Definitions of Independence

The Fourth of July: Independence Day. As a country today however, we are in some ways dangerously and stupidly dependent.

We are far too dependent on a vulnerable Internet and satellites (especially GPS) for far too much, without alternatives or adequate redundancy.

 We are way, way too dependent on other nations for our food and goods.  We are especially dependent on the smooth operation of complex transportation systems over great distances that are vulnerable in any number of ways.  Political instability, natural disaster and other foreseeable but ignored circumstances in key countries could set the entire house of cards tumbling down.

All of this is unnecessary in its scope and threat.  Laissez faire is how the attitude is described: leave it to the massive corporations maximizing profit to determine our dependence.  The sound of those French words suggests what is at the heart of it: laziness.  We are too lazy, too distracted to take sensible measures and precautions to protect our independence.  We could have local food sources and more manufacturing within the country, but we don't even discuss it except in the bullshit of the liar now in the White House who doesn't know how to approach the problems and never intended to anyway.

But in other vital ways, our independence depends on understanding our dependence on the whole: on the natural systems of the planet, and the international efforts that are necessary to address threats to everyone's life and liberty, far into the future.

The Fourth of July weekend is considered the first big holiday of summer.  And in most of the world, it is hot.  It is very hot.  In too many places, it is dangerously hot.

It was hot already in early June.  In Europe, the June heat waves were linked directly to the climate crisis.  Until recently, scientists could not attribute individual events like a heat wave to the climate crisis, although such events were predicted in climate crisis models.  But now they can.  And last month they did.

A new study suggests where in the United States the climate crisis will have the largest effects, but for the moment let's stay with Europe.  The heat there has the full attention of government leaders, and some statements by German chancellor Angela Merkel did not get the attention they deserve, because they were quite ominous.

In advance of the G20 meetings, in which our apprentice dictator is scheduled to take part, Merkel took a step farther than her previous suggestion that Europe needs to look to its own affairs without expecting outside help.  Her new statements are a warning--at these meetings and in general, Europe is going to be dealing with what they need to do to confront and address the climate crisis, and anybody who isn't interested in that agenda will simply be ignored.

On this issue in particular, Europe is declaring its independence (although more than willing to listen to Governor Jerry Brown and other state, city and regional U.S. leaders who are serious people with serious ideas about addressing the causes and consequences of the climate crisis.)  And if they were willing to indulge the a.d. on anything, his last series of appalling tweets have given the Europeans plenty of motivation to simply turn their backs on him.

That's not the only likely drama of those meetings.  Regarding the U.S., it will be how much damage our a.d. will do, childishly miffed by being ignored by all but his mentor in Russia, Putin, with whom he is meeting (though as usual without much of an agenda or reason to meet.)

Meanwhile, thousands of Americans have declared their independence from their own president and his regime, with rallies over the weekend in dozens of cities (but especially in L.A., NYC and San Francisco) in support of his impeachment.

I wrote back in January about mourning for the presidency, but it's worse now to be watching the presidency being drawn and quartered in the public square.  The integrity of the government, such as it was, is also being torn limb from limb, as the president and his family profit from office and openly corrupt government officials--notably the EPA--do the bidding of corporations.

These are ugly, sickening sights and sounds.  Contemplating the history and hopes associated with Independence Day may remind us, however grimly, of the country we should have.  For these days the only independence is resistance.

Update: On this Independence Day the big news is North Korea's first successful test of a missile capable of reaching the U.S., although not yet the lower 48. (This Times piece linked above is a good short summary of the total situation, which would test even a very good president.)  Another Times piece notes that analysts believe that even with this test, North Korea is several years away from being capable of launching an ICBM with a nuclear warhead capable of reaching a U.S. target.

The a.d.'s response was alarmingly disengaged, with a joke most a stand up comics would reject.  His past bluster has not only been ineffective, it shows him up as a bluffer with little credibility. 

  This is shaping up to be the critical situation that was bound to happen sooner or later.  It brings into sharper relief his unfitness for office--as in this oped entitled The greatest threat facing the United States is its own president, and contrary to some I have no more confidence in the foreign policy people of  his regime.

Final Update: To round out this Independence Day: When NPR tweeted the Declaration of Independence line by line, some supporters of the apprentice dictator trolled them for anti-a.d. propaganda.

Head Lines

In recent years it's become my tradition to hike the Trinidad Head on my birthday.  It's not the only time I do it, but it's become a ritual of that day.  It's the first time this year though, and the first time since President Obama declared the Trinidad Head a National Monument, along with other features on the Pacific coast.

Hasn't changed anything--the trail is still rocky and narrow, which is reassuring in a way. This year on 30 June it was cloudy but bright when I started, and I could see the fog coming in as I headed up.

By the time I reached my favorite bench, you couldn't see the ocean anymore.  I went on to the top just to make it official.  My windbreaker and glasses were wet by the time I got back down.

A Spanish ship sailed into Trinidad Bay in June 1775, named the place Trinidad because it was the feast of the Trinity, and sailed away.  The Yurok lived near here, and they were left in peace for another 75 years.  But once the 49ers came, it took only a decade or so before their way of life for thousands of years was destroyed forever.  Their descendants are nearby.

Distractions from the Ominous

There are two interpretations of the malicious tweeting and pervasive lying by the apprentice dictator in the White House.  The first and the most frequent is that he is out of control, impulsive and unhinged.  Richard Wolffe's column represents this point of view,  but he is one among many.  Some suggests this mania has increased since inauguration.

The other point of view is expressed most eloquently by Rachel Maddow.  She proposes that his attention-getting outrages are strategic, unleashed when the a.d. needs media attention to move away from more damaging stories, such as the latest in the Russia connection, or the sordid healthcare bill mess.

