Storm and Consequences

Hurricane Irma just after achieving maximum category 5, the most powerful storm to form in the Atlantic Ocean proper (excluding the Gulf) since the beginning of satellite observation.  It is heading for Puerto Rico, and areas of Florida are organizing evacuations in the likely event that it heads there this weekend.  Two of the three currently projected paths affect the Florida coast, and one is a direct hit on Miami.

Meanwhile, with the news cameras and Washington politicians gone, Texans face a long list of  Harvey's consequences, including multiple threats to public health. The Atlantic reports "Physicians and other professionals are scrambling to contain a multitude of epidemics that might arise after the flood."  This article is instructive for anyone who wants to know the challenges in the organization of medical care and public health that will continue to arise as the climate crisis effects accelerate.

Look at that eye and recall the Ashbery line: "What you see will be held against you."

Reelin in the Years in a Convex Mirror

John Ashbery received a National Humanities Medal in 2012

The coincidences in the work of John Ashbery and Steely Dan (words, sounds, lines) are always fortunate, and therefore more than coincidence.  They become convergence, even when they jangle.  Sometimes they confuse, often they delight.  Come back in a few years and try them again.

That poet John Ashbery and Walter Becker, the songwriter/musician who was half of Steely Dan, died within a day or two of each other is coincidence, but they cohere in an odd way, and not just because they coincided in my life, a modest thing but mine own.

When I arrived at Knox College in the mid-60s, the bookstore was in the basement of Alumni Hall.  You walked down a couple of steps into a foyer, with student mailboxes opposite the bookstore entrance.  I seem to remember a display case on the outside of the building, but perhaps it was just outside the bookstore--anyway, that's where I first saw a book of poems called The Tennis Court Oath by John Ashbery.

I secretly liked the poems in it, their cadences and seeming chaos, the possibilities they permitted, but I wouldn't dare say so at the time.  I'd just left Catholic school and I knew the dangers of heresy.

I didn't understand them of course, but some had a sustained power for me, while almost all of them had some insightful surprise, juxtaposed images and phrases that lit up and therefore lit up the world for a moment.  They had a peculiar rhythm that resonated with me.  For one reason or another or more, they made me laugh.

 I followed Ashbery's work through the 60s and 70s (through The Double Dream of Spring, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Houseboat Days, As We Know.)  I especially liked Three Poems ( prose poems) and I quoted from them in The Malling of America. (When I was writing it, I also had read the comic novel he wrote with James Schuyler about suburbia, A Nest of Ninnies.)   In a way I was returning the favor, for his poems often quoted from pop culture and the latest zeitgeist.  That the poems' voice seemed to be trying to make sense of it and not quite succeeding (but in an amusing way) was a rueful and reassuring reflection of my own earnest and scattered efforts.  Ashbery also knew and expressed with flourish and sudden, memorable exactness (like a rock song hook) how these are new keys to both our exterior and interior realities.

Ashbery also suggested to me intuitions about worlds of which I have little or no experience.  We had at least a somewhat similar childhood in small town, slightly pastoral America, and his parents were only a little above mine on the socioeconomic scale.  But he went to Harvard (in a class with an astonishing array of well-known American poets) and after a stint as a copywriter, he lived in Paris and New York and wrote about art for art magazines, eventually becoming an editor. He was also homosexual, which provided yet another network within the art and literary world.  I've read those poets from Harvard, read about Paris and for awhile read about and observed contemporary art enough to write a few published pieces for outsiders like me.  I also shared with him an omnivorous interest in old movies, though he apparently was even more obsessive.

In more recent years, I've guiltily purchased a few of his many subsequent books when I came upon them at embarrassingly low prices.  Most recently Planisphere which I've had near my bedside.  Among its gems is "Partial Clearing" which ends:
Looking out the window reveals
that the weather is or isn't about to change.
Forelocks will be tugged in a fortnight
and other appraisers add to the already vehement
heap of misunderstood and eagerly approved evaluations:
a coming out into spring after a winter of
carefully worded captions.  A love like self-love
upgraded to "pastoral."  Yes, easy does it,
always.  What you see will be held against you.

 Even though Ashbery is considered one of the most important poets of his lifetime--which was 90 years--he didn't take himself too seriously, as the editors of London Review of Books note. (Still, he accepted all his many awards.) For an informed view on his later work, try Dan Chiasson at the New Yorker. Among many other appreciations out there, there's Katy Waldman at Slate.

I reviewed Steely Dan's first album for Boston After Dark/Boston Phoenix in 1972: Can't Buy A Thrill.  I liked it, but then I reviewed and liked groups like the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils and Audience.  When I reviewed Bonnie Raitt's first album for Creem--her first national review--I knew she was a keeper.  Steely Dan however could have been a one album wonder.

They weren't though.  The sound they created on their first album, the energy and above all the unique songwriting--sharply witty, allusive lyrics and great hooks--developed even more in subsequent albums, and they became an essential element of the soundtrack of surviving the 70s.

Steely Dan was Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and they soon became known as such studio perfectionists that they never played live, didn't give interviews...I don't recall even seeing a photo of them.  So when they reemerged in the 90s as a live band, it just did not compute.  I never heard them live, never tried.

Jon Pareles, who goes back almost as far as me in rock alt. journalism but stuck with it in the big time, has the NY Times obit of Walter Becker.  Becker dropped out of sight in the early 80s, a victim of heroin addiction, at about the time that Fagen released his Steely Dan-like album The Nightfly, which has a couple of songs I cherish with childhood references, the hit "I.G.Y." and "The New Frontier."  Fagen's voice was out front on Steely Dan, so Becker's contribution has to be explained by Pareles and others.

