Twenty five years can feel like a long time or it can pass by in a flash. And a young man looking back 25 years to his childhood is not the same as a late middle-aged man looking back 25 years to the onset of his adulthood.  It’s open to question which span is the More

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To hear Daniel Ellsberg tell it, the world came a lot closer to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis than has ever been played up by the Press for our education.  What’s new?  In his must-read book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Ellsberg delivers the astonishing news, not well-known even More

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“If it works, why do we need to do it 183 times?” – Dianne Feinstein, Senate Intelligence Committee on Torture Last year, I filed a FOIA to obtain the poetry of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) and Abu Zubaydah (AZ). I was in earnest. The illustrious and toolishly necessary New York Times, along with London’s equivalent More

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I’m sorry, but learning that old Ed Asner carked it last week in LA, at 91, was some of the best news I’ve heard in some time. Christos, I needed the good news. If he hadn’t died, of no unnatural causes, I never would have stumble-bungled across his 2017 book in my Alexandrianesque library I’ve More

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Just the other day a Guardian article (and parallel MSM pieces) touted the Biden administration’s announcement that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has become the first to be given FDA approval for Comirnaty, a Covid-19 vaccine. “President Joe Biden hailed the announcement as ‘another milestone, a key milestone, in our fight against Covid,’” writes the article’s author, More

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On TV, it’s Saigon all over again. You see them pleading, help me!, take me with you to a better place. Kids we’ve regaled with ironical Che tee shirts and stonewashed Levi jeans, some of them the offspring of soldiers mixing with the local women, who the GIs promised to set free with equality and More

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It’s all happening. Weeks upon weeks of the MSM reporting on fires in Europe, Australia, California, and even the Arctic.  Fires brought by drought.  Fires brought on by ripping out mother trees and their forest floor moisturizing effect.  Hot domes on their way. A pandemic fighting back against the vaccine. Water shortages and skirmishes.  The More

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“Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew.“ – Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (1963) There’s a new collection of Julian Assange’s sayings and recountings and anecdotes coming out in mid-October, titled, Julian Assange In His Own Words. I was lucky enough to be provided an More

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A joke is a judgement which produces a comic contrast; it has already played a silent part in caricature, but only in judgement does it attain its peculiar form and the free sphere of its unfolding.’ – Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious (1905) I have long fantasized about starting the world More

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Brian Fies is a cartoonist from Santa Rosa, California. On October 9, 2017 wildfires burned through Northern California, resulting in 44 fatalities. In addition, 6,200 homes and 8,900 structures were destroyed. He wrote an 18-page webcomic to describe and deal with the fire and the losses it brought to his family and community. Fies later More

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Things have been heating up with the Chinese and Russians for many years, as if by script.  Americans have been forced to demonize the Russkies since 1945 — we’ve been in a virtual state of war all those years. 76 years.  And China, after America threw away the coveted detente dumpling that Tricky Dick and More

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Can’t seem to escape Dylan’s presence these days.  He’s like a compound version of Hamlet’s ghosts, egging me on to deeds and thoughts I don’t need. Too old for this shit, like God Himself said. (Ophelia, my feminine “ideal,” definitelymade it to the nunnery.)  Rough and Rowdy Ways. Selling his songs for a hero’s bonfire More

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We’re beginning to get the picture.  Beginning to act like rats about to abandon the Titanic.  The American Experiment, the USS Exception is taking on heavy water. The band is singing, the fat lady’s all Ella Fitzgerald, breaking Memorex tapes in the dressing room, waiting for the quiet nod from the Man in the Long More

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Stasi Officer: What do you have to tell us? Citizen: I’ve done nothing. I know nothing. Officer: You’ve done nothing, know nothing. You think we imprison people on a whim? Citizen: No — Officer: — If you think our humanistic system capable of such a thing that alone would justify your arrest. – Scene from More

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Dylan at 80: A Sonnet of Appreciation Been around almost as long the war with Russia, a child of Odessa blues, who spat at Ellsberg,* like Dad did the Tsar, went hunting Woody’s career, filled his shoes, got himself condemned by the left and right — became the Wandering Jew, harp and guitar, on a More

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Chief of Police: One man cannot move a mountain.

Charlie Chan: No, but two men can start digging.

-Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935) calling a spade a spade

Fifty-one years ago, Capitalists Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger initiated their rapprochement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after 25 years of total silence between the world’s two leading economic ideologies. America was in a Cold War with the ‘SPECTRE’ Soviets, but it was a Cold Shoulder they shared with the Chinese. A wall had come up between them. Through backchannels and diplomatic alleyways, the Commie-hating Nixon was invited to come play some ping-pong and shoot the shit with Chairman Mao. Nixon’s sudden announcement that he’d be going to China in 1972 was a shocker, election year or not. (What’s next, some of us thought, will Tricky be inviting Timothy Leary over at the White House for Quaaludes and cubes?) Fear and Loathing had begun.

Many folks agreed (but not Peter Seeger) that when Nixon went electric with Mao and Chou in February 1972 it was as monumentally meaningful as Mr. Jones’s chat fest with Napoleon in rags at the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Look Left, look Right, tell me what you see. Mao snarked about the American Left-Right in his conversation, calling the Left-Left disingenuous reactionaries (i.e., the pampered middle class). Nixon and Mao and Kissinger and Chou chowed down with bonhomie and good humor, the world was their oyster, on the half shell.

At one point, Mao shot down Nixon’s passive aggressive attempt at flattery:

Nixon: I read your book [The Little Red Book]. You moved a nation and changed the world. [Mao looks at Chou, who laughs]

Mao: Oh, I don’t know about that. Maybe one neighborhood in Beijing. [Chou laughs so hard, Kissinger maneuvers das Heimliche]

And soon tiring of Nixon, Mao called it a day:

Mao: I don’t feel so well. [the translator almost said, “You make me sick.]

