The Coasters The Shadow Knows 1958

This is a new one on me. Very interesting. (I love that King Curtis gets credit on the label.) 

The End Of Politics

There was a time when I did a lot more writing about politics. I had so much material in the can that last year I put the posts that I liked into book form and self-published it.* This blog started out in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, and at first I hardly wrote about politics at all. I remember thinking that there was little room left for my two-cents, because so many talented journalists were already doing a great job of covering politics. It was the way that white America reacted to the election of a black man as president that made me angry enough to address the issues that were presenting themselves. Angry in a way that I was not seeing from the talented journalists. I was angry in a direct, forceful way. Obama's presidency saw the resurrection of proud, unalloyed, pure racism in America. Racism of the entitled, white-supremacist old school, racism in a form that had been marginalized in the 1970s. Marginalized, but not destroyed.

The black president brought it all back out into the open. While social media lit up with Photoshops of Obama as a witch-doctor, or a monkey, and white people got busy explaining that they had nothing against Obama being black, they just opposed his policies. “How dare you call me a racist! I just oppose Obama's policies.” We heard that all the time.

Many white Americans, many more than you would think, have always had the feeling that, given a chance, American blacks would kill all white people in their beds. This is been true since the first curious white people in Charleston loitered around the pier to watch the unloading of the first African slaves back in the 17^th Century. White people's fear of those African slaves only got worse as their numbers increased. This fear was exacerbated over hundreds of years of the brutality, rape, and degradation of slavery, followed by the Klan and Jim Crow, segregation, lynching, discrimination, and the casual murder of black Americans by police. The worse white people treated our blacks, the more afraid the whites became. “How,” they reasoned, “could the Africans not want to kill us all? My God, look how we treat them!” White Americans are still terrified, in their deepest hearts and souls, of the righteous vengeance that must be in the secret plans of black Americans. The black president raised this fear level to “vivid.” It's all very silly, of course.

So I started to write about politics, and racism, and the intersection of those things in the Age of Obama.

Those eight years were also when the Republican party, sensing weakness in the Democrats and in the minds of people in general, moved in for the kill. They announced, unashamedly, that their only goal was to make Obama a one-term president, explaining that they would not be cooperating with Democrats or Obama on any subject at all under any circumstances. They threw out the rules and the traditions of Washington politics and practiced only the politics of total war. It was an exciting time. I disagreed with many of the actions taken by President Obama, and with many of the programs that were allowed to continue unchecked during his presidency (mass surveillance of Americans; acts of drone warfare overseas; etc.). But what was he supposed to do? He was nominally in charge of the Executive Branch of the government, but he had very little political support. The rest of the Democratic party was cowering over in a corner someplace, and the courts were becoming unreliable. I still think that Obama did a very good job, all things considered. And there is no argument that he has never been associated with any scandals, political, sexual, or otherwise. He was and remains a good man, and it is a national disgrace that that simple statement of truth will draw vicious responses from many white Americans, to this day.

Anyone hoping that things would calm down a bit with the election of a new, almost certainly white, president, was bitterly disappointed. Oh, we got a white man, that much is true. We got a walking political cartoon of a white man, representing chaos in the tableau. Nothing at all has calmed down, and the chaos only grows day by day. I wrote a little about Trumpian politics early on, but it quickly became too much for me. Just trying to keep up with the daily fusillade of lies and self-aggrandizing bullshit became unmanageable almost immediately.

I considered keeping a diary of Trump's insane acts and utterances, but that would have been an almost impossible amount of work, and all deeply depressing. The only interesting part of Trump's presidency has been the slow process of Republicans recognizing this Coo Coo** in their midst and jumping ship, mostly by retirement. This process has been accelerating here in the year 2020. COVID-19, and Trump's disastrous non-response to the pandemic, have gotten a lot of Americans killed. To make matters worse, the long term project of militarizing our police forces intersected with Trump's encouragement of racial animosity. This caused a serious uptick in the numbers of police killings of black Americans. That, dear reader, is a rubber band that must eventually snap, and snap it has. The frequency and the casual nature of these murders reached critical mass just as the whole population ran out of patience with the virus and Trump's daily carnival of stupid. Anyone paying attention could see that the whole purpose of government had become the further enrichment of the billionaire class and the tight control of the working population by any harsh measures necessary. Not that Trump was doing these things, he lacks the intellectual rigor to understand what's going on and he lacks the energy and discipline to do that much work. No, this new form of government that now controls us was brought about by the Mitch McConnells of the world, the Tom Cottons. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one who is sick of all of the phony Christians waiting in the wings to take over when Trump flies too close to the sun, people like Mike Pompeo, Betsy DeVos, Bill Barr, and Mike Pence. They have plans that are becoming visible, and people have begun to notice.