Pareles describes the music as using "richly ambiguous harmonies rooted in Debussy, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins, giving the songs a sophisticated core that would be widely influential across jazz and pop."  The lyrics are narrative and impressionistic at the same time--many seem to be about an underworld or a street world that may be more of the imagination, though perhaps the references to drugs and dealers are informed.  The William Burroughs meets Bob Dylan references in that first album help suggest that world.  (The group's name comes from Burroughs, the album title from Dylan.)

They are also music of a generation.  Later on "Hey Nineteen" would drive a stake into our 40s, but on that first album there was "Reelin' in the Years,"  one of those classic songs about aging which was written by someone feeling old in their 20s (cf. "Yesterday," "Bookends," etc.) but that resonate when age is actually attained.

I remember that my music editor Ben Gerson was particularly fond of the lines: "You been tellin' me you're a genius/Since you were seventeen/ In all the time I've known you/ I still don't know what you mean."  Because, come on, this was Boston and we were all geniuses, and time was running out.

But now it's the chorus that sings to us: Are you reelin' in the years/ Stowin' away the time/Are you gatherin' up the tears/ Have you had enough of mine?

A Transformative Truth for Labor Day

Many of the jobs Americans did fifty years ago don't exist anymore, and for somewhat different reasons, many jobs that Americans do today won't exist in 50 or even 10 or 20 years.

A lot of that has to do with technology.  But that may not turn out to be the main reason, and certainly not the only one, for why there may be a radical change in the jobs people do in the future.

Jack Ohman in Sacramento Bee via Politico

This Labor Day is a good time to take a good long hard look at Houston and the rest of Texas that's been affected by Hurricane Harvey.

This is one set of effects of the climate crisis that are going to recur more often.
Other effects will also.
More and more people are going to be occupied in dealing with these effects: in responding as well as planning and implementing plans to respond to them and to soften their blows with preventive measures, design and strategies.  The climate crisis is a job creator.

Further effects will make more changes in the kinds of jobs society needs and demands.  Eventually climate change will be a major determinant.  But year by year the pace and extent will increase, and today might be a good day to take a good look at what is needed, and what you can do.

For the climate crisis is no longer an inconvenient truth.  The climate crisis is a transformative truth.

This has been argued by writers like David Orr (Down to the Wire, 2009), Bill McKibben (Eaarth, 2010) Mark Hertsgaard (in Hot, 2011) and Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything, 2014.)  It is argued partly to motivate people to address the causes of climate crisis, to ensure that things don't get even worse.  But there are--even more clearly now--effects that are coming that also must be addressed.  Because of the time lag between cause (greenhouse gas pollution) and effects, a near future of accelerating worsening is highly likely.

But it's not all about politics, and it's certainly not all about being victims.  It is also about the active work that will need to be done, and the people who will do it.

When today's children are young adults, their choice of occupations and careers will necessarily be influenced by the climate crisis and its ongoing effects.  But today's young adults, in their 30s and 40s, have the opportunity to start responding to this crisis in the work they choose to do.

People in the social media field right now might look closely at how social media is being used to deal with the crisis in Texas, and how it could serve the situation better.  People in technology might look at Texas with an eye on how their specific field or even a modification of their job could help deal with such a crisis.

Young people in their last years of education who are interested in management, or managers considering a change, might take a hard look at what emergency management entails, and the work they could do.

Those interested in medicine could look at the public health challenges, and what jobs there are or should be that respond.  And so on.  Many people in many careers can look at how their skills might apply.

Meanwhile, people will be looking for new ways to address the causes of global heating.  Jobs in clean energy are already transforming industry.

Eventually, people are probably going to specialize less, or at least many are going to have to know how to do more than one thing, and they will be practical things. Making things and growing food will no longer be outsourced quite so much. Careers in moving digital money around may not be so well-paid and appealing.

And it wouldn't be a bad idea for some people to learn some trades that are fast disappearing, like how to repair things (those things, that is, that are still not so foolishly complex that no one can fix them.)  Sewing and tailoring, shoemaking and repair, are probably good solid jobs for a few right now, but may well be important trades in the future.

Nobody really knows, but I do think many don't take into account that technology requires reliable power grids and global access to raw materials that remain relatively cheap.  All of that is likely to be up for grabs.  So I wouldn't necessarily count on AI drones and an internet of things.

The transformed world won't be easy, but at least these jobs are meaningful.  Jobs might be hard but they might be fulfilling, though it seems unlikely that word would be used much.  Maybe if people in position to do so started now to change, they could make the future a little easier for the next generations.

Update: As if to emphasize the changes underway, Saturday in Arcata was the hottest day we've experienced since we arrived here 21 years ago.  And not by a little.  I can count the number of 80+F days since then, but the temps hit the mid 90s.  Plus I've never experienced the density of smoke from forest fires over several days, leading to respiratory irritation and worse.  There are going to be effects of the climate crisis here, notably the sea level rise that could turn Arcata into an island.  But excessive heat isn't one of the predicted features.  Of course, it wasn't nearly as bad as the 100F+ temps in the Bay Area, or the temps in the 115 range east of us up here.  But this was a taste of what it would be like here. Temps are going down now, but the smoke is predicted to be with us into midweek. For a day or a weekend the heat and always present humidity were miserable, but also a chance for a more classic beach scene.  Long term however it could easily become dangerous.  And already, forecasters suggest the hot temps may return by next weekend.

And there's another hurricane headed for land.

Are We Ready to Hear This Yet?