Nixon: You look good.

Mao: [imitating Charlie Chan] Appearances can be deceiving.

And they all agreed over their shoulders, guffawing, as they moved down the corridor in different directions that what Lennon said was true, If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, then…. Funniest thing Nixon ever heard. You don’t believe me? Read the transcript for yourself.

A later toast succinctly lays out the clearest, most coherent policy toward China (and all sovereign nations) imaginable and discusses their future role together as partners in a “new world order.” He says, in part,

You believe deeply in your system, and we believe just as deeply in our system. It is not our common beliefs that have brought us together here, but our common interests and our common hopes, the interest that each of us has to maintain our independence and the security of our peoples and the hope that each of us has to build a new world order in which nations and peoples with different systems and different values can live together in peace, respecting one another while disagreeing with one another, letting history rather than the battlefield be the judge of their different ideas.

Mr. Mao, Nixon said, tear down that wall, and Chou En-lai laughed, thinking but it’s 13,000 miles long. Why you not start with Berlin Wall? You funny, shaking his head.

So important was that rapprochement that books were written, an opera was made. Nixon in China got the wunderkind (now wundergramps) Peter Sellars treatment. Remember his Wagner? The pampered middle class enervated by the sobering revelations of the Nam experience (We’re willing to do that? No, not My Lai, Kent State.) was inebriated again, like an overflowing glass of bubbly multiverses. Great libretto by Alice Goodman, who’s been asked to go after Trump now. And the MET production of the opera is actually there on YouTube. Even the Scots had a 2020 version up on stage. Can you imagine Mao with a brogue? Or Nixon for that matter? Pass the bong.

Fast-forward 51 years to the Nixon Library, Mike Pompeo (a comic book villain’s name if there ever was one) delivering a kung-pow speech meant to announce to the world America’s intention to erect a Great Wall against Chinese capitalist aggression: What if they export their sweatshops everywhere? Essentially implying Nixon was a two-faced liar, Pompeo averred that “President Nixon once said he feared he had created a ‘Frankenstein’ by opening the world to the CCP. And here we are.” He called on the world — the same one the Trump government has spurned in the last three years — to come together: “If the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.” Pompeo is gone, but China is forever.

Had P ever considered that capitalism itself is a Frankenstein monster waiting to happen, or, put more honestly, that the US is Dr. Frankenstein out to create capitalist monsters around the globe? And Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, eating “the most beautiful piece of devil’s food cake that [he had] ever seen,” when Trump pulled a cakeus interruptus and whispered to Xi, “I’ve just bombed Syria.” Xi almost snarked some Chan, but did not want to encourage more chaos. Where was Chou when you needed him? Alas, poor Yorick.

Chaos. That’s the recurring motif of Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy by the former Singapore ambassador to the UN, and president of the UN Security Council from 2001-2, Kishore Mahbubani. “The Chinese people fear chaos,” writes Mahbubani early on. “It is the one force that in the past brought China to its knees and brought misery to the Chinese people. Clearly, America is suffering chaos now,” he continues. “President Donald Trump has been a polarizing and divisive figure. American society has never been as divided since the Civil War of 1861–1865.” And that was written before the first impeachment, Super Bowl recovery and Covid-19. Damn. And now some people are thinking George Floyd might be the Storm the Bastille moment we’ve been waiting for.

Has China Won? is 8 chapters od wah, an introduction, and an appendix, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” which could serve as the thesis of the book. With Trump wielding power, Mahbubani suggests, it’s as if America has gone Brexit from the world and even with its extraordinary military might still flexing muscles everywhere, no one is paying much attention any more to her manifest destiny nonsense. “One thing is certain,” writes Mahbubani, “The geopolitical contest that has broken out between America and China will continue for the next decade or two.” There are chapters delving into strategic mistakes the two countries have made in dealing with each other, chapters on their geopolitical motivations and goals, and chapters that question which way nations will go at this historical crossroad of values.

Though he briefly mentions it toward the end of the book, Mahbubani doesn’t emphasize the Clash of Civilizations trope, espoused by the likes of General William Westmoreland, which got us all greatly walled off from China to begin with — such KKK-like nonsense, if true, would mean a Jim Crow world favoring the Nordics and the Nordic Trackers, as culture is not readily negotiable. Nevertheless, Trump and Pompeo thought they’d give Generalissimo Gookphobe’s slant another go. Today, however, we deal in Empir(e)ical theories — the honesty of economics, we tell ourselves, turning capitalist exploitation into an ‘objective’ universal principle; like comparing shitting your bed to organic gardening.

If we want to simplify, we could compare the CCP and Americans systems to a contest between the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) versus The New Silk Road. The Chinese muscling west and south to Africa, the Americans muscling east and south to Africa, and each a kind of spectre hanging over Europe like a high and low pressure system duking it out and you just know a hard rain’s a-gonna fall. PNAC is the muscle behind the unrefusable offer from the neoliberals. The Chinese will sow soft discord, spread their opiated capital to the people, until Confucian reigns. They already have the West by the hairy yinyangs, there’s no Tao about that, and some neocons, believing the CCP wants to do to us what we did to the CCCP, probably think we should just blast them to get some debt relief. (Chou just cracked up in his grave.) But we want a more nuanced approach. Let us follow Mahbubani’s train of thought.

Mahbubani spends a couple of chapters trying to figure out what went wrong in the respective approaches of the US and China that led to the collapse of their 50 year détente. He expresses initial surprise that American businessmen, who’ve made so much money in China, have failed to show up to defend China when President Trump began his trade war in January 2018. It’s one of the few areas that Congress and the president had shown bipartisan unanimity. Mahbubani writes,

Senator Chuck Schumer said that “when it comes to being tough on China’s trading practices, I’m closer to Trump than Obama or Bush.” Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi said, “The United States must take strong, smart and strategic action against China’s brazenly unfair trade policies.…”

As far as Americans are concerned, China brought this on themselves.

