Climate Crisis Future

In mid-December, environmental and city planning officials talked about the future of Arcata, here on Humboldt Bay on the North Coast of California.  Probably the most dramatic moment came when (as reported by the Mad River Union) the Community Development Director pointed to a map of the city and talked about a situation that could come to pass within the lifetime of Arcata's youngest citizens.

"Arcata is not going to be here in the future," he said.

Pointing towards the hills to the northeast he added, "It might be there."

He was talking about a possible future only some 80 years away. But to reach that kind of impact, destructive changes would begin decades earlier.

 Specifically he was talking about sea level rise and its impact due to the climate crisis.  Nobody really knows how fast those levels will rise or how high.  But the range of possibilities and the most likely prospects add up to a very big change, in perhaps the not too distant future.

Sea levels are rising now.  I saw one story that claimed that they are rising faster here than anywhere in California.  The situation is further complicated by land that is slowly sinking due to tectonic forces.  But how fast and how much sea levels rise will make the difference, and that could well begin long before even much of the low-lying areas near the Bay are inundated.  Flooding of underground utilities, especially sewer lines, could affect areas farther from the Bay.

The city is protected by what was described as "41 miles of aging dikes."  The city faces decisions--as many coastal cities now do--of what to protect and how.

Flooding caused by the climate crisis has already begun in the US. Many cities are looking to build dikes and seawalls and other infrastructure at huge cost, knowing that this investment may not protect areas of the city for very long.  But how long is not long enough?  And what are the tradeoffs in terms of environment such as wetlands, or wildlife sanctuaries?  Arcata's sewage treatment plant, a national model, uses marshes a stone's throw from the Bay.

To make those decisions requires studies that are as precise as they can be.  City officials have no choice but to think about the unthinkable.  Since many cities are facing the same decisions, they swap information and ideas.  Some "mitigation" (or addressing the effects of the climate crisis) may benefit from regional solutions, such as regional sewage treatment plants.  It's not possible for responsible people in these positions to ignore climate realities.

According to Kevin Hoover's Union story, "a minute number of Arcata residents...a few dozen total" attended the two events.  Yet I am confident that the vast majority of Arcata citizens accept the reality of the climate crisis.

That is not true of the incoming leaders in Washington.  All the relevant cabinet posts and congressional committee chairs are, like our homegrown Hitler and his vp, climate crisis denialists.  Their solution to problems like Arcata's is to deny that they are happening, to deny the causes of the climate crisis and methods of addressing the causes.  On this issue, the United States will shortly have the most extreme denialist government and policies of any major nation on the planet, as well as the vast majority of non-major ones.

The climate crisis in its essential outlines has been proven by every method known to science, from observation of contemporary and historical phenomena (from satellite imagery to ice-core analysis), from repeatable experiments, from models confirmed by data and refined, from predicted phenomena in the real world happening right now.  Physics, chemistry, biochemistry, mathematics, geology, hydrology and the various other components of "climate science," all have been applied, and they all contribute to the same conclusions.

The near unanimity of scientists studying these subjects, and the outlines of their findings, are widely publicized.  Never in history has a major crisis been predicted by so many scientists in so many related disciplines in so many parts of the world with such overwhelming confidence, for so long.

And just enough citizens of the US voted leaders into power who claim they don't know it's true, or they know it's not true, it's not been proven, it's fake.  So stop studying it, and certainly don't do anything about it.

So what does it mean when people claim, in the face of all this evidence and expertise, to not believe in the onrushing catastrophes of the climate crisis?

It seems clear to me that it means they absolutely do believe it--and it scares the shit out of them.

Sure, fossil fuel money funds denialist propaganda, politicians ally themselves with it to get their hands on some of that money and political support, and they and others bend their ideologies to embrace denialism and cluster together in their denialist support groups to exchange their certitudes that a left-wing conspiracy of scientists out to feather their nests has invented a crisis to destroy free enterprise and jobs, and sap the country of needed resources, initiative, Christianity and precious bodily fluids.

But that's just a consequence of the initial condition of being too scared to face it.

And that's where we are.  Everybody with an ounce of sense is scared.  I've lost more than one night of sleep over it.  The difference is denying it versus dealing with it.

For some, it's their job to deny it, and for others, it's their job to deal with it. There is this conflict and power struggle between the people who must confront at least dealing with the effects but also those determined to address the causes so things don't get completely out of hand in the far future, versus the professional denialists now assuming power.