Update: There is a second "strategy" that has also been mentioned recently: the political one of playing to his base, which is fairly small, but it multiplies by being the core of the Republican party which reflexively follows it.  This strategy makes the most sense when filtered through Fox News and the rabid right radio rants.

The question also can be raised about most of the current regime's actions.  By and large they have been bumbling, so badly structured that major pieces of them fall apart immediately, or totally deceptive in that they are at best p.r. releases, not actionable orders or legislation.

For instance, the White House commission request to obtain detailed data on all individual voters in all the states.  For various reasons, including contradictory statements on how this data will be used (made public?  locked up tight?) most states have so far refused--some colorfully:

The pushback was bipartisan: The Mississippi secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said Friday that he had not received a request from the commission, but colorfully suggested he would not honor one if it came.

“My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” Mr. Hosemann said in a statement. “Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

The stated intent of gathering this information is to investigate whether there was widespread fraudulent voting in the last election, for which there is zero evidence and which only the apprentice dictator believes happened.

Is this omnivorous demand for data just another product of pique (to justify the absurd assertion that he would have won the popular vote but for fraud) in the usual blunt overkill manner?  Or is it strategic?  And to what end?

The reason many see is to further the GOP crusade to suppress voting when it might be against them. There are other possibilities just as sinister and perhaps even more so.  What if this detailed data is funneled only to the GOP, to target misinformation and other political dirty tricks to the most vulnerable?  Such an operation is reportedly part of the Russian connection investigation.

On an even larger scale, besides being a goldmine for thieves that should outrage everyone (for the request includes last four digits of S.S. #) is it a database for more general suppression?  It is the kind and extent of information a dictator needs for his secret police.

So which is it--insanity or strategic genius?  There's no way to know, so it's best to concentrate on what the actual effects are--that is, for the effects that don't depend on knowing the answer.  Because in a sense it doesn't matter.

Whether outrageous tweets are designed to change the subject, they in fact do, and that must be resisted.  People can point out the shocking and deeply sad damage to the presidency and the country that they cause, but the subject doesn't have to dominate every news and cable show for several news cycles, nor need it be the subject of every opinion column and analysis.

Similarly, the resistance to this outrageous demand for voter data--backed by the apprentice dictator's Nixonian, HUAC, dictator-like statement (what are they hiding?)--is necessary for whatever the reason for it was.  The attention should be, as it has been so far, on the possible effects that cannot be risked.

And it is important to go back and find those stories that have been obscured, as Rachel did when she also mentioned the defunding of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which is the only federal agency working with the states on cybersecurity of voting machines and other aspects of the election process.

Another related, undercovered story is that Homeland Security has refused to check voting machines to see if any were hacked during the 2016 election, even as concern over Russian interference increases.

These acts, when taken together and placed beside the suspicions still being investigated concerning collusion with a foreign dictatorship to determine an electoral outcome, are ominous fragments suggesting a very dark future for U.S. democracy.

Devilish Details

Sometimes the devilish details are small but irksome.  Nevertheless they change or obscure meanings, and that always means something.

A little verbal sloppiness seems to intrude more often on Internet posts than they used to in print.  I wonder if this is part of some weird Internet ethic that says you can't have editors or editing.  There is this tradition now that every time a post is changed, the change has to be noted.  Why?  I edit posts for clarity any number of times. As I believe I should.

The esteemed Jonathan Chait is trenchant as usual in his column on the week's major revelation about the Russian connection.  But near the beginning there's this sentence:

That line of defense is likely to disappear now that The Wall Street Journal has reported that Peter Smith, a Republican opposition researcher who said he was working for Michael Flynn, colluded with Russian hackers to try to obtain stolen emails from Hillary Clinton.

But that Flynn "colluded with Russian hackers to try to obtain stolen emails from Hillary Clinton" is not what he meant--at least I don't think so. If I'm correct, they didn't try to obtain anything from Hillary Clinton.  They tried to obtain emails that were stolen from Hillary Clinton. There's a big difference, and while his meaning may be eventually clear in context, the sentence is needlessly confusing.  It stopped me cold anyway.  (And Chiat wasn't the only one to make this mistake.)

Or the group of moderate Republicans that issued an important statement on the R budget, as reported by Politico.  They concluded: “[A]bsent such a bipartisan, bicameral agreement, we are reticent to support any budget resolution on the House floor,” the letter reads.

"Reticent" is an odd word to use, since it usually means not inclined to speak.  While not speaking in favor of the resolution is part of the meaning, the more accurate word to describe what they mean is "reluctant."  They are reluctant to support the budget resolution.  That's plenty mealy-mouth for politicians without being bewildering as well.

But devilish details can also be quite big.  For instance, a lot of verbiage can obscure some important numbers.

In an eloquent column on the Republican healthcare proposals, Paul Krugman provides a broad if shocking understanding of the basic cruelty at the heart of Republican policy.  But several numbers he uses to make his case deserve to stand alone, especially as they are not usually included in stories about the Senate bill.

The numbers are these:

Percentage of tax cuts in this bill that will go to Americans with incomes of over $1 million:  40%

Percentage their income will rise due to these tax cuts: 2%

Estimate of the number of otherwise preventable deaths that will be caused by provisions of this bill:  200,000

My 71st Year

My 71st Year

After surmounting three-score and ten,
With all their chances, changes, losses, sorrows,
My parents' deaths, the vagaries of my life, the many tearing
   passions of me, the war of '63 and '4,
As some old broken soldier, after a long, hot, wearying march,
  or haply after battle.
To-day at twilight, hobbling, answering company roll-call,
   Here, with vital voice,
Reporting yet, saluting yet the Officer over all.

Walt Whitman

The New American Flag

Click to enlarge. Captured from the Washington Post

Another Article of Impeachment

In the almost universal condemnation of our apprentice dictator's latest tweets, many people--especially Republicans--used the phrase "beneath the dignity" of the presidency.