Mahbubani notes that it’s not only Americans coming down with a Sino headache. Europeans, too, have been nonplussed by China’s tactics. He cites George Magnus, a research associate at the China Centre, Oxford University, who tells how, in his 2018 book Red Flags,

China has made a huge political mistake in ignoring the strong convictions among leading American figures that China has been fundamentally unfair in many of its economic policies: demanding technology transfer, stealing intellectual property, imposing nontariff barriers. “The US has a strong case” against China in this area, as Magnus notes.

This is dooley noted, as they said in Casablanca and the White House.

Mahbubani points to “three contributing factors” that brought about China’s unacceptable behavior: one, the power of local officials to control business arrangements with foreigners; two, Sino hubris over the 2008 Wall Street financial collapse; and, three, weak central government in the 2000s. While Americans applied pressure on Beijing, Mahbubani points out that “even if Beijing wished to do so, there are limits to how much day-to-day control the center can impose.” He adds, Charlie Chan-like, “A well-known Chinese saying is: The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away. For millennia, the provinces of China, even under strong emperors, have always had strong local autonomy.” And, sure, they were laughing their asses off when the Cappies almost blew their own brains out playing Russian roulette in 2008, almost like Manchurian candidates. Wah.

Mahbubani also takes issue with American tactics. By giving the Middle Kingdom the middle finger, as only Americans can do (think Easy Rider), we’ve become occidentally disoriented in our foreign policy, becoming the kind of reactionaries that Mao and Nixon had a chuckle festival over in 1972. And, as far as Mahbubani is concerned, America has a “need to find a foreign scapegoat to hide the deep domestic socioeconomic challenges that have emerged in American society.”

Sometimes while reading Has China Won? you wonder if Mahbubani didn’t get so driven to distraction by Trump that he started leaning on some magic dust to get through his analysis. He thinks,

it would be reasonable for many Chinese leaders to believe that when America promotes democracy in China, it is not trying to strengthen China. It is trying to bring about a more disunited, divided China, a China beset by chaos. If that was China’s fate, America could continue to remain the number one unchallenged power for another century or more.

That’s fine, but what I’m talking about is his diminishing Trump (and now Biden) by trotting in Plato. He notes,

Edward Luce reminded us, that ‘democracy was the rule of the mob—literally demos (mob) and kratos (rule).’ [And that ] Plato said the best form of rule was by a philosopher king. [And then the punchline]: There is a very strong potential that Xi Jinping could provide to China the beneficent kind of rule provided by a philosopher king.

Sweet Jesus. Pass the opium bong.

But the most important takeaway from this section is Mahbubani’s discussion of the US Dollar as the global reserve currency, and how it has backed American privilege and hegemony over the many decades, and, how, most importantly, this “privilege,” which has allowed Americans to pursue “middle class” lives, on credit, (without knowing it), is in danger of collapse. He quotes Ruchir Sharma to make his point:

Reserve currency status had long been a perk of imperial might—and an economic elixir. By generating a steady flow of customers who want to hold the currency, often in the form of government bonds, it allows the privileged country to borrow cheaply abroad and fund a lifestyle well beyond its means.

As a result of this status, paper money can be printed up whenever needed — essentially IOUs bought up by foreign investors and countries, such as China, who if they ever cashed in could make the US government insolvent overnight.

Mahbubani points out that such an arrangement is built on trust and that

The world has been happy to use the US dollar as the global reserve currency because they trusted the US government to make the right decisions on the US dollar that would take into consideration the economic interests not only of the 330 million American people but also of the remaining 7.2 billion people outside America who also rely on the US dollar to fund their international transactions.

But, he writes, now much of the world sees America falling into disorder, with the 2008 near-collapse of the global economy, thanks to Wall Street hijinks, being a harbinger of ill-tidings ahead for America. As a result, China, and other countries have begun looking for ways to get around the US dollar, such as with BRICS and other talk of alternate currencies. No doubt, this left many Western bankers shitting bricks. Could such moves cause a war? Wah.

In another section, Mahbubani asks if China is expansionist, as the Americans have claimed. He obliquely responds rhetorically, Is capitalism inherently expansionist? Did America push capitalism on China? Has China shown it can play the game with equal skill, while keeping pleasing its citizens with true upward mobility and market opportunity, while keeping chaos at bay? What do you think, reader, he seems to ask. As far as Mahbubani is concerned, modern China is destined to make inroads into Europe, where the Monguls failed, due to one historian’s account, by getting bogged down by mosquitoes and malaria. Mahbubani writes, America is trying to create a pretext for military engagement with China, by claiming it is flexing its muscles, especially in the South China Sea.

In another section, Mahbubani wonders if America can make a “U-turn” away from its profligate and totally unnecessary military spending. He suggests that China looks at America the way the latter looked at the Soviets who wasted so much GDP on weaponry it helped collapse the USSR. “It is in China’s national interest for this irrational and wasteful defense spending to continue,” writes Mahbubani. America is locked into an “irrational processes it cannot break away from.” He gives an example of their two approaches: “An aircraft carrier may cost $13 billion to build. China’s DF-26 ballistic missile, which the Chinese media claims is capable of sinking an aircraft carrier, costs a few hundred thousand dollars.”

Another chapter asks: Should China Become Democratic? Mahbubani wonders the same about America? While the US considers regime change in China, Mahbubani writes,

Since I live in the neighborhood, I can say with some confidence that most of China’s neighbors would prefer to see China led by calm and rational leaders, like Xi Jinping, and not by a Chinese version of Donald Trump or Teddy Roosevelt.