Since it became clearer in the past decade or so that the climate crisis is proceeding faster than the split-the-difference UN reports predicted, it's become less certain that any efforts now or the near future will prevent the end of civilization as we know it.  But the Paris agreement said the good old stubborn human race was going to try.  That is, at minimum, healthy.  And it may be effective.

Will that agreement and its needed impetus (for its targets are acknowledged to be insufficient) survive the next several months and years?  Or will this retrenchment end our last best hope to make the climate crisis future less than civilization ending?

That's become the question, at least in how to think about the future. Meanwhile there are more practical concerns. The end of civilization due to climate crisis, the 6th mass extinction and a cascade of violent responses to resulting crises,  probably requires centuries (though the estimates range from 10 to 1,000 years.) But well before that, there are likely to be enough catastrophe to change everyday life and test all civic institutions long before the end of the century.

Not just coastal cities.  But places that aren't built for the amount of rain they will get, or the drought, or the more frequent and more violent storms, and the extended periods of major heat. Such effects are already happening.  Climate-induced or exacerbated food shortages are causes of war and forced migration in Africa and the Middle East.  Islands and isolated places face inundation and collapse.

Richer places are vulnerable partly because large populations and economies depend on fragile elements of infrastructure.  Every weakness in civic systems makes the whole vulnerable to climate crisis effects.  A weakened health care system--for instance, caused by chaos created by the suicidally stupid cancellation of Obamacare (i.e. the current healthcare system and infrastructure)-- could aid the spread of diseases manifested because of climate crisis caused changes in the range and lifespan of disease-bearing insects, for example.

Of course people are scared shitless.  It takes courage to face it, to figure out what to do and to work at it.

Dark Age Ahead: Choosing Ignorance

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) is rightly remembered for changing how influential people thought about and designed cities, particularly in North America, because of her original and persuasive writings and activism.

But in this culture people get a single label, which is probably one reason that her last book, Dark Age Ahead was praised and ignored when it was published in 2004.

Another reason is that such a subject (a coming Dark Age in America) is hard to think about: difficult because it is complicated, difficult because it requires shedding habitual categories and ways of thinking, and difficult because it is emotionally huge, and invites displacement and denial.  The mind just can't get itself around it, while the emotions blur the brain and suggest sweets instead.

But at this cultural moment, as we really need to be clear on what's going on and what it may portend, this relatively short book may help focus observations and analysis, getting us beyond the usual paths that so many are now taken in trying to explain what's happened, and more importantly, what to do about it.

There is some agreement that this is part of a trend--not the only one, but a powerful one--that has been building and consolidating over years and likely decades.

There is perhaps less agreement that, as I believe, this is not a mere political problem, let alone an accidental outcome.  Though electoral margins were slim and there's the counter-evidence of the popular vote--and clearly the culture is divided-- the failure of the political system (including media) was so total that it more than suggests a larger cause.

In retrospect, for example, we can see the political and economic causes for Hitler's rise in the 1930s.  Something like it was in the cards at the close of World War I and the harshness of the Versailles treaty.

But that doesn't really explain Hitler.  C.G. Jung, who was in neighboring (German-speaking) Switzerland throughout this period--from before World War I until well after World War II--felt strongly that there was a mass psychological component that transcended politics and economics.  It continued to obsess him for years after.  Judging from the monstrousness of what occurred, I am persuaded he's right.

Jacobs doesn't get into the psychological realm, which I believe is part of the story today, and I believe it is directly related to the prospect of the climate crisis.

But Jane Jacobs also looks beyond ordinary politics and economics, though she includes them in her synthesis.  I approach her book now, determined to go through it carefully.

I begin reading with one of my questions in mind: has any civilization, prosperous and powerful and with domestic tranquility relative to many times and places in the past, actually chosen ignorance and thereby self-destruction?

In the early pages of the book, Jacobs cites two strong cultures that did themselves in: Mesopotamia (much of what we call the Middle East) before the Christian era, and late medieval China.

"The difference between these failures and those of conquered aboriginal cultures is that the death or the stagnated moribundity of formerly unassailable and vigorous cultures is caused not by assault from outside but by assault from within, that is by internal rot in the form of fatal cultural turnings, not recognized as wrongful turnings while they occur or soon enough afterward to be correctable. Time during which corrections can be made runs out because of mass forgetfulness.”