Are we ready to hear this yet?  David J. Phillip in Politico:

"In all of U.S. history, there’s never been a storm like Hurricane Harvey. That fact is increasingly clear, even though the rains are still falling and the water levels in Houston are still rising.

But there’s an uncomfortable point that, so far, everyone is skating around: We knew this would happen, decades ago. We knew this would happen, and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible: Harvey is what climate change looks like. More specifically, Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously."

Jack Ohman Sacramento Bee via Politico

There are other specific contributions to, for example, Houston's plight--its unregulated sprawl and environmental disdain.  There are the contributions of institutions and laws, like the bureaucratic Army Corps of Engineers and the way federal flood insurance does not penalize for building in flood-prone areas, so that 2% of those insured are responsible for 40% of the claims, including a home flooded 16 times in 18 years.

But the universal fact, no matter where, is climate change.  Its role in the hurricane itself and its behavior.  Its role in the rainfall and flooding.

The climate crisis has drowned all the old numbers.  Houston has experienced three "five hundred year floods" in the past three years.  Storms like Harvey are getting more powerful, more damaging, and more frequent.  And these are just one set of effects of global heating.

This week's news is an opportunity to see in detail what such a crisis can do to a very large, complex city, especially one with petrochemical industries.  Though effects of this storm will continue making news, attention will waver.  Is the climate crisis fact sinking in?

It's become commonplace now to say that Houston will never be the same.  But that's not a given.  Powerful forces created this unregulated sprawl and they will be back, relentlessly forcing their vision.  They will want to rebuild in that old image.

It will take political courage to fight this fight in Houston and other affected areas of Texas.  And it will take political courage beyond any we've actually seen to bring this lesson home to the country.  It will never be obvious.  It must be said, and it must be faced.

These days I'm starting to believe that nothing dramatic will change until one candidate--for Senator, for Mayor of a big city, for Governor--runs relentlessly on the issue of the climate crisis, and wins decisively in a state that is not deep blue.

California is a model of a state that takes the climate crisis seriously, yet even here there is much work to be done.  Such work has started in many places, but often almost furtively.  To address the causes and prepare for the effects requires facing them together.  Civilization depends on this.

The Eye of the Hurricane

President Obama comforting a victim of Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey in 2012

The test that the present White House incumbent must pass, according to many media stories, is Katrina, but that is a tragically low bar.  Between Katrina and Harvey there was Sandy, the model, by many measures, of optimal response to a disaster by the federal government.

That response by the Obama administration was on an immensely large scale in a number of states, in both immediate and sustained ways.  But then there are the individuals and what they go through, as well as the collective feelings of those affected, and an anxious, watching nation.

Many problems arise, perhaps fatal problems, with the role of father of the country that the presidency imposes.  But the nation needs the binding and consoling sense that in a time like this, the president understands.  His response as a person translates into a sense that the nation understands. The people most affected and the nation gain confidence from this, and confidence works wonders.  President Obama was always there to provide it.

The current incumbent has not expressed gratitude to those who have responded to the horrific challenges of Harvey.  Nor has he expressed sympathy for the families of those who died (including a police officer) and those suffering from its effects. On his visit he met none of them. He sat behind a desk and stood in front of a crowd.  That impersonal response is not really surprising.  He cannot express empathy because he has never shown the capacity to experience it.

The lack of gratitude and empathy in his words during this crisis and especially during his Texas visit have been noted by, among others, the press secretary for the prior president of his party. Instead he praised the size of the crowd to hear him speak (about a thousand, including protesters.)

These expressions of sympathy are expected (and as basic as being against Nazis), so one writer calls his response "tonally peculiar."  It is more than that.  It is one more heavy sadness, for an isolated, unengaged president leaves everyone feeling isolated.  He is another emptiness where there is only the anti-president.

Moreover it does not bode well for sustained efforts at relief, recovering and planning, which due to the nature of this catastrophe and the places it is happening, will be unprecedented.  The worst may be ahead, and the effects will be felt by the entire country and beyond.  Those effects may be especially harsh if this hapless White House screws up.

 They say the eye of a hurricane is silent and empty.  At the center of authority for future response is this egomaniacal robot, this emptiness.

Dunkirk in Texas

As the effects of Hurricane Harvey continue to unfold in Texas,  and as attention focuses on saving lives, we are also thinking about what it means for the future.

The unnecessary vulnerabilities in Houston, almost always as a result of greed, are again exposed, and as usual the costs are paid more often in the suffering of the most vulnerable people.

While first responders do their jobs with distinction, the failure of government--including the federal government--to engage in preventive measures in a time when such storms and related events are more frequent and ferocious, due especially to the climate crisis, is not a good sign for the future.

We have yet to face the enormity of the tasks, when huge catastrophes hit huge population centers with complex infrastructure. It's bad enough when it occurs in one place. But what happens when--and not if, but when--such catastrophic events occur in more than one place at one time?  This is the cost of denying reality.

But while this event is happening, this is a human story, and an article in the New Yorker ask those human questions that will recur in future disasters, and I'm sure already echo somewhere inside most of us:

"But if we now know more about how the climate will behave, we know less about how humans will react. The experience of frequent storms is one of incredible stress...There is now, too, a double anxiety that greets storms like this. There is the fear about the damage done by wind and rain. And then there is a fear, made stark by the memory of Katrina, about how we will treat each other."

The first news I saw out of Texas, which this piece references in the very next sentence, named one such fear: a homeowner, as the storm began. who saw someone he believed was trying to enter his house, and shot him in the head.

We fear this now especially because we are told we are a severely divided nation, and the politically opposed are often violent in their rhetoric, and vivid in their disdain and especially their suspicions.  That we have a chief executive who is actively inflaming disdain and suspicion, and setting race against race for political gain, only adds to these fears.