In a surprise suggestion to the West, he adds, that for China, and its millenia long history of emperors, “a nondemocratic CCP could do long-term calculations on what would be good for China and the world.” But, of course, there are those in America, who will ignore what Nixon said about sovereign nations. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger said before socialist Allende was popped.

Mahbubani closes with a section on American hypocrisy, which falls on deaf ears, as it does with any realpolitik empire. So, sue me, they say. Mahbubani closes with A Paradoxical Conclusion, the nub of which is that imminent conflict is “inevitable” and yet “avoidable.” Why? Hubris. Always, it’s the hubris. Who will win? Look at the title? What do you think? Mahbubani asks rhetorically.

If Has China Won? has a major flaw it is that it presumes that China’s global victory by economic expansion is a victory. We are learning that we are in late stage capitalism, and that the endless expansion of economic growth in light of diminishing resources, proliferating population growth, and imminent climate catastrophe, is not a healthy response to reality. To his credit, however, Mahbubani does suggest that if the two superpowers could find a way around their dangerous political impasse they might be able to come together and lead the world out of some of its impending crises.

Pass the bong.

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“Why do you read this trash? It is inflated trash, Hemingway. By a dead man.”

“I like to see what they are writing,” I said. “And it keeps my mind off me doing it.”

– Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, “Une Génération Perdue,” A Moveable Feast

I was reading (and watching) a hit piece in the New Yorker today that takes the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre to task for botching an elephant kill in Botswana eight years ago.  “The Secret Footage of the N.R.A. Chief’s Botched Elephant Hunt” includes video of the fatal shots; it’s nasty stuff, trophy-hunting endangered animals, and when I read that LaPierre’s wife, Susan, cuts off the elephant’s tail (“Oh, it’s like a fish almost, with the center cartilage,” she says.”) to mark the beast as their kill, it has an anachronistic feel — and there’s nothing romantic about it. When I read that the elephant’s front feet were eventually made into stools for the den, I was disgusted that such ostentatious egotism still has legs.

Apparently, Mike Spies, senior writer for the anti-gun online journal, The Trace, was trying to show LaPierre what it’s like to be taken down by a boom-gun. Spies, the bush sniper, hits point-blank, right between LaPierre’s running lights. Like the elephant in the piece, who wasn’t looking for trouble, LaPierre goes down in a heap. BOOM: By Spies account, the head of the NRA is an incompetent boob, a fumble-thumbs with guns, who misses the kill spot repeatedly at close range; even the old bull seems to look up with one dying eye in wonder. BOOM: Good heavens! the comfortably middle class New Yorker seems to opine, you drove  your organization into bankruptcy!  Of course, had LaPierre not missed his mark (or had he discovered he was being secretly filmed and executed the cameraman on the spot), we never would have seen the snuff film or read the hit piece.

You come away feeling that New Yorker, using Spies Trace blog entry wholesale for the piece, has an agenda: Gun control pressure is in the air; Biden’s feeling it like a prostate problem.  Guns on the loose in America now number in excess of 400,000,000, so that concern is understandable. But the piece got me thinking. Recently, I finished watching the three-part, six-hour PBS mini-series Hemingway, a Ken Burns and Lynn Novick production.  And I’ll tell you, suddenly I felt like Joan Baez in that old song “Diamonds and Rust” where she answers the phone and she’ll be damned, there comes that voice of Dylan again from “a couple of light years ago.”  (For the record, it didn;t seem to faze Dylan; he hooked up with his old lover shortly thereafter for the Rolling Thunder Revue Tour — the ever-relevant Woody Guthrie number, “Deportee,” a highlight of their mike-sharing.) Except this time, it’s me not Baez, and I find myself considering Hemingway again for the first time in ‘a light year.’

I’m a postmodern, fully relativized son-of-gun now.  I haven’t believed in the Great Man theory since the clowns were all shot out of the Canon by the feminists and other lefty literati decades ago. I’ve attended more than one Good Riddance party. I’ve asked attractive women at such bong-passing parties questions like, “What does Hemingway have that Toni Morrison doesn’t have?”  Seemed like a good pick-up line at the time, but she just kept saying to me, “Hey, I’m up here,” before finally sashaying away. (At least, that’s how I read it.) And it’s true, what does Hemingway have that Morrison doesn’t. (I’m up here, reader.)  Well, they have blue eyes in common.  But sadly, I can picture Hemingway among southern slaves picking cotton shooting at wild geese, admiring the industry of slaves while ignoring their plight.

Really, the Question that comes to mind is why Hemingway? Why now?  What were Ken Burns and Lynn Novick after?  Not long into the viewing the work seems dated already. By the time I was finished watching, I was partially satisfied, but it seemed to me a series that belonged in the era of Carl Sagan and Cosmos; there was something sentimental, even MAGA-desperate about it, as if the snug-comfy middle class ‘folk’ possessed their own pensive nostagitations about an American past not coming back.  Like Joan Baez, I could see myself going back on a readerly tour with Papa, delving into his short stories, reliving his Paris years, learning over again the virtues of minimalism as a writer.  But it will never be the same. As Will Rogers used to say, Nothing is the way it used to be, and never was.

Anyway, I was happy enough that Part One, The Writer, featured Hemingway’s “lost generation” years in Paris, with several quotes from A Moveable Feast. It seemed appropriate to begin with the end, his memoir of those years in the City of Light. The first major essay I ever wrote, for my Lowell High School Honors English class, was a review of A Moveable Feast. (Lowell, let me wax: canals to rival Venice, the ghosts of textile mills still looming, home of Jack Kerouac, who was away at the time.) It was one of those classes led by a tight-seeming teacher with (a golden heart, probably a Catholic) who forced us all to memorize a short classic poem per week and stand up in front of the class to deliver it. Keats Odes on a; Ozymandias; what Beast crouches toward; Tiger! Tiger!; and Milton, alas, gone blind, working as a janitor, They also serve who only sweep and buff, he told himself.