Let's see, we need a precipitating event. Who'll volunteer? Some nameless convenience store clerk in Minneapolis reported to the police that a man had just passed what the clerk believed to be a counterfeit $20 note. The man was located without delay, and he fit the bill nicely. A large, powerfully built man, what, about 6' 4”? 220 pounds or so? Very dark skin. Yes, he'll do nicely. He cooperates fully with the police, and there are no reports of his resisting them in their pursuit of their duties. No, it's just a matter of four police roughing him up, putting him in a car and ganging up on him, then dragging him out of the car and throwing him to the ground, and then three of the policemen kneeling on his back and, more importantly, on his windpipe.

The whole thing was clearly captured on three smart phone videos. One video shows the officer's knee on the man's neck. The officer looks into the camera, not arrogantly, but seeming bored. He has his left hand in his pocket. His knee is on the man's windpipe. The officer periodically moves his knee off of the man's windpipe, and during these intervals the man says, “I can't breathe!” One or twice he says, “mama!” Always the officer moves his knee back onto the man's windpipe and the talking stops, because the man can't breathe. Ultimately, the man becomes non-responsive. The officer's knee was on his neck for over eight minutes; for the final two minutes or so, the man was inert. An ambulance arrived, and paramedics move the man onto a gurney. His head flops around like a rag doll. He is clearly dead. They get him into the ambulance and leave the scene. The man was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Are we enraged yet? Why yes, we are. You may recall that the law is my training. I am a California lawyer in good standing (inactive), and I've been teaching law for thirteen years. I watch this wonderfully clear video, and I see first degree murder. The police privilege does not apply, because the officer was well outside of his authority, and committing a crime. Homicide comes in many forms, the worst of which is first degree murder, which is “the intentional, unprivileged, premeditated killing of a human being.” This case, to me, hinges on the formation of the intent to kill and the premeditation of the murder. One of the videos shows both things very clearly. The officer knows that he is choking the life out of the man, because he sometimes moves his knee off of the man's windpipe to allow him to breathe. By doing this, the officer serves his purpose by allowing the man to speak, thus proving that he can breathe. Then he intentionally cuts off the man's air again. This process is quite deliberate, and obvious. He repeated this over and over again, looking at the young woman taking the video. He was creating a record, in that video, proving, he thought, that he didn't kill the guy, because obviously he could breathe. He could speak!

The man's name was George Floyd. The $20 bill was real.

This snapped the rubber band. Not only for the black community, but for most white Americans as well. I'm not the only one who has been infuriated by this police behavior, all over the country, for decades now. This egregious act caused spontaneous demonstrations, followed by larger, planned demonstrations, mostly peaceful, which were universally met by militarized police overreacting, attacking people with “less” lethal rubber bullets, pepper balls, tear gas, bean-bag rounds, flash/ bang grenades, and what-all else. By now there are countless videos of police rioting and attacking peaceful demonstrators like they were a fortification on D-Day. The video of the police in Buffalo attacking a lone, elderly man, and knocking him to the ground is particularly affecting to me. I'm an elderly man myself, and I'm the type who would go over to the police if I had a reasonable question. I'd be stupid enough to feel safe doing that, because I'm an unarmed old white man, nobody's afraid of me, are they? The old man in the video seems to be asking the officers a question. They take a step and bang him with their riot-shields. He totters back a step or two and then falls like a tree, right on the back of his head. He lies there motionless with a pool of blood forming under his head. Even a couple of the cops were shocked, and moved to provide aid, but they are hustled forward with the gang to go on to more mischief, one imagines.

This is not acceptable. I hope that my brothers in the law launch a torrent of law suits against all of these municipalities, states, private contractors, and political entities. Minneapolis, Buffalo, D.C., the whole perverted lot of them. This police rioting is not acceptable. The torrent of law suits should be as huge as the waves in Waimea Bay.

Do you remember Trump's ridiculous claim that the world had laughed at America during the Obama years, but they weren't going to laugh at us anymore? Could any prediction have gone more horribly wrong? The world, as it turns out, rather liked Obama. He treated them with civility, and approached them in a spirit of cooperation and respect. The world, it is now clear, is currently looking at Trump as a comical figure whom it is best for them to avoid all together. More ominously, the world is now looking at America as an unreliable partner and a dangerous, unpredictable presence on the world scene. Unreliable, and kind of crazy, with all of the guns, and its military covering the globe, and the over-armed police attacking its own civilians with such gusto. I live overseas, and you can take my word for it: these police riots are being televised on the news around the world, and people are shocked.