The other element of this story is the gun.  The valorization of guns, the encouragement to use a gun as a first resort, can turn a misunderstanding into a mortal wound or death.  Who would want to hold out a hand to a hand holding a gun?

But since Harvey made landfall, the New Yorker has published two new articles, one from a Houston neighborhood which tells how people on a single street--many who have never met--are selflessly helping each other, and the other which focuses on the efforts of  individuals using small boats to rescue those about to be inundated by rapidly rising floodwaters.  Learning of people needing rescue from social media, they coordinate the ferrying of people away from their own rooftops, as well as the forgotten (often elderly and handicapped) in group housing.

This citizen navy is conducting a computerized Dunkirk.  Notably, many of those involved are from Louisiana, who remember the help they got from people in Houston during Katrina and the more recent flooding in New Orleans.

This reciprocity makes literal the ethical rule that I regard as the most basic: "You'd do the same for me."  That's the essential faith of a civilized society, and as long as it prevails, there is hope for the future.

The Abyss: Weekend Update

It was the epic Friday night news dump of all time, culminating in the just-past-9 p.m. pardoning of convicted criminal, ace birther and former Sheriff Joe Apieceofwork.  With the possible exception of the "I quit/ no you're fired!" termination of Nazi Lite Sebastian Gorka from his nebulous White House post (with a quick slink back to Brietbart, natch), all of that dumped news has impeachment implications, new and old.  Oh, and it was all done as the worst hurricane to make US landfall in a decade was closing in on Texas.

Let us begin with the most likely to be lost in the explosion: earlier on Friday: the public rebuke of Homegrown Hitler's remarks on Charlottesville by his chief financial advisor Gary Cohn in an interview with the Financial Times.  As the WAPost reports, HH was "furious" but Cohn is so essential (Wall Street panicked when his resignation was rumored--a well-founded rumor, it turns out, because he drafted a resignation letter) that the official response from the White House was much more tepid.

Also the first subpoenas from Robert Mueller's DC grand jury for testimony about Paul Manafort and his tangled webs of deception.   There was also the little matter of North Korea firing missiles into the ocean near Japan, though initial reports claim they all failed.

But the superstar of the news dump was the pardon.  Two responses to it so far are notable:  A quick statement of "disagreement" with the decision from the usually mealy-mouthed Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose statement continues:“Law-enforcement officials have a special responsibility to respect the rights of everyone in the United States. We should not allow anyone to believe that responsibility is diminished by this pardon.”  Ryan of course would be a key figure in any future impeachment proceeding.

And second, the response from Dem Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who said it "violates his [HH's] oath of office."  That a Dem Senator opposed it isn't the significance--it is positioning it as a violation of the oath of office.  Without saying so, that makes it grounds for an article of impeachment.

The predominant--if not universal--view is that the pardon is constitutional, though its extraordinary, really unprecedented nature qualifies it for court challenge.  Although Christian Farias in New York Magazine opines that it won't lead to impeachment, he also quotes Justice Breyer from last year: “There’s no blank check, even for the president,” he said during the hearing. “And if there’s no blank check, that means sometimes they can go too far. And if they have gone too far, it is our job to say that.”  As a constitutional issue, the Supreme Court could examine a pardon power case for the first time in its history.

If they do, they will look at the intent and the history.  Its intent, say scholars, was to keep the peace in a time of upheaval, such as the first pardon of miscreants convicted in the Whiskey Rebellion--that is, for the common good.  This pardon is obviously divisive, and plays only to HH's political base.

But a court case on the pardon itself, or an article of impeachment, aren't the only places it could turn up.  If it demonstrates to those that Robert Mueller prosecutes that they need not worry about it, it subverts justice from the get go, and becomes another Obstruction of Justice count.  If it impedes the investigation itself, as Rep. Adam Schiff charges, by signaling that targets or witnesses can get away with even not cooperating, then again it's obstruction.

The political base motive was clear in HH's campaign speech in Phoenix in which he asked the audience if they liked "Sheriff Joe" and promised him that he would be all right.  Further, he offered the opinion that Arpaio was wrongfully convicted, ("convicted for doing his job") and therefore the pardon is a clear case of the maybe no longer apprentice but functioning dictator substituting his judgment for the court and for the legislature that passed the law.

These two political motives: to reward a loyalist and their common political base, and to foul up the Mueller investigation,  are given further credence by the Washington Post story that last spring, the apprentice dictator asked the attorney-general to drop the federal case against Arpaio.

Add them altogether and it's called Abuse of Power, right up their with Obstruction of Justice as primary grounds for impeachment.

The other of the twin stars of the dump was the White House announcement banning the armed services from accepting transgender recruits.  Let the law suits begin!

  "As Chris Geidner of Buzzfeed reports, this memo is expected to receive significant legal challenges in the months ahead. Multiple LGBT advocacy organizations are seeking injunctions against the implementation of Trump’s transgender ban. The American Civil Liberties Union made no secret of its legal intentions, either, tweeting simply: “We’ll see you in court.”

The issues have become constitutional ones and it seems likely to end up, in fairly short order, in the Supreme Court.  When articles of impeachment are drawn up, the attempt to abrogate a constitutional right of equality as recently interpreted by the Supreme Court, could be among them.  In fact, because the Arpaio conviction was for persistent discrimination against Latinos, that could go into such a count as well.

Of the immediate responses to this decision, one stands out, partly because it came from the daughter of a cabinet member in the current regime, who is also an armed forces vet.  That a child of a prominent pol publicly disagrees is not entirely new.  But the terms used by Jen Detlefsen, the daughter of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in her social media post were notably harsh:

“This man is a disgrace. I've tried to keep politics out of my social media feed as much as possible, but this is inexcusable,” she wrote in an Instagram post.

