Why Don't You Know?

    I'm retired and in my late sixties.  I've always been interested in politics and now I have the luxury of time to read and jot down some of what I'm thinking.  Yeah, yeah, I got a lot of free time. It's kinda nice. Everybody got that?
    I have a long memory for things I witnessed in real-time. I often find myself wondering why someone doesn't know a particular thing or see a past event with the shading it had at the time. I find myself thinking,  'Don't you remember.'   Of course, they don't remember.  They either hadn't been born or were children when the things that shaped today actually happened.  The kids are held to task for a kind of 'age snobbery' but really, geezers like me are just as bad.
    Let's take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She's been dismissed as a youngster. She's 29.  She actually has a mainstream education in economics and isn't proposing anything radical.  It's the way things were done for decades and it was obviously more successful and responsible than what we've been doing since the '80s.  In addition; the way business and investment income is managed will continue to mean most people at the very top will still be paying an effective tax rate of about 15%.  It does mean some people who haven't been taxed at all are in for a new experience.  I think they'll survive.
      She hasn't started this argument but I will: Pretty much every economic proposal advanced by Reagan has been an unmitigated disaster.  There are reliable metrics to apply to these things and the only real conclusion, looking back, is, Muy Malo or the more technical, Bad Ju-Ju.
    She seems to have decided it's pointless to argue with the leftover, Reaganite dinosaurs.  Make the proposal and let others carry the freight.  It's not a bad approach and it has the useful feature of actually addressing reality.  It does make me wonder about the whole Democratic Socialist thingy.  Why start that argument with a bunch of people you already know to be a collection of ignoramuses?  I honestly think it's a bit of snobbery from the east coast, intellectual establishment. They think it gives them a sort of continental cache. Bullshit, they're New Deal Democrats. Just say so. You're old enough.
    The debate about taxation acknowledges the Trump tax cuts have the shelf life of a gnat.  It's just an effort to get ahead of and contribute to the question of what's next.
    What's next?  I was reading about the Rosenbergs the other day.  No matter what you think of that case from the dim past, you can't help but conclude they were actually murdered by a wave of mass hysteria motivated by public officials; elected officials.  When you consider the near future, that's scary.  It does have a serious chance of being what's next.
     Most people would expect this old liberal to go off on a screed about the excesses of Trumpism. Nah, Trumpism is as dead as Casey's nuts.  It's the inevitable reaction to Trumpism we have to look out for.  These  Trump people can't find work in their fields.  They're facing truncated careers. In the private sector, they are being fired in droves.  Businesses aren't being necessarily boycotted but they are being shunned.  Kids are being thrown out of universities. Other kids, like these guys from Covington, will never see the inside of a decent college.  They can save the postage.  The problem with naked appeals to the half-formed emotions of the crowd is, the crowd's attention wanders.
    The American Right loves their boycotts and their blacklists and their condemnations.  They never notice these things become badges of honor over a very brief time.  The American Left controls the culture and thus, eventually, the economy and they are far more thorough and damaging in condemnation and marginalization. There is no real rehabilitation. The American left can be relentless and deadly.
    That may be a good thing.  It may be a bad thing.  It might be totally understandable.  It is a dangerous thing in its pervasive power and certainly bears consideration and watching.

Picture This

    My grandparents went on a short vacation to Buffalo, NY in about 1920.  Though they had been married 3 or so years earlier, I'm sure they went the few miles to Niagra Falls while they were there. While in Buffalo they found a Kodak 3A bellows camera that had been forgotten on a park bench. It was quite the find.  In those days that camera cost $20.  A week's salary.  It became the family camera. It took marvelous pictures. It had infinite focus.  I guess a kind of primitive, reflex lens.  Every find implies a loss. Lately, I've thought about that.
    There were hundreds of photos, each with a sweet story.  My parents had a Brownie Hawkeye and I had both an Instamatic and a Polaroid.  None as good as that old Kodak and none of them as good as the camera on my cell phone or yours.  The stories are every bit as sweet.  The message ignores the medium.
    A century of holidays, vacations, graduations, reunions, departures, arrivals, sunny days and winter storms. Decade after decade of family lore and old friends, all in albums and shoeboxes. They would be brought out every year or so and pondered again and the oral history would be repeated and to some degree re-lived.  Children's questions answered and the answers propelled into the future.
    Well, I put a stop to that shit. I lost all those pictures. They only exist in my aging memory which most certainly could be absent-mindedly left on a park bench.
    When video cameras were first available I refused to buy one. Looking at smiling wives throwing bouquets and baby's first steps, old Christmas trees just made me think, 'How depressing would that be if something went wrong?'
    The static quality of a moment frozen in time is much better to me than a living and breathing video.  I think it's better my memories are only captured just so much and imperfectly. I could not bear the smiles or frowns or tears of a departed loved one. My imperfect memories are just perfect enough.  To me.
    Still, I return to the regret of the loss of those old photos a couple times a week. For example, I'm writing about it now.  I berate myself for carelessness.  Pfft, yeah, who doesn't?