It's worse than that, and eventually these tweets are going to appear in an article of impeachment, or should, under the charge "conduct detrimental to the presidency."

If such articles are written, there will likely be others of more obvious weight, such as obstruction of justice and dereliction of duty (for failing to confront Russian interference in American elections) as well as some fancier way of saying profiteering from the presidency.

But this will be one, or should be.  Because destroying the credibility of the presidency, the representative of our country to the world, is no laughing matter.

Fred

Ever since his post on May 10 about Hospice help on his Fred's Humboldt Blog, I've checked local sites and googled his name every week or so, but for some reason I didn't see his June 1 obituary until today.

I never met Fred Mangels and didn't know him personally, only as a Humboldt blogger.  He and I were in the first group of bloggers hereabouts.  Fred reached out to the rest of us and stayed interested---the last time he commented on a post here was just a few months ago.  It was a small group back then, and such was Fred's standing that a half dozen or so of us contributed to buy him a new computer when he sorely needed one.

Fred inspired a certain affection even among those of us who really didn't share his politics.  His blogging voice was unaffected and direct, his approach personal and sincere.  He wrote mostly about local politics and libertarian issues, but he also wrote about daily concerns and other local matters.

In recent years Fred and I had a teasing relationship.  He changed the name of my blog on his blogroll to "Bill's Obama blog."  I changed his on mine to "Fred's Climate Crisis Denial blog."  When he commented here on an Obama post-presidency post, I promised regular posts on the subject just for him.

I may be wrong but Fred and I may have been the only bloggers left of that original group.  Fred's blog was more of a local institution and got aggregated locally.  His blog and his voice will be missed.  May he rest in peace.

Two Books That Changed The World

2017 is an anniversary year for two novels that changed the world in recent times.  It's intriguing to consider them together.

Although it would not be until the early 1970s that One Hundred Years of Solitude created a sensation in English speaking countries, the novel in Spanish by Gabriel Garcia Marquez published as Cien Anos De Soledad fifty years ago in 1967 began its conquest of the world in his native South America.

 In his recent Vanity Fair article, Paul Elie writes:
"The novel came off the press in Buenos Aires on May 30, 1967, two days before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and the response among Spanish-language readers was akin to Beatlemania: crowds, cameras, exclamation points, a sense of a new era beginning."

"Eight thousand copies sold in the first week in Argentina alone, unprecedented for a literary novel in South America. Laborers read it. So did housekeepers and professors—and prostitutes: the novelist Francisco Goldman recalls seeing the novel on the bedside table in a coastal bordello. García Márquez traveled to Argentina, to Peru, to Venezuela, on its behalf."

But that was just the beginning. Eventually One Hundred Years of Solitude was translated into 37 languages, and had the same effect almost everywhere.  "It’s the book that redefined not just Latin-American literature but literature, period,” insists Ilan Stavans, the pre-eminent scholar of Latino culture in the U.S., who says he has read the book 30 times.

Its broad appeal to that first South American readership--from the literati to laborers, was echoed everywhere.  I remember discussing it with Ted Solotaroff, then editor of the New American Review and a renowned champion of new writers.  His face lit up, and neither of us could keep from smiling.  For the next several years, when young women, from artists to waitresses asked me to recommend a book (partly because I was the book review editor for the Boston Phoenix and taught a course on new books) I always named this one.  I gave copies as gifts.  It never missed.  Never.

This is a book that created rapture.

"Unofficially, it’s everybody’s favorite work of world literature and the novel that, more than any other since World War II, has inspired novelists of our time," Elie asserts.  His article quotes several writers on their response.

Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 and wrote many other distinguished books.  His voice remains unmistakable throughout.  But One Hundred Years of Solitude remains unique, with the same power to amaze and enchant new readers fifty years later.

Twenty years ago a novel for children was published in England called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by a new author, now known as J.K. Rowling. While almost immediately successful, the book itself assumed a special significance as the beginning of a series that became an unparalleled global phenomenon.

It also reached a breadth of readers, most notably in terms of age.  First and foremost the Harry Potter books were enormously popular with children, who grew along with Harry and the series.  But soon--perhaps with the second or third book--adults became readers almost as fanatical.  Margaret and I were introduced to the series by adult friends, and like them, we made a ritual of reading them aloud to each other.  Eventually we awaited each new volume with our version of the same enthusiasm as young readers.

These were books that created rapture.

One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Harry Potter series share some fascinating aspects.  Both stories came to their authors all at once, on moving vehicles (Marquez in a car, Rowling on a train.)  Both combine the ordinary with the magical, the recognizable with the mythic.  Both have memorable characters, memorable incidents and scenes, and strong stories.  They contain the major milestones of life--birth, marriage, children, death--and the major relationships--parents or parent figures and children, lovers and friends.

 Though one is a kind of cosmic tragedy and the other a comedy (ending in marriages, as Shakespeare's comedies do) in which good triumphs over evil at a cost, they both create capacious, credible worlds that include the incredible.  Their worlds in general conception are strikingly imaginative and unique, bringing the new back to the novel. Moreover within these worlds the narrative reveals one surprising invention after another, in details, characters and story, that have captured the imaginations of readers for as long as they've been books.

 Both deal with big themes and with the larger world, including the political world, its issues and consequences.  But even in their worlds apart, they do so through characters who are not in positions of power.

Both are literary works, with debts to many earlier writers (Marquez idolized Faulkner and thought of himself as a journalist, Rowling reminded me first of the British children's writer E. Nesbit and in later books, as her characters got older and the world more sophisticated, I thought of Jane Austen and others.)

A teenager visiting Arcata from England became
the Harry Potter stand-in for the midnight release party
at Northtown Books for the last Potter book.
And yes, I was there. 

But above all they each have an unmistakable and individual voice--the rhythm of words and sentences and paragraphs, the narrative tone--that carried the writer and then the reader forward as a confidant.