A Moveable Feast was the saddest, deepest, most manly book I’d ever read. I felt lucky. While kids in normal English classes were grumping because they had to read A Patch of Blue (their teacher scolding for writing about Sidney Poitier’s looks, when he wasn’t in the book, although his image was on the cover, and reminding them that Mockingbird was up next, and that she was gonna scrub the dirt out of race relations come Hell or High Water — probably a Catholic (with a golden heart)). So yeah, sad, deep, manly. Witness to horrors. Bearer of unbearable secrets. Seer of symbols seen in bullfights, wars, marriage. Toro!

You could feel the world-weariness of Hemingway as he reminisced in A Moveable Feast, reminding me of Gregory Peck (I mean Harry Street) “feverishly” dying in a cot of gangrene, palliative care administered by the hot Susan Hayward, him recalling his even hotter romantic years with Ava Gardner in Paris (which recalled Rick’s remembered golden years in Paris with Ilsa, before the Nazis ruined everything, and also, she was married).  Burns and Novick, through signature stills and voice-overs and slow period tunes, do a pretty good job of aping A Moveable Feast’s end-of-career reminisces of a writer’s life. It’s a good, clean, well-lighted place to begin their narrative.

There are quite a few things I liked a lot about this series about memory and decay, history and its owners, positing meaning in the void we all face, writing and reading narratives.

I thought the PBS kulture-klatch duo did a reasonably good job representing the myriad places Hemingway had been for realz or vicariously, in no particular order: Kansas City, Toronto, London, Italy, Africa, Spain, Cuba, the Keys, Germany, Paris, Pamplona, and Ketchum, and so on.  A dizzying array — a moveable feast, indeed. All of these places represent a constellation of Hemingway’s cosmos, and as the series unfolds with all its nostalgic crenellations, you can almost see his special place lighting up the firmament. Of course, who looks at stars anymore, now that we have the Internet.

I especially enjoyed the Cuba sequences.  “Papa” seemed quite at home and productive at Finca Vigía, at first; it’s where he had all his African safari trophies, art works, papers, books, typewriter, cats, and the best years of his life with his women and kids (when they visited) were had.  He and journalist Martha Gelhorn, chased away Papa’s first wife, Pauline, and shacked up there together. Burns and Novick conjure up the couple’s dynamism together quite well; an often-rocky relationship between two headstrong, independent reader-writers of the world, whose views were counterpoint to each other.  Good sex, too, apparently, but not always living up to Papa’s needs from women. Ouch.

That brings up another fine depiction from Burns and Novick: The Warrior versus the Writer. It’s often true what they once said, He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Ask one of Hirohito’s grandkids.  But it’s also jocularly true that He who lives by the words, dies by the words. Every man kills the things that he loves, said Oscar Wilde, and then they gaoled him and paroled him to Paris where he died in a gutter, like some David Lynch version of Quasimodo. Over his career, Hemingway did his best to humanize the trauma soldiers were faced with on the battlefield — the horror, the horror, and then, if you got lucky, you got laid, preferably to your nurse, preferably with tits. But nobody really wants to be a warrior any more, except the psychopaths on drone patrol, clean cut kids fresh out of Full Metal Jacket Academy, and Cofer Blacks and his merciless mercenaries.

Sad to say, and it’s never raised in the series, Hemingway mayn’t have found a publisher for his war stories today. He may have ended that guy sweeping and buffing the high school floors after school, saying I also served, and muttering “small talk at the wall, while I’m in the hall,” as the Bard from Duluth sings — another Nobel laureate who might have become a janitor had he “burst on the scene” a decade later.  And this raises the Question of what it is we get out of watching a series about Hemingway today?  Who’s watching (gulp, meekly raises hand)? What can He possibly teach us?  We are so lapsed in our catholicism and romanticizing, so relativized by the shifty paradigm we live by, that the conceits of the well-off and smug, like many of the “supporters” of PBS, strike one as bourgeois fantasy at Fate’s end.

Still, we can probably rescue and fully appreciate the Hemingway style for its clarity, simplicity and almost journalistic “objectivity” that eschews (gesundheit) modifiers (subjectivity) for simple subject-predicate-object plank-hammering, as Hemingway put it, elegantly, I thought, Burns-Novick don’t linger long on it (unfortunately) but the section on Hemingway’s writerly beginnings at the Kansas City Star, were a trenchant and pure gaze at his male prose. We’re told by a no-bullshit narrator that the Star “was a pioneer in crisp, clear, immediate reporting,” and then they flash an image of the Star’s Style Sheet and it’s opening desiderata: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”  Sound advice, but, again, anachronistic in the Twitter-tweet age.

The Style Sheet is excellent advice for any newbie writer of any generation, I reckon.  I myself was so inspired starting out.  Get a load of this lede (actual): “The state budget fiasco is running out of time. Like rebels who’ve lost their cause, Senate and House leaders are rushing headlong toward the fiscal cliff, neither willing to give in, while towns and cities clutch each other like fearful siblings in the back seat.”  Some editors liked the front page piece above the fold, but I never got the statehouse beat I coveted.

The other thing that Burns-Novick merely mention is Hemingway’s very brief Nobel prize acceptance speech that, coming at the end of his career and not long from the end of his life, he so succinctly sums up the universal writerly life:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life…For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day…How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. [Listen to the full speech here.]

This still holds true, be ye Hemingway, Toni Morrison, or any global flavor-of-the-month writer.