The initial cause of decline in Mesopotamia was environmental degradation: they cut down their forests.  In China it was the result of a bad decision made by the head of an all-powerful--totalitarian-- central government, that turned the nation inward.

But at some point they made everything worse by choosing ignorance. “Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to society’s decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality," Jacobs wrote.

The fortress mentality conjures up the inevitable image of walls.

Jacobs quotes historian of religion Karen Armstrong analyzing the Mesopotamian decline as continuing because of a shift "from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit" to a "conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview."

At its height, medieval China had huge fleets of ships capable of exploring the world.  The decision to destroy the fleets eventually led to government officials destroying all the records, designs, navigational charts, maps and findings associated with the fleet and these voyages.  Centuries of knowledge were lost.  Ignorance was chosen.

Jacobs quotes a vice president of the War Ministry for China of the period as denying the fleet was ever large and impressive, or that the voyages brought back anything of value.

This reminded me of a talk I watched on YouTube by science fiction author and thinker Neal Stephenson who suggested that today's minority views could become predominate, so that in a matter of decades in America it would be generally believed that the Apollo moon landings never really happened.

(By the way, what might have happened had China continued to explore is explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate history novel Days of Rice and Salt.) 

Jacobs adds another interesting comment:

“A fortress or fundamentalist mentality not only shuts itself off from dynamic influences originating outside, but also, as a side effect, ceases influencing the outside world.”

Reading about what could be causing the onset of a Dark Age is not the most pleasant--it can't be called diverting.  So I'm enforcing my reading by committing to writing about Jacobs' book in this space for the next few weeks.

2017

People will be presented with things, and will find things to be happy about in this new year.  But for America, the West, the planet, it is unlikely to be happy.

We will count it as not as bad a year as it might have been if we are not in a shooting war by the end of it, or no nuclear weapon has been used in the next twelve months.  And if the world's nations stay the course on the Paris climate agreement.  But it will almost certainly be a year of catastrophe for which we have no precedent in this country, even if some of those catastrophes aren't evident or don't manifest within the next twelve months.

Our imaginations work by metaphor, analogy, story.  There are lots of people trying to fit what is about to begin on January 20 within recent history, political and otherwise.  Some say 1968 is an apt analogy, for instance.

But 1968 is not. There is nothing of a normal pattern about it, and there is no analogy.  There are no precedents in American history, or history of the past century, except in the sense that photos cut up from various sources are precedent for the collage made from these fragments.

I use the term Hitler Millennium to suggest the direction and extent of what I see coming.  That's as close as I can get, and it is extreme in order to suggest that we are entering a period of extremes (and not simply extreme rhetoric), and it is best to err on the side of anticipating worse consequences than actually occur, rather than try to normalize and excuse events and actions that are by their nature and historical context extreme.  There is precedent for that attempt to deny and normalize, at least, in Germany of the 1930s.

The world may go completely to hell this year, but it may take a little longer.  Still, the UK is in almost as bad a shape as the US, and Germany is teetering.  (All this at a time of great prosperity and wealth, with relatively healthy populations.  None of which is guaranteed to last.)

The US is likely to see regression that goes beyond reversing progress and changes made in the past 8 years, or 50 years, to the past 75 years and beyond.  There is no precedent for that.

Perhaps it is worthwhile to realize that this perfect storm is composed of elements that we've been well aware have existed for some time.  Covert racism has been festering for decades, probably since it became culturally suspect to be overt. And while some see this as the revolt of an undervalued working class, it bears much more the hallmarks of the continuing revolt of the very rich, in unholy alliance with the political scum of the earth.

Some may hark back well into the previous century, to the conspiracies of power expressed, for example, in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (which I have recently actually and finally completed reading.)  I've recently been re-reading Jim Harrison's 1998 novel The Road Home. One of its narrators, a 29 year old man and confessed nomad whose study and solace is the natural world, nevertheless makes these comments:

"...part of the Republican trance that required of the poor only that they behave and keep out of the way of the money-making possibilities.  The whole country had apparently become comfortable with the greed frenzy of its top one percent."

This is 1998, with the "one percent" rhetoric of 2012.  And more to the point:

"The rich and the upper middle class were now seething with resentment over protecting their position and were demanding an enforceable mono-ethic which was gradually turning the country into a fascist Disneyland."