Like all major successes, timing and luck and the right people helping them played a part.  But above many others, these two books argue for the undeniability of work so transcendent that its success seems only natural if not inevitable.  In a world with more than enough horror, these are welcome wonders. I'm grateful to have them, and to have been there to see them happen over their lifetimes so far.

The Tipping Point of Cruelty

Update 6/27: Senate Republican leadership withdrew their Kill Obamacare and the People It Serves bill from immediately going to the floor for debate and a vote when it became clear that not enough Rs supported this first step.  The next opportunity comes in two weeks, after negotiations with key Senators may result in a revised bill.  The nail in the coffin of this bill appears to be the Congressional Budget Office estimate that 22 million Americans would lose coverage.  Meanwhile opposition is growing, both from healthcare related organizations, including the American Medical Association, and voters, who may have the opportunity to move their demonstrations from Senate offices to the home districts during the Fourth of July break.  Laurence O'Donnell and guests on his show suggest that the bill actually had the support of from 5 to 20 or 30 Republicans, which would seem to make getting to 50 an uphill climb.

This piece of video is amazing, one of the best sequences I've ever seen on Rachel Maddow.  It starts as a mundane story about the upcoming Fourth of July weekend, and what happened in Denver in 1978 on a similar weekend, with the 4th on a Tuesday.  It then becomes a story of a successful social justice campaign, that over a scandalously long time, won rights for the disabled--providing them the liberty of free movement on public transportation.

Then it comes up against the current Senate Kill Obamacare and the People It Serves bill, specifically the draconian cuts in Medicaid which will devastate the lives of a large proportion of the disabled.

The climax of this piece is a bit of video of disabled demonstrators outside the offices of Senator McConnell that is heartbreaking and haunting.  The woman being dragged away while pleading "Don't touch Medicaid!" is very powerful video.

This segment illustrates and suggests why this bill is the tipping point of cruelty.  If it passes, it will change America more than any single act of this regime, and tips the future into a very ugly place.

Medicaid is the insurer for a third of disabled adults and 60% of disabled children (and 40% of all children.)  Medicaid insures nearly half the births in America.  Medicaid is by far the largest health insurance provider in the United States--75 million Americans--much bigger than Medicare.

And here's what Republicans are trying to do:

Washington Post:

"Congressional budget analysts plan to issue their projections as early as Monday on the legislation’s impact on the federal deficit and the number of Americans with insurance coverage. Already, proponents and critics alike are predicting that the Senate proposal would lead to greater reductions through the Medicaid changes than the estimated $834 billion estimated for a similar bill passed by House Republicans last month."

This is almost incredible, as most observers assumed the Senate bill will moderate the crude brutality of the House bill.  But this one is worse, particularly on Medicaid.

 Medicaid is not only enormously important, it is also popular with the American public.  The Post again:

"Part of the pressure the moderates now face is that Medicaid consistently draws widespread support in surveys. A poll released Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that three-fourths of the public, including 6 in 10 Republicans, said they have a positive view of the program. Just a third of those polled said they supported the idea of reducing federal funding for the expansion or limiting how much money a state receives for all beneficiaries.

Even among Republicans, the foundation found, only about half favor reversing the federal money for Medicaid expansion."

The money that the federal government won't pay into Medicaid goes directly to a tax cut for the wealthy.

America's first social programs may not have been purely or even largely motivated by compassion.  In the 1930s, even the bankers worried about revolution.  But FDR's programs, including Social Security, put social justice on the agenda, and gave permission to politicians to act decently.

When Michael Harrington published his landmark book on poverty in the early 60s, he estimated that a fourth of the population was below the poverty line.  Dwight McDonald, in his review of the book in the New Yorker, suggested that in practical terms it was more.

Harrington's book caught the attention of President Kennedy, who had already proposed the program that became Medicare.  Kennedy identified poverty as the domestic issue he would emphasize in his reelection campaign in 1964.  Following his lead and using his memory to get it passed, President Johnson got enacted the programs that made up his War on Poverty.

For awhile, poverty did decrease. But with the additions and subtractions of programs and especially the rapid changes in the economy affecting jobs and incomes, poverty--especially child poverty--has increased, and many Americans are living so close to the edge that nearly 40% could not sustain an emergency costing just $400.

The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare was the single most important social justice effort in decades, as it provided medical care for the most vulnerable, especially poor and disabled Americans.  The Senate bill erases the expansion, and limits Medicaid in ways certain to decrease coverage and increase harm.  Here's a pretty good summary from, of all places, Cosmopolitan.

The Senate version, should it become law, will directly threaten the independence and the very lives of the disabled and the elderly requiring care beyond Medicare.  Many more will be hurt.  In the long run it will increase poverty in America.

Harrington's book is called The Other America. Poverty in the 50s and 60s was hidden outside the mainstream, in urban ghettos among people of color, and in isolated rural areas--in Appalachia for instance--where poverty was often white.  (Even today most welfare and Medicaid beneficiaries are white.)

Today there is homelessness everywhere that would have been a scandal in the 50s but which has become invisible except as nuisance or threat.  Major parts of cities like Detroit look like the bombed out streets of European countries after World War II.  And rural poverty is widespread again, if it ever abated.

But as two new books from Princeton U. Press (reviewed here and in the June 22 issue of New York Review of Books) describe the greater extent of economic vulnerability.  Because of volatility in jobs and incomes, fully a third of all Americans are living below the poverty line for at least one month of the year. Costs of necessities have risen enormously in just the past decade.  Social programs are generally not flexible enough to respond.  They need to be improved, not destroyed.

Social justice movements made injustices painfully visible.  With this Senate bill it may be happening again.

If this bill passes, it will pave the way for more self-defeating cruelty in the proposed Republican budget.  But more immediately, this Senate bill will devastate not only the lives of the most vulnerable, but the American soul.