“This veteran says sit down and shut the f--- up, you know-nothing, never-served piece of s---. #itmfa #wtf”

This Week in the Abyss: The Anti-President and R v R

1. The Anti-President

After all the initial emotion, political and otherwise, related to Charlottesville, there is this specific sadness: the young woman who died there as a victim of political violence while peacefully demonstrating, was buried without a consoling word by the President of the United States.

 Her funeral received almost no coverage nationally, because no President was there.  That it wasn't covered is a failing of the media, which has a very bad record in remaining so fixated on Homegrown Hitler that other important stories are obscured, but it is much more a failing of the current White House incumbent.

When David Axelrod stated absolutely that President Obama would have given the eulogy for Heather Heyer, no one could contradict him.   But the current incumbent is more than absent as president, the un-president.  The words he did speak were all but opposite to what all the living presidents would have said and in fact did say. He is the anti-President.

When sailors died on the John McCain, the current incumbent--their ultimate commander as commander-in-chief-- offered no words, said nothing.  On other occasions when any other president would have spoken, he has not.

The White House is no longer a welcoming place where artists and scientists feel valued and heard.  No longer does it celebrate and demonstrate diversity or inspire children to learn and achieve.  It is not even a moral vacuum.  It is the ever tightening, shrinking home of lying words and evil deeds.

So we get Frank Bruni's New York Times column entitled The Week When President Trump Resigned:

"Trump resigned the presidency already — if we regard the job as one of moral stewardship, if we assume that an iota of civic concern must joust with self-regard, if we expect a president’s interest in legislation to rise above vacuous theatrics, if we consider a certain baseline of diplomatic etiquette to be part of the equation.

...his presidency ended in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, when he chose — yes, chose — to litigate rather than lead, to attend to his wounded pride instead of his wounded nation and to debate the supposed fine points of white supremacy.

He abdicated his responsibilities so thoroughly and recklessly that it amounted to a letter of resignation. Then he whored for his Virginia winery on the way out the door."

And another NYTimes oped by young author Caroline Randall Williams entitled: President Obama, Where Are You?  She lamented the loss of Obama's "gravity, good sense and honesty" as President.  She spoke for her generation that graduated from college, got their first jobs and became adults during his administration:

" We learned to experience politics through the lens of your eloquent presence in the White House. In this respect, you raised us. So we are unaccustomed to all of this wildness. Just because we’re grown doesn’t mean we don’t need to hear from the man who brought us up."


2. R v R

Controversies rage over our apprentice dictator in the White House.  He screams at his most vocal critics, insults them and threatens their jobs.  They question his moral judgments, stability, fitness for office and his sanity.  Their arguments fill the media space.

Yet they all have one interesting thing in common.  They are all Republicans.

I think it was Rachel who pointed this out Wednesday.  On Thursday, it didn't stop. For example, The Hill: GOP taken aback by Trump’s verbal bombs and White House calls GOP senator's remark about Trump's competence 'outrageous'

 Politico headline: Trump takes potshots at GOP leaders as fiscal crisis looms.  Another:Trump clashed with multiple GOP senators over Russia.

The preponderance of coverage was about these intra-party conflicts.  So it is perhaps not surprising that the most recent Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that Homegrown Hitler hit a new low in that poll of 39%, a drop of 5 points, and "Much of the decline in Trump’s approval rating appears to have come from self-identified Republican voters."  

It's a large one week drop while the overall R support is still 75%.  But it could be a harbinger of things to come.

Eclipsed

This is my photo of the view from a cafe attached to a motel in Lincoln, Oregon in 1986.  I'd completed a speaking engagement in Portland and took a bus here to spend my 40th birthday by the ocean, before flying back east.

Today the solar eclipse that has the country in a frenzy will start precisely here, in Lincoln, Oregon.  I won't be there, however.  Motels in Oregon and certainly this one in Lincoln (if it still exists) are not only booked for today--they have been for four years.

Here in Arcata (where I now live), down the coast from Lincoln, the eclipse won't be total.  And forecasts suggest that it will be eclipsed anyway, by a combination of fog, clouds and smoke from fires to our north and east.

I've seen a partial eclipse, in Pittsburgh.  Or at least I saw the eerie reverse shadows on the sidewalk of leaves from the trees near the library on Forbes Ave. in Squirrel Hill.

Time was I might have traveled hundreds of miles to witness such an event as a total solar eclipse.  Not today, though.  In fact, I'll probably be asleep.

When We Were the Next Generation

A minority group is prevented from buying food and supplies because powerful people have intimidated storekeepers.  This group finally occupies the street and is preventing anyone from buying at the stores.  The leader of this minority has a brief conversation with a storekeeper.

"It's not right to make innocent people suffer," says the storekeeper, meaning his regular customers.

"Those who think themselves better than others are not innocent," says the minority leader.

"But don't you understand--I was forced to do what I did."

"Cowards are even less innocent than hypocrites."

Robert Loggia as Elfego Baca

So what philosopher, what great statesman or author wrote this dialogue?  It was Maurice Tombragel.

 You've likely never heard of him.  I hadn't.  But he wrote this episode of what by then was called Walt Disney Presents in the late 1950s.  It was one of the series of hour-long stories centered on Elfego Baca, a Mexican-born hero of the American West, played by Robert Loggia.

The people in this minority group were called Mustangers, apparently poor whites from the Blue Ridge Mountains who at this point were trying to farm in the cattle-range West.  But they had all the characteristics of a minority suffering prejudice by others and oppression by the powers that be.  It's not hard to see parallels with another minority prominent in 1958.