I wouldn't lay that at the feet of Walt Disney, a better and more complex visionary than many credit him, but what the term "Disneyland" suggests is clear enough in this context.  And now there's no more "gradually" about it.  We're about to get a fascist reality show.  Produced chiefly by fossil fuel wealth.

People are frightened--especially people of color, Muslims, women, people whose health depends on Obamacare.   The effect on the planet I'll leave for another time, but the short version is that whatever chance civilization had to survive the climate crisis relatively intact may well be gone as a result of what begins on January 20.

 We'll see if large numbers, or even a few, actually employ the tools of resistance being talked about, and if they have any effect, and what people will do if these efforts don't immediately change things.  It's a long game, with lots of unknowns.   It seems more than possible that 12 months from now--or 24 or 36--people won't recognize what things were like, what they themselves were like, on this New Year's day of 2017.

The apocalypse as a time of revelation is embedded in the word.  We will learn much about ourselves, individually and collectively. The stakes are highest for the young, and there are jobs to be done, jobs of hope enacted in the present.  There are lives to be lived, for however long they last.  As a wise old friend wrote to me recently, "My life has taught me that resistance starts with endurance."

As for this blog, it will be around for the rest of the Obama presidency.  By that time, maybe something else.  But my resolution not to dwell on political commentary doesn't mean I won't have anything to say.    

R.I.P. 2016: Remembrances

All I can add by way of tribute are random recollections of where these famous people and their work intersected with my life and sometimes my work.  Often that was during a brief period, though I did follow some over years.

For example, I attended to Alan Rickman's work as an actor and movie director over several decades, and wish I'd had the opportunity to see his theatre work as actor and director.  My appreciation of him just after his death is here.  Reading about him at that time and watching tributes by his peers preserved on YouTube proved he was an even more admirable person than I knew.

But two legendary pop music figures who died this year had mostly brief hold on my consciousness, long ago in the 1970s.  I became aware of Prince when most of the world did, with his Purple Rain movie and album--when he had the #1 film at the box office, #1 single and album simultaneously. (Dorin Thorin, cinematographer for Purple Rain, also died this year.)

 I was intrigued by Prince's musical versatility, stage presence and the unique mix of styles that characterized his music.  But as he shifted his persona I lost interest, and can't at the moment summon a single melody of his in my head.  Well, maybe "Little Red Corvette".

I became aware of David Bowie in the early 70s, this time before most of America.  His classic album Hunky Dory was not a hit in the US, but it was in Boston where I was writing on rock music and other topics for the alternative weekly Boston After Dark/Boston Phoenix.  I remember that our music editor, Ben Gerson, was much taken with Bowie.  Wish I had those pieces he labored on.

Hunky Dory remains the album that I remember, though I can conjure up a number of other Bowie hits in my head, recorded after and also before.  But I didn't follow his subsequent work all that closely--I wasn't so taken with the theatrics of the Ziggy Stardust and subsequent personae.

I admired his acting in The Man Who Fell To Earth and The Hunger, but again I lost track of his subsequent films.  I've got a lot of catching up to do.  Reading his extensive wikipedia bio, I got exhausted just trying to follow his activities through the 1970s.  I do recall reading a story a few years ago about his successful marriage to Iman, a beautiful woman who fascinated me as a model and delighted me as an actor opposite William Shatner in Star Trek VI.  I've noted that some younger folk were much taken with his last album Blackstar, in which he dealt quite consciously with his impending death.

My interest in the music of Bowie and Prince in the 1970s was largely supplanted when I got absorbed in the Asylum Records era--Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, John David Souther, Chris Hillman, American Flyer, etc. and especially the Eagles.  This must partly have been because I could play and sing some of their songs, and I did, and occasionally still do. I think my version of "Peaceful Easy Feeling" has actually improved.

That was one of many Eagles songs written or co-written by one of its founders, Glenn Frey who died in early 2016.  I saw the Eagles live once, along with Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne, at a Jerry Brown for President fundraiser in 1976 in Washington.  They had reunion tours and albums in 1994 and 2007.  I should catch up with that music, too.  President Obama honored the group at this year's Kennedy Center honors.