Stay Warm Old Man

    I rarely mention my faith because my faith tells me that's inappropriate. This time of year does kinda call for comments of affirmation.  So let me show you how I think it's supposed to work.
    Oddly enough, I was in jail. It was not quite yet Christmas and it was years ago. I wasn't particularly upset by the mere circumstance.  You adapt. This too shall pass.  I was awfully upset and resentful of how I had gotten there. LOL. I was wroth.
    These boys didn't like me much and dug up some crap from nearly a decade before which had been resolved, I thought.  As it turned out I was right about that but that didn't slow these boys down much. As a matter of fact, they actually tried to beat my ass. Had I not worked hard for forty some years they might have succeeded. I didn't resist. It was like some biting flies but they did throw my old ass in jail and it took about a month to sort itself out. It took me a bit to sort it out as well.  Did I mention I was wroth?
    I'm trying to think of all the ways I was upset. I felt violated. My sense of fair play had been just, trashed.  I'd been physically assaulted in my own home for no reason other than, they could.  I'd had to allow myself to be helpless in the face of outrage and lesser, seemingly evil men.
    Seemingly, evil men.  It finally occurred to me these men were no more than self-righteous. We do sorta pay cops to be self-righteous. They had merely been angered because I dismissed their righteousness. That had caused them to do demonstrable evil.  It was then I realized their souls had been stained, not mine and should, rightfully receive not my contempt but my prayer.  So, I certainly felt better and said my little prayer for these little men. They certainly have never gone up in my estimation but they were sincerely forgiven and I did and do have a concern for their souls.  Sorry, that's the best  I can do. Probably, being such a condescending bastard was part of the trouble.
    I'm trying to imagine how to relate this next part without being a total asshole. It's just what I have observed.  It doesn't have anything to do with my outlook, at least I hope not. There seem to be three types of black guys in a county lock-up.  One group are just folks who don't think much about race and freely associate with anyone.  The second and I would say, the largest group, are quiet, self- assured and contained. They'll associate with you but don't trust white folks in general and won't initiate contact.  It seems like a reasonable response to overall circumstances to me.  The third group is guys that will not acknowledge even the existence of white folks. They look thru you and merely walk around you like so much furniture.  I can't imagine a reason to disagree with that approach either. There is certainly a deeper dynamic to that whole thing too but not the point today. This is Faith, not sociology.
    So, I am in jail.  I know there's no reason for it.  I'm dealing with this inner rage, mainly because, on some level, I know the rage is wrong and I know I'm missing why it's wrong. It's not until I realize that I haven't been hurt, need no existential pity or justification and that my, would be, tormenters have seriously injured themselves that I find inner peace in the embrace of forgiveness.  It was a literal epiphany.
    County jails are cold. Ya got your skivvies, your socks and some ill-fitting PJs.  One thing you can buy from the canteen is a thermal undershirt but it's very expensive. At least twice what you would pay at Sears.  It's a prized possession and a foregoable luxury.  Hmm, simple comfort as a luxury.
    A few minutes after my epiphany and my brief but sincere prayer I was finally at peace, sitting in the common room watching television.  This guy walked over to me. I'd never spoken to him or he to me.  He was part of that second group I mentioned.  "Here ya go." Out of the fifty or so guys there and out of the blue he handed me a thermal shirt and walked away.
    A simple, unbidden act of kindness.
    That completed my epiphany and that epiphany remains a solid pillar of my personal faith.
    Here endeth today's lesson.

What If We Don't Get High?