Free Range Reading

“Literature, as I saw it then, was a vast open range, my equivalent of the cowboy’s dream. I felt free as any nomad to roam where I pleased, amid the wild growth of books.”
Larry McMurtry

Adam Gopnik loves reading cookbooks, collections of letters, and James Bond novels—pleasures, but not guilty ones. “If you can tolerate one piece of advice,” he says, “it’s don’t segregate the great continuum of reading. “”To be a good reader, paradoxically, doesn’t mean being a discriminating reader, it means being an omnivorous reader,” he explains. “You never know what will grab you.””
Danny Funt in Columbia Journalism Review

I'm a free range reader, as Larry McMurtry describes.  I love Adam Gopnik's phrase "the great continuum of reading," but though I wander I'm not exactly an omnivorous reader. I have my interests, which vary from time to time, but I don't read everything.  My selection process is a mixture of idiosyncratic searches and serendipity. In particular I've learned to believe in serendipity.

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen is in part a memoir of reading by novelist and legendary book scout and book seller Larry McMurtry.  I'm reading it now, and it is resurrecting and focusing memories of my own reading history that I'll probably be boring you with later in this space.  But I am reminded that before serendipity was either a research technique or a selection process, it was a necessity.  In the ignorance and restrictions of my early years of reading, I had to choose from what I happened to come across.

Since my retirement from, among other things, book reviewing, my reading has changed somewhat.  Just for fun I've assembled books I've read (in whole or part) since January, to see where I've been roaming this year.  (There are a few more books than pictured.)

The non-fiction books are fewer than fiction, which is itself a change.  Jerome Kagan's On Being Human is the second newest book in this pile, and the only one I got from the publisher as a review copy.  Kagan had a long career as a research psychologist but is also thoughtful and erudite on larger issues of mind and the human spirit, as well as a trenchant critic of psychological research as it is practiced today.  The first time through this book was to find those chapters and pages that most interest me, to which I will return.  It's also one of those books that quotes other books that I immediately want to read.

Kagan is himself sort of retired now, and writing from that perspective.  I'd read and reviewed the book before this, which dealt more specifically with the practice of psychology, as well as an earlier book.  So I was sure to read this one eventually.

Man and His Symbols is a classic work with a long essay by Jung (the last he published) and other essays by mostly first generation Jungians.  This volume stands in for several others of Jung's I read parts of since the election, notably a volume of his collected works called Civilization in Transition, with essays from between the wars and after World War II.

I had an old mass market sized paperback copy of Man and His Symbols, and I carried it in my backpack on our Christmas trip to Menlo Park.  What a great relief and pleasure it was to leave an awful attempt to make mechanistic and poorly designed psychological experiments into a theatrical experience, to sit in the sunny patio of a cafe, drinking coffee and reading Jung's chapter.

But after carrying it around with me since, the book's cover fell off, and its small size couldn't do justice to the many illustrations, reproduced in smeary black and white.  So more recently I located a gently used hardback copy on Amazon and ordered that.  It's one of those books that's probably going to disappear in a few years, so I just acquired some plastic book covers to preserve it.  I'll keep the paperback--I like to open it at random at odd moments when I'm out and about, and usually I come upon something that strikes a spark.

Apart from memoirs, the only other nonfiction books I've read in the past few months are by digital revolution analyst and prophet Jaron Lanier, particularly Who Owns the Future?  Very smart, pretty dire.

This is a change from recent years, that I'm reading more fiction than nonfiction.  It's also different from the preceding months as there are no plays in the pile, though I did read and enjoy a memoir by playwright David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper.  The trail I followed to that one was not entirely new--I got the DVDs of Hare's tv trilogy Worricker starring Bill Nighy (films I'd seen before), and so looked at Youtube videos of interviews with Nighy and Hare that I hadn't seen the last time I'd searched.  In one of them, Hare mentioned The Blue Touch Paper. So once again, Amazon Marketplace.

Hare explains a number of things in this book but I came away still not knowing what "blue touch paper" means (had to google it.)  I can tell you however that by far the dominant color in the Worricker trilogy (clothes, walls, landscapes) is blue.

The last time I committed to reading big long novels was in the 1980s, and they included Gravity's Rainbow.  It was however the only one I didn't finish then.  I happily completed Moby Dick, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But this year I did it--all the way through Gravity's Rainbow, even following the plot.   The style of Pynchon's sentences, his wonderful descriptions, were always attractive--I'd often read a few restorative pages over the many years since this novel first landed on my desk at the Boston Phoenix, when I assigned a reviewer for our first books supplement.  Finally reading the novel whole was an accomplishment and a pleasure.

The other really big book this time was Dickens' Bleak House, which I wrote about here already.  I got it off my own shelves, obviously bought used.  I'm re-reading David Copperfield and will go on to Tale of Two Cities (which I may or may not have read before) before tackling the massive Our Mutual Friends, once I've had the adventure of acquiring a copy.

The newest book is Kim Stanley Robinson's New York: 2140, a science fiction novel about surviving the climate crisis which I hope to write about in the future.  I interspersed these and other more weighty volumes with some old science fiction written in the 1950s for teenagers, a genre which (again) I plan to write about here soon.

Also a Sherlock Holmes novel by Anthony Horowitz, who created and mostly wrote the Foyle's War UK television series about World War II in the homefront.  House of Silk is a classic Holmes novel in style and subject, though with crimes Conan Doyle probably couldn't write about.  I'd recently acquired the Foyle's War DVDS with Horowitz interviews. It was mentioned that he published novels, so I looked him up on Amazon and found this one.

Flyover Lives by contemporary novelist and critic Diane Johnson is mostly about her childhood in a part of the country near where I lived for a time--Moline, Illinois, on the Mississippi River.  I learned more about that area than I knew, and found similarities as well as differences in our childhoods and backgrounds.  I got this particular hardback book at the local Dollar Tree--not the first or last I'm glad I scouted out there.