The musicians I listened to but who survived their initial fame are dying off in droves now (Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, a group among those that define 1967-68 in my memory, and both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, though I barely remember them) and the musicians like George Michael who I didn't listen to are joining them.  I wonder how long I'll have the energy to notice, which is not as cynical as it may sound.

2016 saw the end of Muhammad Ali's long sad decline.  I remember watching the 1960 Olympic boxing match in which commentator Howard Cosell extolled the merits of the young amateur American fighter Cassius Clay.  He won that first fight and went on to win the Gold Medal.  He turned pro the same year and began his incredible career.  His name change, rapping persona, and especially his draft resistance in the late 1960s were inspirational and changed the culture.

Another hero of the 1960s was astronaut John Glenn.  His three-orbit ride in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth made him an instant hero. He became a personification of the JFK years, an apple pie American who was also a Kennedy Democrat. Towards the end of a distinguished career as a U.S. Senator, he became the oldest American in space when he returned to orbit as a member of the Space Shuttle crew in 1998.

Of course, the most current news is about the deaths of Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds, within 48 hours.  Carrie Fisher's feisty Princess Leia changed how women appeared in action movies, but I especially admired her writing.  Postcards From the Edge remains a special book.   And I was a Debbie Reynolds fan from childhood.  Her performance in Singing in the Rain, surely one of the most joyous musicals ever made, was brave and indelible.  It looks great on DVD.

Gene Wilder is known as an actor, notably in Young Frankenstein and a segment of Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, but earlier this year I discovered how instrumental he was as a writer in that classic Young Frankenstein film.  Though director Mel Brooks gets the credit, the initial idea and much of the story came from Wilder. (Brooks attention to black and white visual style however is essential to the movie's quality.)  It remains a classic film comedy.  I remember I first saw it with Pat Mitchell, then an entertainment reviewer for WBZ in Boston, later head of PBS.

Besides Jim Harrison and Edward Albee, writers I read who died in 2016 include Umberto Eco, whose work I have mixed feelings about, and W.P. Kinsella, whose novel was the basis for the classic movie Field of Dreams. Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself gave major credit to Gregory Rabassa for his English translation of A Hundred Years of Solitude and other of his works that established his reputation in North America.  Rabassa died in 2016, as did  British "Angry Young Man" playwright Arnold Wesker, Italian political playwright and Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo, and author of the most beloved American novel of my time, To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee.

Besides record producer George Martin, Beatlesland lost Al Brodax, producer of the film Yellow Submarine as well as the earlier Beatles TV cartoon series, the animation director of Yellow Submarine Robert Baiser, and press officer Tony Barrow. 

Actor Robert Vaughn costarred with David McCallum in the 60s TV series Man From UNCLE.  Others I remember fondly who died this year include the excellent PBS news reporter Gwen Ifill, golfer Arnold Palmer who came from my part of western PA and returned there after utterly transforming professional golf into the major sport it is today, pioneer news broadcaster Morley Safer and pioneer baseball broadcaster (and Pittsburgh Pirates catcher) Joe Garagiola.  The world we know now is due partly to their unique presences.

Among the lesser known figures I want to recognize are journalist Ben Bagdikian, who covered Civil Rights in the 50s and was the reporter to whom Daniel Ellsberg passed the Pentagon Papers.  Bagdikian became a journalism educator and author.  Robert Stigwood was the impresario that made the Bee Gees prominent, through thick and thin and thick and thin and thick.  Pat Harrington, Jr. was one of Steve Allen's original Man on the Street gang, and among his many later roles was the unforgettable man from the Phone Company, revealed to be running the country in the 1967  movie The President's Analyst.

Bob Elliot of Bob and Ray died at age 92.  Alvin Toffler was the author of Future Shock that popularized the 1970s future studies movement.  Whatever happened to that, the future?  And yunz Pittsburghers will remember Chilly Billy Bill Cardille, host of Chiller Theatre, who memorably appeared in the burgh classic, Night of the Living Dead.

May they all rest in peace.  Their legacy and their work lives on.

Not So Rainy December

December is statistically the rainiest month of our winter here on the North Coast, but not so this year.  It was just a shade under the normal (7.87 inches v. 8.12.) which surprised me--I thought it would turn out to be less.  It was certainly less than last December, when we got about twice as much.