    Thirty years ago a subversive sticker appeared for a brief while plastered in various places. It said, " Do not defy authority.  Ignore it."  I first saw it stuck to a toll booth which I thought was absurdly appropriate.  Most people, if pressed, would define anarchy as defiance of authority or rejection of authority but refusing to acknowledge authority as a viable concept in the real world is far more subversive and seems to really piss em off.  I realized that concept had become not just my unspoken motto but the unspoken motto of millions of passive-aggressives everywhere.  A lot of them stoned.
     Over 40 years ago people just started ignoring authority and started using marijuana among other recreational drugs.  When you consider what the penalties were in those days that was a pretty big rejection of authority as some sort of viable concept.  It was subversive and corrosive but not really.  In the end well over 99% of those people went on to become productive, willing participants in society and willing subjects of authority albeit with some reservations. Although, there is something about legalization that makes me uncomfortable on some level.
    Most people are honest but the idea that what the IRS doesn't know won't hurt them is pretty common.  Most people don't lie.  Well, that IRS thing again but as a general rule people only lie to their spouses.....their kids, well and bosses sometimes but for the major part.
    My point is, the average person, to this day wouldn't dream of committing a major felony or defying authority in any significant way but there is a kinda laissze faire attitude about the more prominent committing more prominent crimes.  The days of Pat Nixon's good, Republican cloth coat are long over. That scandal in 1952 or so was over a relative few thousands that Nixon couldn't really account for. It nearly ended his career. By comparison, Trump wrote a check for 25 million to settle fraud allegations the same week he was elected President and that, in the overall picture is just the tip of a very dirty iceberg. Nobody seems to care at least not in proportion to the fantastic amounts of money involved.  I wonder why that is.
    Is it possible our collective decision to roll a joint and ignore authority seeped into other areas?  Our elders said it was a decline in morality.  We didn't think so. What if that was right? What if we had recoiled from euphoria in favor of Sunday School morality?  I know, not likely but what if?
    I guess the question here is: Would society and we be different if we had been more amenable to authority just because it was authority?  Would frauds and thieves be less likely to rise?  Would nude models be less acceptable in polite society?
    My point is, we are seeing things today that just wouldn't have happened 40-50 years ago well outside of political conviction.  Is that at least, in part due to our casual attitude to morality?
    I don't think the morality of the fifties is going to make a comeback but maybe we shouldn't be so casual. Spin one up and we'll talk it over.

It's Just Never Discussed

    There are 144 million Russians.  They are the rightful owners of natural resources that rival any other region of the earth.  We see articles about the daily lives of the average American or Brit or Finn or what have you.  We don't see much about the average Russian.  I'm reminded, by saying that, that as a schoolboy I  used to receive a copy of the Soviet equivalent of Life Magazine on a monthly basis because I wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington and asked for some information.  I wonder what the FBI made of that?  I wonder what the Soviets made of that come to think of it. Hell, I wonder what our mailman thought of that.  My parents just thought I was a tad strange.  I just figured I needed more information.  They were used to it.
    I didn't imagine I got much real information about the average Russian.  Now, we still don't but it's different.  Our current ignorance is based on disinterest.  We're looking at trouble just because we aren't much interested.
    The first British envoy to the Moscovy Court was appalled to discover they were usually drunk to a man, all the time.  In modern times both Gorbachev and Putin have complained about pervasive drunkenness thru out Russian society. Another thing that has been constantly observed is the governments responsible for managing Russia's resources have been uniformly dishonest, incompetent and brutal. That means the Russian people have been uniformly subjected to dishonesty, incompetence and brutality from their representatives.  Now, rather than being a perennial Russian problem it's becoming a problem for the rest of the World.
    The malefactors of great wealth in Russia make our malefactors look like Boy Scouts.  Putin, though he has amassed great wealth is more motivated by power.  He doesn't want to see the glory of the Soviets restored.  He wants the previous glory of Mother Russia restored.  He wants the hegemony of Imperial Russia restored.  What can I say?  The heart wants what the heart wants.
    The oligarchs have a different problem.  They have stolen pretty much everything that isn't nailed down but their ill-gotten gains are in rubles which are essentially useless outside Russia.
    Putin wants international power for the sake of power itself and he uses the means that are familiar to him as a result of his career with the KGB.  This meshes with the oligarchs who want international power to further the greatest money laundering scheme in history.  Unfortunately, some of our malefactors are disposed to help.
    I think it's an undeniable fact that either Nixon or Reagan could have easily been bought. It just never occurred to anyone until the Bush family became a willing subsidiary of the Saudi Royal Family.  When that happened the gloves were off.
    Is there a solution to this assault?  I see two things that need done.  International financial transactions need to be more extensively monitored and misbehavior much more severely punished.  We were starting to do this until the current administration backed away.  International and extra-national access to the internet needs to be curtailed for any regime that continues to digitally assault other nations.  Well, how do we do that?  We created, control and own most of the internet.  Act like it.  That will take political will beyond the corruption we currently see.
    In the end, the Russian people need and deserve a break.  Bringing them more fully into their patrimony will benefit all of us.  Maybe we should be doing to the Russian State what they are doing to us.  I dunno.
    We should discuss it.

