Sunday, May 31, 2020

There Are No Heroes Here

Courtesy of NBC News


After several days of protesting, rioting and now looting, America as an enterprise, as the home of the free and the brave, as a democratic beacon standing against tyranny and injustice, all of it is an illusion.  We are not advancing, if you are keeping score; we are in free fall.  And there are no heroes or leaders here to stop the country from bleeding out.

There are the protestors standing in opposition to the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers, only one of whom has been arrested and charged.  They carry signs pleading for justice, for an end to the endless killing of black men.  Mostly, they crowd the streets chanting and decrying this latest atrocity which should be an affront to every American because when one is treated unjustly, we are all deprived of our human rights.

In the last few days and nights, we have witnessed another group hiding within those protestors:  the rioters and the looters, bent on destroying businesses and property while sowing the seeds of anarchy.  These people are out for themselves, not for George Floyd or the greater good of abolishing injustice.

Finally, there are the police officers who indiscriminately target everyone on the street without regard for those who are protesting peacefully or the journalists telling the stories.  Cops shooting non-lethal rounds at the photographers and reporters, all of them with press credentials in plain sight.  What else could this be but yet another attack on the media as the “enemy of the people?”  This can be traced directly to Trump and his undemocratic attack on a free press.

The violence doesn’t stop with the reporters.  We have footage of New York City police officers driving into crowds and injuring people.  We see police officers knocking an elderly man with a cane down into the street in Utah.  His crime?  Waiting for the bus that will never come because service has been suspended due to protests.  When police officers realized the journalists across the street were filming, they quickly helped the poor man up.  New York officers again drove down a street in one of the outer boroughs, swinging out an open car door to strike people randomly.  Another officer threw a woman into the gutter so hard that she went into a seizure.

The police have become a military force patrolling a war zone.  They have the flash-bang grenades; they have the AR-15s; they have the armored vehicles; they have the military body armor; they have the tear gas canisters.  Once again, the protestors have face masks and their cell phone cameras.  Only the rioters and the looters have rocks and baseball bats.  Yet everyone on the street is targeted.

That, after all, is the distinction we must make:  the thugs (police and rioters/looters) and the protestors (tired of the senseless murder of black men).  We have four groups at war with each other on the streets of our cities, and only one group has no protection other than a cardboard sign they constructed on their own.  And cardboard does not stand up well to rubber bullets and pepper spray.

We are watching in the blue glow of our televisions the nadir of our democracy.  This is the way a country ends, with a bang and a whimper, with a knee on the neck of every citizen, for if one is deprived of human rights, we are all in jeopardy.  When those reporting the stories from the streets are shot with rubber bullets, those of us who are informed by their work are next on the list.

So what do we do?  What will happen tonight, tomorrow, and the rest of the week?  Will this blow over?

We are way past the point of a blow over.  No, this is what it is like to live in the midst of sociological upheaval.  Things will be rough for a while.  We know that in previous social unrest, it took months for change to come, for the society to rebuild, for the economic damage to be rectified, for the general population to forget, or at least make peace with what has been inflicted upon them.  No, we will have to endure this for many, many days, months and possibly years.  We need to re-examine our behavior.  We need to go to the ballot box and elect true leaders.  We must keep pushing, pushing and pushing for social justice, for human rights, because if we abandon our humanity, we will be truly lost and destroyed.

This murderous oppression of black men, this militarized policing of our streets, this general disregard for human life and dignity must come to an end.  However, we are up against the rise of hate crimes, of white nationalism, of a pervasiveness of violence perpetrated upon each other.  It is, quite literally, all about people’s inhumanity.

There is a cancer of fear and loathing on the streets of America, and we will need to go through a lot of pain to cut it out.  At stake is our democracy and our future.



Friday, May 29, 2020

The Hollow Man--Trump

Photo courtesy of  The Daily Mail

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

                                    From “The Hollow Men”
                                    T.S. Eliot


Standing in the checkout line in a grocery store way back in the supposedly safe days of early March.  Two guys waiting at the next register:

“Dude, can you believe this?  I mean, maybe I should get more beer and toilet paper, eh?”  Sweat pants and Dodger cap, six pack cradled to his chest.

The other, full beard and bed head hair, shorts and sandals.  “End of times, dude.  End of times.”

“It’s what I am telling you, man,” says the walker in my neighborhood yesterday sans mask.  “It’s like the end times.”

It is the end times for Trump, the original hollow man, the stuffed shirt, the Scarecrow drunk with his own narcissism.  Will the country survive this disaster of a president?

One hundred thousand plus dead of the virus.  The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The shotgunning of Ahmaud Arbery in a quiet neighborhood in south Georgia.  The attempt by Amy Cooper to incite a confrontation between police and an innocent black birdwatcher in Central Park.