We are on the verge of becoming just another in a long list of failed states. Our politics has not only failed us, it has resorted to threatening us with bodily harm if we fail to toe the new line. Within one year we will know if this has been the end of American politics. I'm afraid to think about what comes next.

*Political Rants: Lefty Vitriol in the Age of Obama and Trump, Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WKF3L95

Special price: 99 cents!

**Coo-Coo. A “brood parasite.” A type of bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species, who then unknowingly hatch the eggs and raise the chicks. Trump is the brood parasite, hatched in the nest of Republicans, who are now realizing that their little darling is not a Robin like them, but a coo-coo.

Ohio- Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

I had a good friend later in the 1970s who had been at Kent State at the time of this incident. He knew the girl in this photo. He wasn't political at all, and this was in his black fingernails period. All he really remembered about Kent State was what great parties they had. That's how many young people respond to a world gone mad, they withdraw from it. Somehow, I don't blame them. 

Buy My Book!

Now specially priced at 99 cents (Kindle, on Amazon). It's called Political Rants: Lefty Vitriol in the age of Obama and Trump. It's been out since last August. Self promotion is not one of my many talents. This is the link: https://www.amazon.com/Political-Rants-Lefty-Vitriol-Obama-ebook/dp/B07WKF3L95

Here's a short blurb that I like:

"An exciting look at the decade leading up to Trump. See prosperity evaporating like a puddle in the sun! Relive the slow death of the dream that was American Democracy! It's a heart-pounding story of mayhem and racism. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder, 'what were we thinking?' Caligula ruled Rome for 1,400 days. Soon we'll find out if Trump can beat that record."

This book is a real bargain at 99 cents. Hell, it would be a bargain at a few dollars. It's 110,000 words of my best political posts, after a good line-edit for clarity. The book includes the election campaigns of 2008, 2012, and 2016. I like to reference cultural events and little ironies (2016 saw the election of Trump and the Jubilee Year of the Dada Movement). There are two intentionally humorous posts. There is a lot of talk about racism, because Obama was the president for eight years and there was a lot to talk about. Who knows, you might enjoy it.

Here is an example of the things I included in the book. (This is the blog version, because it was a lot easier to cut and paste.)


Spin Easy Time!: America's Flawed Democracy: I teach a class called “American Legal Institutions” at a Thai university, and we often generate some discussion of democracy in general. ...

Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth 1967

Still worth keeping your head on a swivel. Keep an eye on what's going on. Fail to do so at your peril.

The End (Live At The Rainbow Theatre / 1974)

This LP was a June 1st tradition at our house. 

Something Happening Here

It is difficult for me to understand how it is only now becoming apparent to most Americans that everything that we all took for granted about our country and about our lives has been stolen. Isn't it odd that ONLY NOW are we beginning to see pundits from the left and right agreeing that that Minneapolis policeman straight up murdered George Floyd? Even Judge Jeanine isn't going for this one. She shed a tear! Even Rush Limbo says hold up a minute! I'm not sure about this one!

This new era of high-quality smart phone video has given us all a front row seat to some of the clampdown's abominations. All of the beatings, and the forced confessions (George Whitmore Jr.), and the frame-ups (Rubin Carter), and the planned murders (Fred Hampton), once took place well hidden from the voters' prying eyes. Now we have a crystal clear video of that policeman casually keeping his knee on George's windpipe, carefully shifting it off for short periods to allow George to breath a little, pleading for his life, saying that he can't breath, thus proving that he could breath, so that when he finally asphyxiated, which was obviously the plan, the cops could use his statements of “I can't breath!” as evidence that he could breath, even as we could watch as poor George was slowly choked to death over the course of the eight minutes of video, which the cops casually allowed the bystander to take! Amazing! Then the video showed George's body being taken away, head flopping like a rag doll, dead as a door nail. They were so sure that they could get away with murder that they allowed evidence to be gathered in real time against them! From whence springs such confidence? It springs from decades of getting away with murder, that's where.

That's only the beginning of the changes that we have watched quietly without interfering, and police brutality is only the most visible of them this week. We've lost many of our freedoms, and much of our prosperity. I've been over this ground many times here on the blog, and I've been the private Cassandra to friends and family for almost fifty years now. Since 1975, I'd say. Before that I had been too young for most of that time, and after 1968 I had combat fatigue and gave up the news, gave up caring in fact, for many years. I was again ready for action by the late 1970s, and the government gave me plenty to complain about on a regular basis.