But probably the best thing about how Burns and Novick put together the Hemingway story is the way they end it, after the reminisces of A Moveable Feast have finished and the book has been set aside, the unravelling of Hemingway’s life begins in earnest. Head traumas from crashes, bad hunting trips in Africa, another broken marriage, alienation from his children, the increasing loneliness of his time in his Ketchum cabin, and the loss of most of his material possessions in the Castro revolution that locks him out of Cuba and Finca Vigía. The Old Man and the Sea seems to tell all of this of going out beyond “where no one can help him,” and events, and memories, and desires are stripped from him piece-by-piece, until he’s just his old man with a gun to his own head. Burns and Novick did excellent job interweaving his last waltz of being.

But the series could have been better. Much better.  While the dynamic duo played up Hemingway’s relationships with women with reasonable balance, not letting the Big Fella off the hook for belting his women around when he got untethered, it was a narrative glimpse that seemed to pander exclusively to feminist concerns with his untenable masculine aggression. Perhaps a more productive way forward would have been a deeper dive into Gelhorn’s writing and journalism; they were writing competitors and we might have benefitted, in our understanding of each, if a brief compare/contrast of styles and focus had been displayed. For instance, they covered D-Day for Colliers, and that’s mentioned in the episode, but a comparison of texts might have deepened the analysis we’ve been provided by Nurns-Novick. Check out their D-Day stories for yourself: Hemingway’s “Voyage to Victory” and Gelhorn’s “The Wounded Come Home.” It’s worth noting here also that Gelhorm has a prestigious journalism award named after her. Mighta got a mention.

I feel that more review of Hemingway’s short stories could have been teased out for the viewer. There’s a reasonable set represented — “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Indian Camp” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” — each ca:rrying a weighty theme: courage/betrayal; the pain of birth and death; egotistical nostalgia, respectively. But to reach a new generation, it might have benefited us to know more about the differences in production between writing short fiction and novels.  But also, Burns-Novick might have said more about the early outdoorsy “nature” tales that make up much of the Nick Adams sequence. And “The Killers” is instructive of a fighter who won’t sell out (I assumed) and now waits in bed for the fight Furies to come for him. And, my favorite Hemingway story (sad, I know), “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” seems to need a way of coping with the nothingness (nada nada nada) that consumes us in the end and by which we may actually share a brotherhood of understanding.

Also, how could any production of Hemingway’s life and writings not emphasize the so-called Hemingway Hero — coded and stoical, absorbing the gut punches of reality and struggling to find its meaning and express it, exhibiting “grace under pressure.”  Why include it? We used to say we believed in this stuff.  That it was the very essence of what a Great Man was. Do we still believe this stuff? A fuller exploration of an answer might tell the viewer if Hemingway’s worth the read anymore, since so much of his simple prose, especially in his longer work, is a delivery system for his message, this Code.

Burns and Novick also provide some intriguing glimpses into the previously unknown interior of Hemingway’s feminine mystique. We’re teased with his early proclivities, brought on by an overbearing mother who would dress him the same as his sister. Apparently, cross-dressing and cross-sexual roleplaying was a quiet feature of his marriages.  Why bring this stuff in? I wondered.  No psychosexual analysis is forthcoming. We’re not force fed the notion that he was “over-compensating” and the lions he shot Burt Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, or any other twattle. I don’t know, felt like a gratuitous diss, a bone of contention thrown to dogmatic feminists to interrogate and un-man. Although, who could blame them if they waterboarded over Papa over the she-wanted-it story, “Up in Michigan.” (Burns-Novick do speak to the gender identity issue in an Esquire piece.)

Speaking of teaching Hemingway, no matter how you come down on his enduring value viv-a-vis American letters, he will continue to be taught to kids mostly indifferent (god help us, if girls saw any value in his portrayal of their realities) to his message and, these days, too hip to be square, to go with short, simple, clear prose — not if their tweets are any indication. Maybe we can take an emoji poll of the Great Men (and women too). Luckily, PBS, which wants to do its bit for MAGA for the middle class (MCMAGA), offers educators and students tools and kits and links and winks and excerpts and testimonials and maybe even multiple choice quizzes (I didn’t check).

Critics are beginning to tire of Ken Burns’ hold on PBS. Most of his detractors say that even though it’s quality stuff he puts out, other folks can do it too.  What Burns did with Jazz was cool, but maybe it’s not his story — it’s a version, but there are others, if the money’s made available. Recently, an NPR (PBS radio), as if to show it can do its own policing, ran a piece, “Filmmakers Call Out PBS For A Lack Of Diversity, Over-Reliance On Ken Burns.” A letter signed by many concerned filmmakers reads in part:

How many other ‘independent’ filmmakers have a decades-long exclusive relationship with a publicly-funded entity? Public television supporting this level of uninvestigated privilege is troubling not just for us as filmmakers but as tax-paying Americans.

It’s a good point.  Burns may have grown stale pushing Americana to viewers wealthy enough to write out checks at pledge time.  Not every public viewer is able to write a check.

The series can be streamed online for free at PBS: Hemingway.

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Arizona and Georgia have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. Each state is engaged in electoral fraud-making for the future — in full view of the nation.  They both want to ensure that voting in their states, especially for future presidential elections, is manipulable, that ways and means to recalculate votes is left to the discretion of the secretary of state, most likely to be Republican.

Until recently, the power of the secretary of state had eluded me.  Like most American voters, I had simply assumed that the system had two parts: popular vote and Electoral College.  They don’t necessarily work together. For instance, in 2000, Al Gore won the national popular vote against GW Bush, but he lost the Electoral College vote. (Had he won his home state of Tennessee, the Electoral College votes there would have gone to him instead of Bush and he’d have won the presidency.) On election night, the MSM, though it tallies individual state popular and electoral college voting, rarely provides insight into how individual states handle votes, of what counts as a valid vote, who determines validity, and what the number of votes tossed away are. Turns out this individual determination of vote validity is crucial in presidential elections.