Still, we're ahead of last year since October by 5 inches, and some 20 inches more rain fell in calendar year 2016 than 2015.  Which is about the most positive thing I can say about 2016.  (Other than that two of my nieces had their first babies, so my baby sister became a grandmother for the first time--and the second time in the same year.)

R.I.P. 2016 George Martin

I don't have much to add to Adam Gopnik's Post Script on George Martin in the New Yorker, especially as it confirms something I noticed when listening recently to the early cuts on the Beatles Anthology: at first the Beatles were very close to a comedy group.  When he met them, George Martin was chiefly a comedy record producer, and he mostly liked their sense of humor.

Of course both Martin and the Beatles together transcended the category, but that specific early 60s era of lunacy, parody and satire, from Peter Sellers and The Goon Show, Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was in the UK (and briefly in the US) to the likes of Stan Freberg in the US, was an important aspect of the cultural shift that became what's known as the 60s.

As Gopnik notes, those early audition tapes weren't special in themselves. The Beatles were fortunate in finding the right supporters, like George Martin--to help liberate their unforeseen genius.  That comic orientation would persist--they picked Richard Lester, who'd also been associated with Peter Sellers (as George Martin had been) and the Goons to direct their movies, and continued through John Lennon's books and the group's wonderful Christmas records for their fan club.

That comic sense--parody, self-parody, satire--combined with a Liverpool twist and a British larking about--would transmute through the decade (in the crucible of mind-expanding drugs, the craziness and dangers of nuclear Cold War and Vietnam) into a kind of transcendent, desperate joy, a refusal to submit to despair in the face of possible annihilation.  It would be a major element and effect of the Beatles very individual music.

All of the Beatles were funny, and all in different ways.  George Harrison's spiritual musical expressions were part of that transcendent joy and wisdom, but he also wrote one of their great satires ("Piggies") and later bankrolled Monty Python movies.

In all this, George Martin provided all that Gopnik notes: possibilities found in the musical literature, the willingness and ability to follow creative paths and whims, and a specific taste and ability in executing arrangements as well as constructing recordings that became the definition of a producer.  The Beatles wouldn't have been the Beatles without him.

Like all great producers, Martin worked on records nobody heard with artists that never made it.  But that doesn't diminish his contribution with the Beatles, which extended to the more recent anthologies and resurrections.  He became a curator as well as a co-creator.

George Martin died in March 2016. (My commentary at the time is here.)  His work lives on.

An Italian Connection

Among the many vicious and racist expressions liberated by election results--some unparalleled in my memory which goes back to the open racism of the 1950s--there are the prominent remarks of one Carl Paladino, often described as a highly placed Trump ally.

I won't repeat the remarks, though I will repeat that while such language about African Americans has obviously lived through private exchanges, not even in the 1950s would a public figure make them public.  (Paladino denies he meant to make them public, though he's made similar denials in the past.  His defense apparently is that he's a bumbling racist.)

I mention them because by name and appearance, Paladino seems to be of Italian extraction.  I've noted with great sadness the Italian names that prominently appear in the ranks of reactionaries, xenophobes and racists.

 I've also noticed that as generations of Italian Americans have become "Americanized" and prosperous, they have lost touch with their roots and their ties to their immigrant ancestors.  I saw this in western Pennsylvania but it is probably true elsewhere.  The move to the suburbs seems to more than symbolize it.

I grew up in the 1950s, when Italian Americans were major players in American culture, from Sinatra to DiMaggio.  There were Italian language hit songs on the radio.  Later generations had only the Godfather films, brilliant in themselves but unfortunate in their effects at creating dubious and mostly inaccurate stereotypes.

There were waves of Italian immigration from the late 19th century to just after World War II, but the bulk came in the first two decades of the 20th century--and together with the immigrants from Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe (at first solicited by American companies for labor in coal mines)--led to restrictions and quotas on immigration from those countries in 1921.

My maternal grandfather arrived from Italy just before these first restrictions went into effect, and my grandmother and mother got in later because they were family members.  The quotas from certain countries were further reduced in the National Origins Act of 1924, which a New York Times book reviewer earlier this year called it "the most restrictive immigration law in our history" meant to "protect the country from foreign contamination."

But "foreign" meant something more specific. It meant virtually all Asians, for one thing.  But it also meant Italians, already here in large numbers.  This review also quotes the august Saturday Evening Post from the 1920s:  “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.” 