Oh, the militarization of our local police forces, the proliferation of new Federal police entities (like ICE, etc.), the death of the right-to-counsel, ever broader government search-and-seizure powers, I've grown tired of making this list. The degradation of labor laws and New Deal social assistance programs alone should have made a lot more people mad. (I'd say, “social insurance,” or “social leveling,” or “social fairness,” but that's just me.) Didn't people like the weekend? Weren't vacations nice? Didn't you think that time-and-a-half for hours worked over forty in one week was nice? Do you remember when all, that's ALL, hospitals and medical insurance programs were non-profit? When for most people, getting sick wasn't as utterly terrifying as it is today? It was that way up to the mid-1970s. Raise your hand if you remember when rich people paid their fair share of taxes! They were still rich, too. It didn't seem to hurt them much.

Cleaner air! Cleaner water! I just wanted to throw that in.

It would be lovely if more people realized that most of these things were brought to us by Democrats, with some bi-partisan assistance with the Civil Rights Act and Medicare. Beyond those couple of instances, the Republican party has been devoting itself heart and soul to the clampdown since the 1920s. They gave us the Great Depression with their loose banking and securities laws; they tried at least twice to get rid of Franklin Roosevelt by coup-de-etat, having lined up popular generals for installation in the White House; they did their damnedest to prevent America from preparing in any meaningful way for World War II; they obstructed programs that were necessary to win WWII. To beat the Democrats they finally resorted to running Dwight Eisenhower, about whom they were less than enthusiastic. The old far-right called Ike a communist! The 1960s brought Nixon to the forefront of the Republican party, and I will leave you to your own terrible memories of Nixon. We all have them, don't be ashamed. Let it out. A two-minute-hate!

After that the Democrats were asleep at the switch, or co-opted by threats or money, or blackmailed, or something, because they really dropped the ball, and have continued dropping it until this very day.

This week hundreds of thousands of people are out peacefully demonstrating their horror and opposition to the kind of police violence that we see constantly against black Americans. Joining them are various interstate groups of anarchists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and militia types who just like to raise hell. Those few are out to break windows and start fires with the full intention of provoking violent police reactions, which are delivered enthusiastically almost instantly. Those police, looking like something out of a dystopian police-state movie from 1965, like Soylent Green or Robocop, cheerfully accept any excuse to start randomly firing tear-gas canisters and shooting reporters with rubber bullets and bean-bag rounds. Children getting hurt? That's the parents fault for bringing them to a peaceful demonstration. President Rage Machine is doing nothing helpful, as usual. There was a demonstration near the White House, so the Prez went down to the bunker to watch some TV, snack on some KFC, and fire off 150 Tweets a day at nothing in particular. (Fake News! It was only 146 Tweets yesterday!)

After three years of President Comb-Over, even the Banana Republics of the world are laughing at us. They're laughing at all of us, and we all deserve it, too. Who else can we blame it on? We handed Trump and McConnell and Pompeo and the rest of these pirates the keys to the kingdom.

The prosperous fully-industrialized countries of the world are laughing too, when they have time. Mostly, they're busy working together on the shared problems of the world, an exercise that until recently was generally led by the United States. Now they don't even bother calling us. No one in Washington is interested in anything but abrogating treaties or complaining about foreigners. There's nobody left in the State Department anyway, except Mike Pompeo and his prayer group, and many countries haven't had an American ambassador for years. The only American presence in the world now is military, wondering what their mission is and looking over their shoulders to check for the COVID-19.

COVID-19! Most of us, all of us, everywhere, are wondering what will destroy our happiness first: the virus itself, or the associated economic collapse? The only ones that are doing well in these perilous times are the billionaires, especially the super-billionaires. They have seen their fortunes rise exponentially. This phenomenon will make a lot of our problems worse. The growth of monopoly power; the number and wealth of idiot legacies (the foolish children of the deceased super-billionaires); the percentage of rental housing units in the hands of a few hyper-wealthy individuals, usually in the form of “investment groups.”

But at least we can enjoy this new bipartisan bitching and moaning. This is something new, and it's worth getting excited about. For two decades we have become accustomed to liberals/Democrats complaining about certain things, and conservatives/Republicans complaining about a completely different set of things. That created a chasm over which no one could reach to shake hands on anything. If a Democrat said that she liked apple pie, the Republicans, as one, would scream, “cherry pie! Johnny Appleseed was a socialist!” But if Judge Jeanine and I can agree that that cop killed George Floyd intentionally and maliciously, that, dear readers, is progress.

Maybe we can all move forward to agree on certain other obvious things, like the importance of fair elections, or all citizens working together for a better country, or that it helps America to remain in close contact with the world and work together with our allies on large scale problems.

That idea is so crazy that it just might work.