McMurtry laments the collapse of the antiquarian/used bookstore business.  I've seen evidence of it--all the used bookstores (I remember 3) and the two or three new bookstores I knew on Murray Avenue and Forbes in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, were gone in the first few years after I left in 1996, apparently done in at least in part by the big Barnes and Noble store that came in.  Then the last time I was there, the Barnes and Noble was gone.  (However, the Squirrel Hill Public Library on Forbes was greatly expanded, with a lot of computers but also more stalls of used paperbacks for sale.)

In Arcata in the late 90s there were four used bookstores; now there is one.  The owners of two of the others continued to sell but only on the Internet. But there are other places now to find books, especially the thrift stores, of which there are many in Arcata and Eureka.  I bought McMurtry's book at the Arcata thrift store run by the Humboldt Hospice organization.

There are still two used bookstores in Eureka, one of them also antiquarian.  I trade books at the Booklegger in Eureka--they make the fairest trades--for credit on books there.  That's where I found Sebold's The Emigrants, which I'm now reading.  I looked for it after seeing it praised in several different places within a week or two: serendipity.  I'm glad I found it.

I heard Roy Parvin read once at Northtown Books in Arcata, when he lived in a nearby town and had recently published this volume of novellas In the Snow Forest.  I enjoyed the reading but couldn't afford the book at the time. I found a used copy later on and never got around to reading it until this month.  The stories are well written and unlike anybody else's.  I liked the first novella the best, although the second was the title story and the third--which includes a evocative description of a long train trip in 1957-- got made into a movie in Europe.  So this one is an argument for keeping a library.  Still, there was a certain serendipity in finding it---when I relocated a pile of books with little in common but that I'd long meant to read them.

My library held another interesting surprise.  Before taking another look at Ford Maddox Ford's World War I saga Parade's End, I thought I should read his more famous novel, The Good Soldier (which has nothing to do with any war.)  I looked in my tumbled fiction section and sure enough, next to several novels by Richard Ford, was a paperback copy of this one.

One of the delights of acquiring used books (including old library books) is the hints that previous readers leave.  Not the manic highlighting--I can live without that.  Sometimes just a name, a few notes, or a telling bookmark.  I once had a first edition of Gravity's Rainbow but sold it when I left Pittsburgh.  Here I bought a used quality paperback--previous owner Joshua Wolf not only signed it, but left his United Airlines boarding pass stuck in between pp. 344-5.  So I celebrated not only getting further into it than I had before, but far past Joshua as well.

With The Good Soldier, this time the previous owner was known to me--an old girlfriend who evidently read it for her high school College English class, several years before I met her. (Along with her name and her familiar home address, she'd carefully written the name of the class and its teacher.)

 That I had it in my collection--evidently for years--was a complete surprise.  I haven't been in touch with her in decades but through her handwritten notes--probably based on what her teacher was saying--I found myself oddly communing with her teenage self.  I was also reminded of how many of my college classmates had attended better high schools than I did.  We didn't get literature beyond Silas Marner and Great Expectations at mine.

This pile of books doesn't include several I started but abandoned.  One was a paperback from my shelves by Anthony Burgess, the English novelist with whom I once shared a deliriously liquid lunch.  But the narrator was a man in his 80s, and I wasn't in the mood.  However, the book's previous owner (Matt Hinton) left a wonderfully enigmatic message on the flyleaf: "The pelicans are flying in groups of seven today." Maybe he took "flyleaf" literally? That and his signature were all he left me.

Some of these books were discrete reading experiences, while others will likely lead to other books--by their authors, or mentioned in their pages, or on a similar subject, which in turn will branch in other directions.  I picked out the Diane Johnson book because I recognized her name, and got it mostly because of Moline, but also because last year I read a couple of excellent memoirs that included childhoods in isolated areas of America--which started with the serendipity of finding one of them in a "free box:" cardboard boxes of stuff exiting students and other transients left behind on the sidewalk.  (In another free box, I found a vintage paperback of the Isaac Asimov s/f classic, I, Robot, which I hadn't read--but I will now.  A book in the hand is worth two on Amazon.

In my free range reading, I don't know how much content I retain, but that's not as important to me as the reading experience, and the sense of things, the added depth and breadth, the connections and inspirations, the interplay with memories, of events and people and feelings.  

So this is an account that suggests ways that books are in my life these days. (I wrote more about it now and again over the years, especially at my Books in Heat blog, which by the way, has some paragraphs about a book in this pile I haven't mentioned--Don DeLillo's outstanding novel Zero K.)

 It probably isn't your typical twenty-first century story, but perhaps someone out there might be reading this and thinking, well I may be crazy but at least I'm not completely alone.

First, Do No Harm

Among the first to react to the suddenly revealed Senate "Kill Obamacare and the People It Helped" bill was President Obama.  His statement in full is on Facebook and at the Atlantic.  Quoting:

"I recognize that repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act has become a core tenet of the Republican Party.  Still, I hope that our Senators, many of whom I know well, step back and measure what's really at stake, and consider that the rationale for action, on health care or any other issue, must be something more than simply undoing something that Democrats did.

We didn’t fight for the Affordable Care Act for more than a year in the public square for any personal or political gain—we fought for it because we knew it would save lives, prevent financial misery, and ultimately set this country we love on a better, healthier course."

"The Senate bill, unveiled today, is not a health care bill. It’s a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class and poor families to the richest people in America. It hands enormous tax cuts to the rich and to the drug and insurance industries, paid for by cutting health care for everybody else. Those with private insurance will experience higher premiums and higher deductibles, with lower tax credits to help working families cover the costs, even as their plans might no longer cover pregnancy, mental health care, or expensive prescriptions. Discrimination based on pre-existing conditions could become the norm again. Millions of families will lose coverage entirely."