All of this is on you, Mr. President.

Is this making America great again?  Is this what winning looks like?

Those who cling to rational thought like the life raft it is are fed up with Trump’s stalling on coronavirus testing, his misinformation about the virus, his white nationalism and insistence that there are good people on both sides of the racist street, his supporting white supremacists, his crazy, inept, incompetent, boorish behavior.  He permits such atrocities on his watch; he condones violence and discrimination.

That one statement alone:  there are good people on both sides.  Hate-filled hearts are never good.  Someone who does violence to others under color of authority must be brought to justice.  The hate has swallowed that person up.  That person is a black hole of human depravity, no longer human at all.

From every angle, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin who was himself aided and abetted by his brother officers on that street in Minneapolis.  He keeps his knee on Floyd’s neck, his hand in his pocket, the smug superiority plain on this face.  This is a hate crime true to the very definition.  Floyd questioned the officers.  He had the temerity to question why he was being assaulted in the street.  This is America where people are allowed to question, people are allowed to know why we are being arrested.  Floyd’s death penalty crime was to ask why.

As for the burning and looting in Minneapolis each night, the people speak to authority in the only way they can:  with property damage and rocks.  They burn stores, they burn the police station, they destroy the neighborhood.  There are only a limited number of ways that the public can be heard when the violence, injury and murder continue on and on.  We are talking, across the country, a pandemic of deaths for blacks at the hands of police.

Trump has never shied away from racist and misogynistic language.  Back in 2017, he encouraged law enforcement to use more force than necessary with those being arrested.  He was quick in 1989 to condemn the young black men arrested in the Central Park Jogger rape even when that case later fell apart and DNA revealed someone else was responsible.  The things he says every day in his briefings and in passing to the press make clear his feelings about the people he is supposed to serve.  He sets the example for incendiary language.  His presidency reflects his inability to do his job, his whiteness, his disregard for anyone’s rights but his own and those of his family and cronies.

This nation is one of fault lines and cracks in the foundation.  Trump has spent his presidency widening the cracks and dividing people.  We are left with that indelible image of George Floyd pleading to breathe under the knee of a police officer.  It is America’s neck under the knee of this president, and we are dying.  We desperately want to breathe again.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper



Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year



Like Camus’ book, Daniel Defoe combines realism and journalistic reporting to create a tale of life during the Great Plague of London in 1665.  His work is more journalism than personal journal.  In fact, Defoe was just a child when the plague raged through the city.  His A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is based on the personal accounts of his uncle, Henry Foe (Defoe added the “De” later in his life).  What is most interesting in Defoe’s writing is the way he uses science and data; the book really reads as science journalism, with Defoe citing “bills of mortality,” statistical references to those taken ill and those who died, as well as documenting the spread of the disease in London.

As with Camus’ work, many of the situations and responses Defoe describes ring eerily like our own Covid-19 response.  The government attempts to hide the greater spread of the disease.  “But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over,” he writes, “but all was kept very private.”

He offers anecdotes about strange occurrences both before and during the outbreak.  “A blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague,” he tells us, and these events continue up to the Great Fire of London which effectively ends the spread of the disease in 1666 by eradicating rats and curing the flea infestation that spread the infection.  People also seek out all manner of “quacks and mountebanks, wizards and fortune-tellers,” in an attempt to find some kind of logic in the spread of the disease and eventual death rate.  Poor people especially are victimized by this.  Many of these snake oil salesmen hawking quick remedies offer no mitigation for the disease, similar to Trump flogging chloroquine as a cure for Covid-19.

Families of those who are hospitalized or die from the plague cannot be with their loved ones.  Defoe tells us they could not enter the church or hold graveside services.  In addition, he describes how when someone is taken ill or has died in a particular house, a guard is posted to keep the remaining family members from leaving the premises and possibly infecting others.  However, people would not report the death until the entire family could sneak out and go to the country or another area and thereby avoid quarantine.  This only spreads the disease to outlying areas.

Plays, entertainments and other assemblies are banned and people who try to circumvent the law are “severely punished by every alderman in his ward.”  This includes “all public feasting…dinners at taverns, ale-houses, and other places of common entertainment.”

The most chilling part of his account is the bringing out the dead.  Because of the sheer numbers of bodies, many are buried in mass graves.  Special workers are designated to roam the village streets at night collecting the corpses to be transported to the cemetery.  Defoe tells us that some feverish people, near death, would escape the house and run to the pits in the graveyard and throw themselves in with the dead bodies, a kind of self-burial.  He also makes note of the fact that rich and poor were thrown into these mass graves, making the plague the great equalizer in society.  Many of these workers who handled hundreds of bodies did become sick themselves, but there is also a fair number who did not become ill at all, a case of inoculation by exposure to the disease.