I Try Not To Do This

    This is what I've been trying to do with this public space.  If something in current events catches my eye, I try to relate it to the underlying principles involved rather than discuss the personalities involved and the daily wear politics.  I do that for a couple reasons.   First: My politics are too obscure and too extreme but my principles are about as mainstream as it gets.  Secondly: That kind of comment on current affairs involves a fair amount of prediction and I'm always wrong in the short term.
    On top of that, this kind of thing has the shelf life of a mayfly
    That being said; let's go.
    There are things involved with the Kavanagh hearings that need said and understood.  Because I worked alone for years I have listened to pretty much every major set of Congressional hearings for the last 30 years or so.  These particular hearings have been a near travesty.  Kavanaugh is a bald-faced liar.  I've never seen anything like it.  That's in addition to his record on the bench just being an outrage. The man has literally spit in the eye of anyone earning less than the one percent.  He, literally, has no appreciation of what being an average American is all about.  That leads to the real point.
    He worked for Ken Starr for 3 years and was the lead author of the Starr report which looked like a 50's porn novel written by a Sunday School teacher you wouldn't want around your kids.  It really kind of explains his behavior around women. The guy's a creep.

    He was an upper echelon participant in the GW Bush administration.  The truth is that group was engaged in criminality on a global scale. They ALL escaped prosecution because they had created such big problems we just couldn't afford that type of spectacle while trying to fix that mess.  That's why they have tried so desperately to hide the details of his participation.  Who the hell ever heard of the National Archives being blocked from releasing public information on the basis of party affiliation?
    The gentlemen's agreement was: They would be allowed to serve out their careers and retire in obscurity.  The first violation of that agreement was the appointment of the torturer Gina Haspel to head the CIA.  The second violation was the elevation of Bolton.  Those two could and would be credibly prosecuted at the Hague.  The latest outrage is trying to appoint this cipher to the Supreme Court.
    It's entirely possible Trump simply doesn't understand the concept of a gentlemen's agreement.  It's possible his advisors just chafe under the silent recognition of the criminality of the Bush people and themselves. It's possible a lot of these people don't understand the crimes they committed.  Who knows but this guy is totally unacceptable for those reasons and it's a damned shame this sleazy sexual abuse had to come to light.  It's just weird this is the only thing that gets republican's attention.

Let's Remember What Really Happened.