Simply put, if there’s a chance you might get sick, get old, or start a family—this bill will do you harm. And small tweaks over the course of the next couple weeks, under the guise of making these bills easier to stomach, cannot change the fundamental meanness at the core of this legislation."

"To put the American people through that pain—while giving billionaires and corporations a massive tax cut in return—that’s tough to fathom. But it’s what’s at stake right now. So it remains my fervent hope that we step back and try to deliver on what the American people need.

"After all, this debate has always been about something bigger than politics. It’s about the character of our country – who we are, and who we aspire to be. And that’s always worth fighting for."

On the bill itself, most news outlets agree.  The New York Times:

Obamacare raised taxes on high earners and the health care industry, and essentially redistributed that income — in the form of health insurance or insurance subsidies — to many of the groups that have fared poorly over the last few decades.

The draft Senate bill, called the Better Care Reconciliation Act, would jettison those taxes while reducing federal funding for the care of low-income Americans. The bill’s largest benefits go to the wealthiest Americans, who have the most comfortable health care arrangements, and its biggest losses fall to poorer Americans who rely on government support. The bill preserves many of the structures of Obamacare, but rejects several of its central goals."


Passage of this program will not only mean fewer Americans will get the health care they need as it makes healthcare more expensive, a new study says it could cause an economic recession:

A new report from the Commonwealth Fund and George Washington University researchers," writes the Atlantic, found that the very similar House version  "would slash total jobs by about a million, total state gross domestic products by $93 billion, and total business output by $148 billion by 2026. Most of those jobs would be shed from the health-care industry, which would contract severely over that frame. Most of the losses in economic activity would come in states that have expanded Medicaid to low-income adults under the Affordable Care Act."

It's about cutting taxes for the wealthiest, and let the others suffer and die.

That's the Republican credo.  Their greediest supporters see the opportunity in holding Congressional majorities and the White House: more bucks for us.

"Follow the Money" was the catchphrase of Watergate, and it is again for the Russian connection investigation.  But more than that, it is the first place to look for anything Republicans in Washington do.

It's there in the generous donations from fossil fuel corporations, and so on.  As for our apprentice dictator, it is all summed up in his allegiances--in the Middle East and elsewhere, he loves whatever country his companies do business in, and any country that doesn't want his businesses is America's enemy.

Read All About It

To his surprise, the election of a president with zero apparent interest in books seems to have inspired a surge in reading nationwide. It’s good news, of course. “But,” he told me, “if it takes a brutally divisive election and concerns over American authoritarianism to get you to read, maybe you could have started earlier.”

Carlos Lozada, nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, quoted by Danny Funt in the Columbia Journalism Review

DejaVugate

It's been 45 years this weekend since the break-in that led to Watergate, although for many months, it didn't get much attention.  Woodward and Bernstein began reporting on all kinds of questionable and criminal activity involving the Rs 1972 campaign.  At roughly the same time there were various other stories suggesting dark doings by the White House.  But few people--and certainly not voters--dared to heed any of it.

The famous movie version of their  book All the President's Men lays it all out, but remember what the final scene is: Woodward and Bernstein continuing to type away, while on the TV there begins the second Inauguration of Richard Nixon.  They'd already reported much of the corruption and crimes we know as Watergate.

I was a writer and editor for the Boston Phoenix at the time (though for at least part of this time it was still called Boston After Dark.)  Though my work was mostly in the arts section, I did cover 1972 campaign events in Boston, and wrote  a series of reports on the Nixon revelations.  Apart from the Cover-Up to come, a great deal of what we call Watergate--and the activities that were the basis for several articles of impeachment--were already known, they were in my articles based on mostly widely available information.

I wrote one article focusing on the Nixon White House attempts to intimidate the news media, which went beyond claiming that Woodward and Bernstein and other major newspaper and TV network reporters were politically motivated, unpatriotic, dangerous and (sometimes even) inaccurate.  I recall that my editor gave it the headline "Beat the Press."

So much was known by November 1972. On the basis of all these stories, the Democratic candidate George McGovern called the Nixon administration the most corrupt in history.  He was criticized for political hyperbole.

Nevertheless, Richard Nixon, who was elected by a razor thin margin in 1968, was re-elected with the largest electoral majority in history.  He won 49 states.  Only Massachusetts resisted (as did DC.)  For years I carried a bumper sticker on my guitar case: "Don't Blame Me: I'm From Massachusetts."

With that electoral mandate, there was even greater pressure on the news media. The Nixon White House was able to basically destroy at least one career I know of.  Later it was confirmed how far this pressure went: the Enemies List, the ordered tax audits, the threats to take away broadcast licences, and attempts to intimidate newspapers through pressuring their advertisers, stockholders and/or owners.

That's one difference from Deja-Vugate.  The news media has been much quicker to this story, partly because (I suspect) people in government aren't nearly as afraid of being sources for information, partly because this regime is perceived as incompetent and dangerous, partly because of the Watergate precedent, and basically because they are freaked out.  Then again, everything about this is accelerated.

What isn't really known yet is how the public is perceiving this.  Polls suggest that it's just like everything else, split according to political affiliation.  Nixon and his minions could demonize the Washington Post, and for awhile a lot of voters apparently believed them.  The belief systems are even more entrenched now.  There is a hefty percentage of people for whom the major news media are irrelevant. The criteria for evidence most people would accept is narrow, if they exist at all.

The reporters who quite courageously got the stories of Watergate, along with the patriotism of individuals like Eliot Richardson who refused Nixon's order to fire the special prosecutor, the Supreme Court in ordering that the White House tapes be released to the special prosecutor, and the courage of a number of Republicans in Congress to investigate and judge the evidence rather than just the politics--they all went down in history as heroes (although of course there are those who probably don't accept that history.)  We have yet to note any Republican profiles in courage, but the media and the courts have so far stepped up pretty well.