I didn’t fully understand or appreciate the full significance of such state-by-state determination of vote counts until I read Greg Palast’s How Trump Stole 2020, which I reviewed several months before the election. Palast lays bare the What and How of voter disenfranchisement, and shows specifically how states have manipulated votes and helped determine who would win the presidential election since at least 2000.  How do they manipulate? By tossing votes away — literally and by “technicalities” that hardly ever hold up to scrutiny. During the 2016 presidential election, Palast reckons that, despite all the distractions about DNC hacking and FBI interference, Hillary Clinton won the election — not only the popular vote, but also the Electoral College vote had all the tossed votes, in swing states, been counted.

Palast has delineated the four key ways that votes get de-validated and not counted: stop registration; if they cancel anyway, then cancel their rego; prevent voters from getting to the polls; and, if all fails, then find a way to invalidate their vote (hanging chads, smudges, various anomalies). Palast says a favorite way of manipulating an election is dumping mail-in votes. In 2016, he says, more than 500,000 mail-in votes were tossed, overwhelmingly Democratic. Add in provisional votes lost, and millions of votes get tossed away by Republican-controlled states.

Some people will now disregard Palast’s findings because his prediction that Trump would steal the 2020 election didn’t come to pass.  But such reasoning is unsound.  If the Covid-19 pandemic hadn’t led to a massive move toward mail-in ballots, Trump would have won again, by the same purges. Because there was such MSM attention paid to mail-in votes this time around, watchful eyes were on those votes like never before. This vigilance intensified in August when Trump was accused of trying to use the US Postal service as a means to losing votes.  It’s almost ironic, but more pathetically dishonest, that the MSM almost universally declared the 2020 presidential election ‘the fairest, securest election ever.’  (Maybe they were just fucking with Trump and the language he uses.)  If it was fairer, it;s because they counted all the votes this time.

Despite the extra vigilance — incredibly! — Trump almost won the election anyway. He was within a couple of percentage points in four states — Georgia (.2%), Pennsylvania (1.2%), Wisconsin (.7%), and Arizona (.3%), and even Michigan (2.8% is recountable). See below:

Trump lost the recounts in these states.  But I can still recall sitting before the TV on election night watching with a grin as Trump’s leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania evaporated once votes from the counties around Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia came in. Places that ordinarily see votes (8-2 Blacks, as the networks reported) disappeared. Had it not been “the most secure, fairest election ever,” as Trump might have said had he won, many thousands of votes — mail-in and provisional — would not have been counted,  as usual, and Trump would have won re-election. This “usual” scenario is what helps explain why Trump was so upset with the results of some of these states. He thought that he had Georgia in the bag, which partially explains his call to the secretary of state after the election to have the state disqualify enough mail-in votes (11.7 thousand) to give him the edge.

Who knows, but maybe Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove put him up to it (he was with the Trump re-election campaign) and, according to Palast, back in 2012, Rove, a Fox analyst on election night, had been so indignant that Obama was about to win Ohio that he put in a call to the secretary of state’s office to throw votes. As Palast puts it in How Trump Stole 2020,

About 70% of Black voters in Ohio had cast their ballots on early voting days…Rove knew that these hundreds of thousands of Black early voters were not given regular ballots. Instead, they were all given ballots that could be disqualified. (p.158)

Mail-in ballots were handed to them, right there at the polling station in front of the voting machines (hooded). They were dumbfounded, but had to go on with it.

Palast heard about this ploy at the last moment and ran to a law professor he knew who immediately went to court to stop the disqualification of votes:

Turdblossom Rove knew…that if [Ohio secretary of state] Rusted disqualified about 20% of the early-voting “absentee” Black ballots on technical grounds, Rove would realize his last, best hope of defeating Obama …(Fritakis went to court, I went on air, and the mass disqualification of Ohio votes—which worked the trick in 2004—failed in 2012. (p. 164)

That’s right, 2004. Palast proved that John Kerry was robbed — of Ohio and the presidency — this same way in 2004. All Donald was doing in Georgia was asking for more of the same ol’ same thing. Back when the MSM couldn’t say it was “the most secure, fairest election ever.”

Given how close the Georgia count was in the 2020 presidential election, and the speed with which Trump’s request to find winning votes was leaked to the MSM, you might have thought the state would finally get its act together and legislate an end to the last minute manipulation of votes by Republican Machiavellian operatives. After all, Georgia was a laughing stock after governor Brian Kemp changed the rules for vote counting while he was still the secretary of state during the gubernatorial race. Kemp’s half-million voter purge not only benefited him, but also helped get Trump elected president in 2016. The pure chutzpah of Kemp’s purges was well-received:

And spread it did. Swing states that would decide the 2020 election—Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin— had done a “Kemp job” on their voter rolls. (p.23)

Hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from the rolls.

Recently, Georgia passed legislation (Senate Bill 202) that tightens, rather than loosens, restrictions on voting that, once again, affect Black voters far more than others.  New ID laws will make it more difficult for voters to register. Voting buses that helped alleviate the pressure of long lines will be reduced to emergency use only.  The so-called “souls to the polls” early voting scheme is reduced, leaving fewer hours of voting open.  All of the changes disproportionately affect poor, rural and minority voters. This is a form of doubling down on disenfranchisement. In addition, Bill 202 eliminates the secretary of state as overseer of the Election Board, a “move seen as revenge for Georgia Republicans against the current secretary of state, Mr. Raffensperger, who would not capitulate to Mr. Trump’s demands to overturn the results under a false banner of fraud.” And losing two Republican Senate seats to Democrats in run-offs in Georgia meant the loss of that chamber’s control.