    We were talking about the turn of the new millennium and how brief it seemed between now and then. The tumult of current events seems to overshadow all the things in between.  We lose perspective.  We count the current presidency in days and forget that history is actually composed of decades, at least.  We tend to forget.  We tend to forget. Some people just never do know.
    Where to begin without covering a thousand pages with fact and conjecture?   I think a lot of things we face today began with the Reagan administration so let's go back 30 or so years to the flagging of Kuwaiti oil tankers.  I can see a lot of eyes glazing over but ya gotta start somewhere and nothing happens overnight.
    The flagging of the Kuwaiti tankers was seen as supporting Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war.  What it really was, was the rental of the US military by the Saudis and Big Oil.  It was also a genuine mistake that, as predicted, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and decades of regional instability.  I could tell you about millennia of hatred between the Arabs and the Persians, read Iranians but all that would do is point out the common American mistake of having no clear idea of what actually motivates most of the rest of the world.  We paint, haphazardly, with a broad brush of willful ignorance usually dipped in simple greed.  We faithfully imitate the British Empire, right down to the willful ignorance and the greed.
    Old habits die hard. During the Cold War, there was a default justification for interference in things that actually weren't our business. After all, we had the geo-political thingy to consider.  In most cases, it's easy to see now that was just nonsense. That was then, this is now. The important thing to understand is; at no point in history have the affairs of Iraq had any impact on the peace and security of the United States.  The only duty of the government of the United States is to address things that actually affect our peace and security. Violating that dictum negatively affects the peace and security of the United States and the World.  We sure have proved that.
    The flagging of the tankers and, by the way, giving the Iraqis nerve gas, convinced them we were allies. Silly boys. They actually came to the Bush people and asked if we'd mind if they took over Kuwait. The response was, " Local issue, why would we care?"  That's a fact. You can look it up. So, the Iraq touring company went to Kuwait and were really surprised when we demanded the show close on the road.
    Only 9% of the American public opposed the first Gulf War.  A friend of mine who happened to be a veteran asked me what I thought of it at the time.  I observed it was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen but now we were committed, we had better win.  It was something new.  We were no longer constrained by the Soviet threat. The Russians were incapable of response or meaningful opposition. The men of the Bush 41 administration, steeped in the Cold War, were simply not up to the challenge of a free hand.
    We didn't win by any American definition and Bush 41 paid an immediate price for that in the following election.  It wasn't the "economy, stupid" as Bill would have us believe.  It was, just as Cheney and company thought.  Bush Sr was seen as weak and ineffectual for leaving Saddam Hussein in place.
    There were two other elements that weren't discussed. The Soviet Union was as dead as Casey's nuts but a large portion of their remnant economy depended on arms production and export. The Iraqis had the world's fourth largest military armed to the teeth with  Russian weapons.  Russia and the United States were the leading arms merchants to the world.  The whole thing was an advertisement for the Russian 'brand X'  against the American brand.  That didn't work out so well for the Russians.
    The other thing that went unnoticed was instead of addressing some Cold War related, geopolitical aim we were suckered into supporting Saudi regional aims that had absolutely nothing to do with our peace or security. That was a monumental mistake which is still playing out in deadly fashion.
    That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.  Well, as I've said before, most conspiracies are really confederacies of dunces. This is not an exception to that rule.
     I'm trying to call to mind the proximate casus belli for our invasion of Iraq either time. Oh, that's right.  There were none. Both times it was an irrational act. In point of fact if we were going to attack some country other than Afghanistan for 9/11 it should have been Saudi Arabia but realistically the only goal was to kill Bin Laden and smash Al Qaeda. It's part of our willful ignorance that we don't understand the importance of faction and Islamic regional sects.  We don't know these things because we insist on being lumbering fools.
    I'm going to be blunt. Cheney and company thought the reason they lost power to Clinton was the failure to remove Saddam.  They were right but that doesn't mean they were justified.  At that time GW's presidency was on the rocks.  He was known to be an ineffectual minority, illegitimate President lacking in gravitas.  He did get his tax cut. Without the 9/11 attacks, he certainly would have been a one-term president.  Our outrage was co-opted.  To this point at least a million innocent people have been murdered and a volatile region of the world has been plunged into chaos that will last for several generations.  Guys like Bolton see this as driving the eventual agenda. That's outright bullshit and will see no more success than that kind of thinking ever has.  He's wrong and it will lead to further chaos.
    Why bring this up?  Well, it's fun to point out I was right.  Everyone likes that.  Trump is doing terrible things to us domestically and that is certainly dangerous but at this point, it seems temporary.
    It's good to remember that he hasn't murdered anyone, at least not in great numbers.  It's really doubtful if he'd be allowed to employ the military.  His criminality, so far, has been strictly domestic.  The public is making a list and checking it twice to make sure his predations are immediately repealed.
   Our public life moves slowly.  That's a good thing.  Education will triumph over ignorance and racism will be forcefully corrected.  Classism will be addressed. We will learn to not judge progress by only success for the wealthy.  The coming, decade-long, prosecutions will inform the malefactors.
    We will emerge on the other side imperfect but having progressed.  That's the idea.
    The kids are pissed.  They can't understand why anyone would tolerate this bullshit.  They'll calm down but they won't forget.

    Now, a year after I wrote the above, Trump is being allowed to dabble in foreign policy.  It's an unmitigated disaster as anyone could have foreseen.
   Two years later Trump's  incompetence has killed at least 100,000 U S citizens.