And yet, an outcome that ends up with the Republic somewhat wounded but intact, which happened in 1974, is not at all guaranteed this time.  This weekend a number of analysts and commentators were floating a dire scenario.

 It starts with the firing of the special counsel, especially if Deputy AG Rosenstein recuses himself because he might be a material witness in the investigation.  But one way or another, the ax will get into the hands of the next in line, and though she has some reputation for integrity she is also basically a political ideologue with little experience in constitutional law.

Without a special counsel able and willing to follow all the many lines of investigation, there will be little proven substance.  All that remains is obstruction of justice, as a basis for impeachment.  Or, even if Mueller remains, gathering evidence and making a case will take months if not years, and so far the assumption that a sitting president can't be charged with a crime has not been tested.  So again, it's impeachment if anything.

Update: As if to emphasize this point of the long haul, Politico notes that on the Sunday shows, Senator Angus King said the Senate's investigation into campaign collusion with Russia is no more than 20% done, while Dem Rep and ranking House Intel committee Adam Schiff  confirmed that the special counsel investigation is "just getting started." 

And pundits from former Republican speechwriter David Frum to New York Magazine's Jonathan Chiat and Andrew Sullivan believe impeachment, conviction and removal from office will not happen.

Andrew Sullivan: And so it seems to me completely plausible — even inevitable — that Mueller will be fired too at some point. More saliently, if his team’s work eventually exposes and proves Trump’s obstruction of justice, the only possible recourse, impeachment, will never happen. There will never be 18 Republican senators who will vote against the leader in this Congress or any other. We will have a criminal in the White House indefinitely, utterly impervious to sanction, and emboldened even further. And he will have brought almost half the country along with him, digging deeper in with every news cycle.

David Frum makes basically the same point about 18 Republican Senators, as conviction requires a two-thirds vote.

Chiat's piece elaborates on the headline:Trump Can Commit All the High Crimes He Wants. Republicans Aren’t Going to Impeach Him.  His reasons are political: the dictator apprentice is adhering to a far right agenda which will preserve his core political support among voters, the same voters that R members of Congress need to win their primaries.  The long version:

"Many conservatives opposed Trump during the primaries because they suspected, with good reason, that his conservatism was shallow or insincere. They worried that, once elected, Trump would abandon their priorities and pursue the most expedient course.

But Trump has not done that at all. The policies or talking points Trump has abandoned are the centrist ones: He would protect Medicaid from cuts, give everybody terrific coverage, hammer the big banks, spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, and cut deals with both parties. This week, Trump formally abandoned the last possible area of ideological compromise in infrastructure, “clarifying” that his plan relies on private industry, states, or cities ponying up the money. Trump’s budget actually cuts federal investments in infrastructure. He has positioned himself to the right of even House Republicans on domestic spending, and continues to push for their grossly unpopular plan to cut a trillion dollars from Obamacare. “The Never Trump conservative argument that Trump is not a conservative — one that I, too, made repeatedly during the Republican primaries — is not only no longer relevant, it is no longer true,” points out the popular conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager.

Trump is faithfully supporting the conservative agenda, so most conservatives faithfully support him. Their concerns are pragmatic ones about his effectiveness on behalf of their common agenda, rather than moral objections to the legitimacy and propriety of his actions. Trump may have committed impeachable offenses, but the impeachment clock has not even begun to move."

On the other hand, having lived through Watergate, I experienced how a president who won overwhelmingly in November 1972 could be forced to resign in 1974 because he had no political support, first of all in Congress, but also very little in the country.  Nixon's version of the populist/conservative base was called the Silent Majority.  They were especially reacting to the cultural as well as political turmoil revolving around race and Vietnam protests, as well as sex, drugs and rock & roll.

But at a certain point many of them turned on Nixon.  I spent several months back home in western PA during these years and I saw it happen there especially.  Nixon was right about one thing. People wanted to know if their president was a crook.  When they became convinced of it, they wanted him out of office.

The Saturday Night Massacre was a key moment.  Constitutional issues weren't so much the point.  It was that Nixon was acting like he had something to hide, like he was guilty of something.  People started admitting their doubts.

Another aspect of Dejavugate is that Nixon was also fond of the imperial presidency concept.  He said basically that if the president does it, it cannot be against the law.  He was an insecure autocrat, rather than a narcissistic one, but his behavior was similar: he ranted, he was vengeful, he demanded loyalty but showed little of it.  He was also very experienced and a lot smarter than Homemade Hitler.  But he seemed just as crazy.

What is called Watergate started with newspaper reporting that got amplified on the evening TV news.  But then there were the hearings: the select congressional committee, the House Judiciary impeachment hearings, broadcast in their entirety on all three networks, every day.  They were mesmerizing, and all consuming.

I probably learned a lot watching those hearings, though I remember very little.  I know I learned a lot reading All the President's Men: one concept in the book and the movie that is proving useful this year is the non-denial denial.

But basically I look back at the obsession to follow every nuance knowing that it's all time I'll never get back, and it was all time I didn't do work I might have done. And I've had painful assaults of obsessions with awful ongoing political disasters since.  On election night 2016 I knew I was probably going to be drawn into it again, and I didn't want to at all.  I still don't.  Wasting my time following all this and blogging about it is not going to make a bit of difference as to the outcome.  And yet here I am.

I also felt last November, and I expressed it here, that the way that election played out indicated to me that something well beyond politics was going on.  I still fear that's true.  And so even though Andrew Sullivan is an excitable boy, and a couple of major pieces will have to fall into place now for the apprentice dictator to become a real one, it still could play out that way.

Sullivan ends his piece: Over a year ago, in this magazine’s pages, I wrote the following sentence: “In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event.” We are about to find out if I was right."