That prominently meant Italians, who at the time were not considered "white."  It also meant Poles, another chunk of my known heritage and the source of my last name.  When I was growing up and started having lofty ambitions, I could not help but notice that names like mine (or my mother's) weren't reflected in lists of American writers or presidential candidates.  And if I didn't notice it, others were helpful in pointing it out, even meaning it kindly.

The impact of immigration is complicated on every level.  There is a certain cultural sentimentality that twists reason, along with understandable reaction to nearby change.  On the other hand, racism is racism.

We can attribute the Paladinos of today's America to a combination of a lack of empathy and historical awareness as well as residual tribalism and personal stupidity, in which the culture of greed overcomes any other.  But there's likely also a specific sort of projection, a shadow of shame in the cultural disdain and stereotypes that still follow our ancestral groups.

Defining the Darkness.10

“She has opted for a world in which she has done nothing wrong, and that she need answer only to God. This is a not very rare version of God in America which is often viewed as a godless place, ergo, the most ordinary behavioral ethic may be ignored by Christians. It is a version of religion quite similar to Senator McCarthy’s version of Americanism where all honor and civility can be righteously ignored.”

Jim Harrison
The Road Home

As we approach the final Christmas of the Obama Presidency--the comparative Golden Age before the Dark Age Ahead--I'll focus on photos of President Obama with babies and young children. (That is, in addition to the ones I've used before, here  and here. There are so many to choose from.) Every one tells a story, at least one. Happy Holidays.

President Obama with siblings of children killed in Sandy Hook shooting

A Story for Our Time? Well, For Mine Anyway

I had this clock on the wall in my bathroom, blue background, black numerals.  I liked it a lot.  Then a few months ago it started slowing down.  I changed the battery.  Pretty soon it slowed down again.  New batteries didn't help, and eventually it was losing hours.

I got another clock for that space in the bathroom, at a local thrift shop.  It had a gray, pebbled pattern surrounding the face, which coincidentally matches the colors and approximately the pattern of the surface around the sink.  (This is the original stuff from the 50s.)

That's pretty nice, but I still liked that blue clock.  So I mounted it in here, above my computer and to the right.  I decided I would treat it as an old-fashioned wind-up clock that you had to reset every day.  But most of the time I forgot, so it had any old time.  When I wanted to know the actual time, I depended on the computer time down there in the right hand corner.

Then about a month ago, the computer clock stopped telling the actual time.  I reset it using the various Internet clocks, like nist.gov.  The first time it worked but the next time I turned the computer on, it was wrong again.  Then it refused to update--just an error message. At the moment, that clock is off by 5 hours and the calendar by 3 days.

I'm told this may have something to do with a battery that's just for the clock.  It's an old computer.  The operating system is so old that Microsoft won't support it anymore.

  But here's the thing.  The blue clock on the wall started keeping perfect time again.  It has for several weeks now.

2016 Bumper Sticker of the Year

Apparently it's been around for a few years, so I should qualify the award as Best Bumper Sticker I Saw for the First Time in 2016.

In California, Resistance is Official

It's not just activists and entrepreneurs, and even not just California Governor Brown.  Elsewhere the Resistance to the coming Nazi Millennium is official, according to the LA Times.

The story notes CA reps to the federal government like Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein and incoming Senator Kamala Harris.  But also various state officials, like incoming state A-G Xavier Becerra, Sec of State Alex Padilla and top members of the state legislatures: Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon.

There's state legislation already in the works "which would stymie construction of a wall along the California-Mexico border and SB 31, which would prohibit the state from sharing information to a federally compiled registry of Muslims in the United States..."

Among non-officials and including non-Californians, talking up resistance are scientists who attended the recent American Geophysical Union convention in San Francisco where they heard Governor Jerry Brown's fiery speech, among others.  The Washington Post reported on their first street demonstration, and the determination of individual scientists and groups to defend science, especially climate science, against the Dark Agers of the Nazi Millennium.

The scientists confess they have no experience at political warfare.  Politicians on the other hand do--the question is will they have the stomach for it, beyond popular post-election bravado.  It's not very risky in California at the moment, but there's always the Bush-Cheney technique of getting us into a war or two and making support for the reich a test of patriotism.

Are they ready? Nobody seemed to remember the 2000 election, so why would they remember Iraqnam in 2003?  All these nifty Internet tools are useless when everything surprises you.