We often think of westerns, so popular in my 1950s childhood, as a lot of fistfights, shooting and riding, and especially cowboys v. Indians.  But many were more than that, and few were as simplistic.

One reason was Maurice Tombragel.  After a decade writing a variety of B movies, he turned to television, especially westerns.  Before Disney, throughout the 1950s he wrote for The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Jim Bowie, Bat Masterson, the Range Rider.  I watched them all.

But of course it wasn't just him.  The very first network western TV series was Hopalong Cassidy.  It starred William Boyd, who had played the character in more than 60 movies, beginning in 1935.  Boyd, who'd started in silent films, bought all the rights and produced his own series for this new medium of television.   It began broadcasting in 1949 and became wildly popular.

The series episodes were digitally restored and are now available on DVD and on YouTube.   They are kind of amazing.  The plots are both simple and complex (some involving finance and real estate deals), and there's plenty of riding, fistfighting and shooting.  But there is also a common thread: Hoppy is always fighting for the oppressed, for people who are helpless against the more powerful, including those in authority.  He fights for people who are being cheated, and are the victims of prejudice and hate.

When Indians appear, they are either being set up as villains by white land-grabbers or victims of attempted swindles. The bad guys are usually motivated by greed.  He defends Mexicans, and there's even an episode about human trafficking.

(The Lone Ranger, who rode into television next, was also this kind of western hero. Clayton Moore, who played the LR, appears in a Hopalong Cassidy episode--as a bad guy.)

The first two TV heroes I knew were Captain Video and Hopalong Cassidy. I had Hopalong six-guns and holsters, a Hoppy toy box and other Hoppy toys to put in it.  The only pun I remember my Italian grandfather making was calling me Hopalong que-se-dice. He was a hero.  I tried to imitate his walk and especially his laugh.

William Boyd was pretty old when he made these episodes, but we didn't notice (though once the series became a huge hit with kids, he played the parent--or grandparent-- figure with moments tagged onto the end, requesting that we brush our teeth and help out around the house.  I was probably around 5 at the height of my Hoppy obsession, and judging from these messages, so were a lot of his viewers.)

 Did I absorb attitudes from these shows, perhaps even develop a social conscience because of them?  I think I did, partly (though of course more generally with Hopalong and the earliest heroes.)  Not only from my TV heroes, but certainly they were powerful in reinforcing and defining who the good guys and bad guys were, and why.

It's especially interesting to me at this historical moment to observe the historical moment when these shows were made.  People think of the bland 1950s, but apart from the atomic bomb and the Korean War, there was Joe McCarthy and the Blacklist, and the early Civil Rights movement and events.

But I think in some ways the most important element was that the memories and the meaning of World War II were still being absorbed.  The end of the war was only four years in the past when Hopalong Cassidy first hit the airwaves, and the Nuremberg trials only three years.

Thanks in part to Frank Capra's Why We Fight series and other movies and short films, and Norman Corwin's eloquent radio programs for CBS, there eventually was widespread awareness of  the evils of Nazism and fascism in the 40s, and that education continued after the war.

The contrast was often drawn between the US as defender of the oppressed, as a citadel of freedom from oppression.  For writers of even TV westerns, that consciousness transferred to other causes.

It wasn't always westerns.  When Superman flew out of the comics and into radio, he was heard battling religious bigots and the Ku Klux Klan.  The opening familiar from television ("truth, justice and the American Way") also included on radio a description of Superman as “champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice.”

Superman came to television in 1952.  In that first year a two-part episode had originally been the movie that introduced George Reeves as Superman.  In it, Superman defends aliens (from the center of the Earth) against a persistent mob.  At one point he accuses the mob of acting like "Nazi stormtroopers."

Superman in this series fought crime but also defended the unjustly accused, and in an early second season episode with a plot that had appeared in the comics, he battled against the clock to stop an innocent man from being executed.

The Depression in its way, and World War II in another provided the stories that gave content to social conscience.  They in turn led to other stories, including the ones my generation saw and heard on television.  (The Blacklist led directly to some of these.  Some blacklisted writers fled to England and wrote episodes of Robin Hood and Sir Lancelot that did exactly what the blacklisters feared--poisoned our minds against racial prejudice and towards equality.)

Despite the dangers (i.e. every online argument, it is said, eventually gets to one or both sides accusing the other of being Nazis), I hark back to the Nazi era pretty frequently here.  One reason is that the generation that experienced World War II and may have seen Nazi Germany up close and personal, is all but gone.  Those of us who grew up on stories that had the Nazi experience fresh in their backgrounds and perspectives are getting pretty old as well.  But for as long as we can, we have to represent that perspective when it is important to do so.  As it seems to be right now.

The Abyss Report (Updated)

New Yorker cover dated the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington
Two other new magazine covers are below.

Drip, drip, drip.

Saturday updates: Kennedy Center Honors reception at White House is cancelled, and the HH and spouse will not attend the awards at all. This event isn't until December. There have been protests and boycotts before, but is this the first time that the president hasn't presided?  Is there a president? 

The day's best headline is from Slate:Trump Describes Boston Protesters as “Anti-Police Agitators,” Misspells Heal Four Times

Friday afternoon updates: While media buzzes about the "firing" of Bannon, two observations:  First, his "interview" with the American Prospect editor told me he knew he was leaving and he was using his last days in office as a way to feel out possibilities for his post-WH career (which immediately included taking back control of his old propaganda unit.)  Second, he may be gone from the West Wing but he's very likely to still be advising Homemade Hitler, as other "fired" folk continue to do.  I see the New York Times agrees with me.  Still, the potential remains that the firing will be consequential, with the rabid right attacking each other.  I'm somewhat doubtful that much will change.  Bannon's balloon is set to deflate.