Defoe makes the case that people and government officials were not prepared for the onslaught of the epidemic.  However, there were previous outbreaks of plague before the events of 1665 but the warning signs were ignored.  He also expresses doubt about the veracity of those bills of mortality:  “if the bills of mortality said five thousand, I always believed it was near twice as many in reality…”

The striking thing about Defoe’s account is the way he addresses things science was centuries away from discovering and understanding, namely the idea of someone who is asymptomatic of the disease yet capable of infecting a host of others while not exhibiting symptoms himself.  “These were the dangerous people,” he writes.  “These were the people of whom the well people ought to have been afraid; but then, on the other side, it was impossible to know them…one man who may have really received the infection and knows it not, but goes abroad and about as a sound person, may give the plague to a thousand people, and they to greater numbers in proportion and neither the person giving the infection or the persons receiving it know anything of it, and perhaps not feel the effects of it for several days after.”

Even the crowds at pools and the beaches that we saw over the Memorial Day weekend are reflected in Defoe’s writing.  He complains about people “running rashly into danger” by “giving up all their former cautions and care” in fear of the disease only to expose themselves to new threats as quarantine measures were relaxed.

The prescient nature of Daniel Defoe’s writing tells us that plagues and pandemics have trolled human history back through the ages.  It would be a fair response to be prepared in the future to face these threats to human life.  We must learn a lesson here; I am not sure we will.


Monday, May 25, 2020

The Patriot At Home

My father, my infant brother and me, circa 1968


To my father, patriotism was of utmost importance.  He exhibited the love of country more common in a recent immigrant, even though we could trace our family lineage in California back several generations.  Love of country was just all-important to him.

My father was born at the start of the Second World War, and his mother, a descendant of those who lived through the potato famine in Ireland only to become ensnared in the Great Depression and watch as her family lost their farm in the Dust Bowl, transferred her food insecurities to her oldest son.  We were commanded to finish everything on our plate each evening at dinner, and we were taught to live frugally.

My father came of age just after the Korean War ended, and by the time Vietnam kicked up, he was a young husband with two kids to feed and a stay-at-home wife.  So he was not drafted, but he had two younger brothers who went to that war, one of whom contracted spinal meningitis in boot camp and never made it to the front while the other died years after the war from skin cancer caused by Agent Orange, the popular jungle defoliant.  Seeing his one brother struggling to walk again with crutches and his other brother suffering from PTSD and cancer inspired guilt that he had somehow failed as an older brother to set an example.  They were brave and went to war; he did not.

Instead, war movies became my father’s refuge.  He loved and idolized John Wayne, and his favorite movie was The Battle of the Bulge (1965).  Later, he religiously watched the 1962 television series Combat! starring Vic Morrow.  Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day and the Fourth of July were sacred holidays to my father.  He also revered the National Anthem and “America the Beautiful.”  At church on those holidays, the choir often sang American hymns like “God Bless America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  My father soaked it all up.  He was not blessed with a singing voice, so he would listen, spine stiff and his eyes forward.  He felt every note.

His patriotism carried over in one strange way.  Whenever we watched a sporting event on TV, when the game began with the National Anthem, he insisted we stand, place our right hand over our hearts, and remain so throughout the entire anthem.  Only when it was finished could we sit back down on the couch.  The one or two times I questioned why we had to do this in our own home where no one could see us, I received a sharp answer.  “You show respect,” he would growl, “no matter who can see you.”

The biggest argument I ever saw my parents have occurred over an article of clothing on a long ago Memorial Day.  In the 1960s and 70s, it was fashionable to sew an American flag patch to the seat of one’s jeans.  It was all part of the anti-establishment years when protests over Vietnam were running hot and the line between the younger generation and the older became the “generation gap.”  Nothing got my father more riled up than to see the flag patch on a “hippy’s ass.”  My father responded to this act of disrespect by affixing to his truck bumper the popular sticker “America, love it or leave it.”  Next to it, he placed his National Rifle Association sticker.  These two stickers became the hallmarks of his Republican conservatism, something I never shared with him.

That year, on the holiday to remember those who gave their lives for our country, my mother gave my father the gift of a full barbecue apron and chef’s hat made out of an American flag.  She saw it as patriotic that he would wear the outfit while barbecuing on this most American of holidays, second only to the Fourth of July.  My father exploded when he unwrapped the box and opened it up.  In his view, this would be in line with the American flag patch on torn jeans.  It would be sacrilegious  and disrespectful to country.  He was enraged and would not listen to any attempts to explain alternative views.  My mother was in hysterics.  The outfit went back into the box never to be seen again.

On a holiday to sacred memory, I remember my father.  He never got the chance to serve his country in war, which I know was a disappointment to him, possibly even something to be ashamed of.  But I am happy he got married and started a family before the draft came for him.  In America, there are many ways to be patriotic.