Politico: Wave of resignations hits Commerce Department’s board of ‘digital economy’ advisers.

President’s arts and humanities committee resigns over Trump’s Charlottesville response is another Politico headline.  After one member resigned with his own letter, the remaining 15 members of the committee resigned en masse with a letter that said in part: “We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions,” members write in a joint letter to Trump obtained by POLITICO that ends by calling on the president to resign if he does not see a problem with what’s happened this week.  The story notes that the first letter of each paragraph spells out the word RESIST.  Later, the White House pretended they'd dissolved the committee on their own because it wasn't a good use of taxpayer's money.  Brave words from an administration that wastes more taxpayer money and funnels it to HH and his family in an hour than this committee ever spent.

The Hill reports: The pastor of a New York megachurch [Rev. A.R. Benard of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn] said Friday that he has resigned from President Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board, citing "a deepening conflict in values" with the administration.

And another R Senator speaks out: "GOP senator: Trump needs to be clear, white supremacists were 'solely responsible.'" Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma is a very conservative senator elected in 2014 in a special election, and re-elected to a full term in 2016.

On Thursday, in an on-camera interview, Republican Senator Bob Corker said: "The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful," and "has not demonstrated he understands the character of this nation."

Despite his goofy name, Corker is a silver-haired eminence who was reportedly considered for Secretary of State.  Corker also defended Arizona Jeff Flake (where do they get these names?  And we haven't even gotten to Senator Luther Strange) against attack by the White House, which included HH endorsing one of his primary opponents.  Both Flake and Corker are up for re-election in 2018.

Corker joined Senator Lindsey Graham in name-checking the apprentice dictator.  Corker raising the question of competence, and using the term "stability" were considered significant.  His statement was considered highly unusual for a Senator to make about the WH incumbent of his own party.

The highest ranking Democrat so far announced his intention to introduce a resolution of impeachment in the House.  He is Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Steve Cohen of Tennessee.

James Murdoch, the CEO of 21st Century Fox and son of conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, ripped President Trump's response to violence in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, also pledging a $1 million donation to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

The Hollywood Reporter reported Thursday that it had obtained the email memo Murdoch sent to friends. In the email, Murdoch says he was concerned with Trump's comments on the violence that broke out after a white supremacist rally last Saturday..."I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists. Democrats, Republicans, and others must all agree on this, and it compromises nothing for them to do so."

James Murdoch's father, Rupert Murdoch controls Fox News.

While HH defended Confederate war statues, the Congressional Black Caucus, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Senator Corey Booker called for such statues in the Capitol to be removed.  Republican Rep.. Tom Rooney of Florida agreed: "Confederate monuments in the U.S. Capitol should either be removed from the building and relocated to a museum or battlefield, or be appropriately contextualized as a symbol of slavery, a Republican lawmaker said Thursday."

However, for the moment, the greed of corporate leaders looking for a tax relief windfall will probably keep them in touch with the WH aides, and will keep National Economic Council head Gary Cohn from resigning.  The mere possibility he might quit sent the stock market sharply downward.  Thursday's word was that no other WH staff will resign either.  But hey, even worms can turn.

Think about the functions of the President.  Think about not being able to attend a funeral of an American killed in an act of domestic terrorism. (David Axlerod says that President Obama absolutely would have given the eulogy.)  Or to empanel a business advisory group on the critical needs of infrastructure.  Or even the ceremonial participation in American life, from recognizing a championship basketball team to honoring achievers in the arts:

Golden State Warriors superstar Kevin Durant says he won’t visit the White House to celebrate his team’s championship with President Trump if they are invited. "Nah, I won't do that," Durant said Thursday during an interview with ESPN. "I don't respect who's in office right now."Durant’s teammates, Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala, have each expressed reservations about going to the White House to celebrate their title with Trump."

Carmen de Lavallade, an acclaimed dancer and choreographer who will be recognized in the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in December, will boycott the awards ceremony reception taking place at the White House.  De Lavallade, 86, was one of the first African Americans to dance for the Metropolitan Opera.

TV writer and producer Norman Lear, who previously called President Trump America's "middle finger," also said he will skip the reception.

America has no president.  How long can that go on?

The Abyss: Updates

So many corporate CEOs on two presidential advisory boards resigned or supported disbanding that the White House itself disbanded both.  But many CEOs acted under immediate pressure from the public, in some cases reversing the stands they made just hours before:

“The collapse of the CEO councils is not due to an outbreak of conscience,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Instead, it is public pressure — pressure for the CEOs to evidence a measure of decency — that is driving them off the councils. That’s not exactly the most inspiring example of moral leadership. No profiles in courage here.”

Score one for the Resistance.

But even though stories continued to emerge of dismay in the White House and the administration, there were no resignations on Wednesday.  Jonathan Chiat notes that White House staff were shocked only that Homegrown Hitler made his racism public--they've been working hard to hide it, since they've heard him in private.  It's unlikely then that these cowardly enablers will step out of the moral abyss.

There were a few more measured statements from Congress but no profiles in courage there either so far.  A challenge has been made however, as several House Dems introduced a resolution to censure the apprentice dictator in the White House.  Supporting that is the only way out of the abyss for Republicans, but breath is not being widely held.  NBC and Fox new shows couldn't get a single Republican officeholder to talk on camera about this situation.

However, pretty interesting that dissidents to HH's rhetoric came from leaders of the US military.  The NYTimes:

Five armed services chiefs — of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines and the National Guard Bureau — posted statements on social media condemning neo-Nazis and racism in uncompromising terms. They did not mention Mr. Trump by name, but their messages were a highly unusual counter to the commander in chief.

Meanwhile, Politico reports that Homegrown Hitler was pleased with his Tuesday performance, and so apparently was his alt.right aide:

The president was not alone in his pleasure at the news conference. Chief strategist Steve Bannon, whose nationalistic views helped shape Trump’s presidential campaign, was thrilled with the remarks, according to a friend of Bannon. Even though Trump on Tuesday failed to offer full-throated confidence in Bannon, saying, “We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” the controversy has brought some additional job security for the strategist, who has been on the outs with Trump and other White House aides."

This suggests to me that while some White House staff may have been blindsided by HH's statements on Tuesday, Bannon wasn't--he probably was the one who prepared the notes that HH was seen slipping into his coat pocket just before the press questioning began.  Enough of these notes was visible to determine they were about Charlottesville.

Add another to the White House roster of Nazis--the NY Times reports that the lead lawyer for HH on the Russian investigation forwarded an e-mail "echoing sucessionist rhetoric."

The Governor of Virgina followed the governor of North Carolina calling for all Confederate monuments in their states to come down. Meanwhile the city of Baltimore quietly took down four Confederate monuments, literally overnight.

On the history and its significance, Adam Goodheart writes persuasively in Politico that the erection of statues commemorating the Confederacy were deliberate political acts in times of renewed racial oppression, giving them a significance now that might be lost outside their local and historical context.

For example, the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville was not installed immediately after the Civil War but in 1924, the height of the Klan revival.

It is important for non-Southerners to try to understand the local context, from both sides of the racial divide.  At the same time, resurgent racism is not just a Southern phenomenon.  The Nazi who killed Heather Heyer and injured others came from Ohio.  Self-proclaimed Nazi groups hide out in isolated areas of the West.

As for history, a striking aspect of all this for me is the coincidence of my recent research into the old Post Office building in my hometown of Greensburg, PA, which turns out to be modeled very closely on the old Court House in Charlottesville.  In fact, I thought I spotted that Charlottesville building--now a library--in a photo of the strife there.

While Greensburg (being in a Union state) doesn't have a Confederate statue, it does share a history of hosting the Klan resurgence in the 1920s.  According to a local history, the Greensburg chapter was formed in 1921 and "was said to include many prominent county and Greensburg men."

Update: Here's an interactive map of the 917 hate groups in the US, as compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Abyss

In the eyes of many, the apprentice dictator in the White House earned his full title of Homegrown Hitler on Tuesday when he angrily denied that the demonstration and violence in Charlottesville were chiefly expressions by those who call themselves alt.right, neo-Nazis and white nationalists or white separatists, but who must be called by their real name as well, just plain Nazis.

Historical context continues to broaden to take in this new reality.  Rachel Maddow produced a powerful narrative of the KKK's influence in American electoral politics in the 1920s, climaxing in several huge open marches in Washington, one involving 50,000 people, and a large and violent demonstration outside New York, that saw several arrests including HH's father.

She made two points: this has been part of American life and politics for a very long time, and it is not content to be a fringe group--"some peanut gallery for parolees."  It craves mainstream political power, and at this press conference, Homegrown Hitler went a long way towards giving them the space, especially since they can count on his tacit support.

Despite reports of White House staff consternation, Maddow insisted that these remarks were not entirely spontaneous, and in any case they were not an unintended screwup.  These groups have been "building back up for political power and terror for generations and he is now doing what he can to help them come back."  This fascistic element in American politics "is a real thing."

Meanwhile a piece in the Atlantic emphasizes the connection to 1940s Nazi ideology.  Many saw these Charlottesville events in the context of racism especially against African Americans, and it was surely that.  But as Emma Green points out in the Atlantic, much of the iconography was explicitly Nazi and many of the slogans chanted targeted Jews:

"Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like “blood and soil,” a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. “This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,” one demonstrator told Vice News’ Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic rifles stood across the street, according to the temple’s president. Nazi websites posted a call to burn their building."

Among the most outspoken in response on Tuesday was former aide to Republicans G.H.W. Bush and John McCain, Steve Schmitt.  In tweets and on various talk shows, he spoke of the "psychological fragility" of HH', and tweeted: "This performance will send shivers down the spine of every Allied leader.  It will inspire every adversary.  Everyone sees the unfitness."

But the qualitative difference he saw was a public moral failure of unprecedented meaning and importance.  He called it the "most disgraceful performance" since film and television began recording such events.  "The moral failure is complete," he said.  "It's almost irredeemable."

Schmitt called it a "seminal moment for the Republican party. Republican leaders have to "censor" him "by name," "or slide into a moral abyss with him."

Will there be resignations from the administration?  In any past presidency that would be expected.  

It may be a seminal moment for the Republic as well as Republicans.  Already some are speculating on the likelihood of a new American civil war to the extent that there's a piece about it in the New Yorker.

How could that happen?  How does it happen elsewhere?

"Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes."

Meanwhile, President Obama's tweet quoting Nelson Mandela became the most liked tweet in Twitter history.  But one quote for the day was recalled by Brian Williams at MSNBC.  It's from Michelle Obama: "The presidency doesn't change who you are.  It reveals who you are." 

Ode to the Modern Man

“He goes, in a condescending amateurish way, into the City, attends meetings of Directors, and has to do with traffic in Shares. As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners, have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all: Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blazing images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, ‘Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us!’”

Chareles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend 1865 chapt x