Similar to Georgia’s reactionary response to Trump’s loss Arizona legislators have been finding it impossible to get through their stages of grief and move on.  A few days ago they ordered an audit of the November election results.  This audit goes around the Democrat secretary of state who oversees the state’s election board. They hired right-wingers from Florida, home of the rigged election, to oversee the recount. It’ll be costly and pointless, except to further erode confidence in the US electoral system. Almost certainly the recount is rigged — something awry will be found that will add weight to Trump’s charges that he was robbed, a feeling that could prove useful during next year’s  midterms and if Trump should decide to run again.

Arizona state senator Martin Quezada probably has it nailed when he tells the Guardian that the likely motivation for the limited audit (Maricopa county only) is to keep pressure up on pending legislation restricting mail-in ballots and requiring voter ID documents. Quezada says,

They want to justify all of the changes that they are already proposing to election laws because they need to have some sort of legitimacy behind it to justify the severe restrictions they’re hoping to put in place here. Every element of this audit, from the beginning, to the end, it just stinks to high hell.

The fight for the state’s 11 Electoral College votes has begun.

Another state that has been critical in the selection of president in the last few cycles is Wisconsin. Like Georgia and Ohio and other states following the Kemp Purge Scheme, the Republican-controlled Electoral Commission tried to have 69,000 voter registrations purged from the rolls, asserting that they had moved. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court nixed the idea. Though none of the 69. 000 voted in the recent presidential election, won by Joe Biden by 21,000 votes in Wisconsin, giving the commission the right to purge might have proved useful in the next election.

Lest the reader get the impression that all the bad doings are coming from the Republican side, and continuing with mini-survey of how states wield enormous power during the presidential elections that we remain largely unaware of, Palast draws our attention in How Trump Stole 2020 by providing a compelling case that California’s state secretary personally whacked Bernie’s candidacy and likely nomination for the Democratic front-runner position by arranging for the purge of thousands of young mostly Latino voters registered as independents and who preferred Tio Bernie to Joe Biden. Had Sanders won California’s primary race, he might very well have faced off against Trump, a thought that terrified more than one corporate Democrat. Palast writes,

No state—not Georgia, not Florida, not Ohio—comes even close, for sheer number of ballots disqualified, than The Golden State—thanks to the sticky fingers of its Democratic Secretary of State, Alex Padilla.

Who gets disqualified most? LatinX and university students.

During the California primary these LatinX and young voters overwhelmingly register as independent voters listed as No Party Preference (NPP). They are unwilling to join the Democratic party, writes Palast, and go along with its assigned nominee.  State Secretary Padilla  dealt with these would-be 5 million voters by sending them junk mail-looking postcards that “91% ignored.” Palast asks local official Paul Mitchell, a state statistician, who responds that it’s “Disenfranchisement by Postcard.”  Further, of those eligible NPP voters who show up at the polls to vote further shenanigans awaited. Poll workers would hand them normal ballots instead of “Crossover” ballots or give them a provisional ballot to fill in or tell them to simply write Bernie’s name in — all of these were grounds for disqualification of the ballot. In 2016, with Padilla purging the same voters, Palast estimated that 1.3 million independent voters had their ballot tossed. (p.242)

So, what does it all mean?  The Democrats will cheat to push a candidate of their corporate choice. They will never allow voters to vote truly independently or as socialists under the Democratic flag. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are private organizations with private rules, and not really beholding to public demands.  They are corporations like Coke and Pepsi, and tough doodles if you want to run as Dr. Pepper or 7 Up.  Ralph Nader and Howie Hawkins will always be seen by the Left as spoilers of votes — that should have gone thor way. The Right allowed a populist to take over the party with disastrous results. All in all, the message is that corruption abounds and there’s no apparent urgency to fix anything. We could use a Ralph Nader or even a Bernie Sanders right about now, but we seem content to stay corporate right to the cusp of Climate Change, after which they’ll never be democracy again. As it is, Freedom House, a non-profit organization that ranks the world’s democracies has the US dropping to the 83 on their list, now right there with Romania and Panama. Depressing.

E pluribus unum, out of many one, sounds good as a flute toot in a marching band, but we grow more and more fractured. California talks of seceding from itself (as only California could do). Texas is at it again with reminders of its Lone Star past and intimations of said same future. The Southern states, if the January 6th clown show is any indication, are getting ‘uppity’ again.  More like E anus plutobum these days — plutocrats talking shit out they ass.

Well, we can’t fix it if we can’t identify it. And as long as we allow the corporate MSM to massage our messaging (h/t Marshall McLuhan) we will continue to miss the reality of Coke versus Pepsi choices we make.  If activists can tune in to the problems at the state level we can address them in smaller practical steps….or we can just go the way of Estonia (ahead of us in the Freedom House rankings), which does all its voting online. Why not just throw in the towel, No Mas! and let Facebook or Twitter conduct the elections — instantaneous results for an immediate gratification society. You can vote from the toilet. It’ll be like a bowel movement.

The reader is strongly urged to read Greg Palast’s How Trump Stole 2020. The process he describes so clearly and entertainingly is on-going , and relevant to the moves legislators in Georgia and Arizona have made recently to make it easier for Republicans to steal future elections. If Palast’s easy prose is still too cumbersome for you, you can read the Ted Rall comic book inserted into How Trump, which is a graphic version of his spirited words. Both are free from the Palast site.  Here’s How Trump Stole 2020 and here’s Ted Rall’s How to Steal an Election.

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If you find Earth boring, just the same old same place, sign up for Outer Spaceways Incorporated…

– Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (1973)

Earth Day!

Recently I read an article in one of my favorite alternatives to the MSM, Business Insider, “Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have profound visions for humanity’s future in space. Here’s how the billionaires’ goals compare.” As the title suggests, the two billionaires, when not fucking around with gadgetry and automation and the realignment of democracy on Earth, have their minds entangled in ideas of space colonization and exploitation. The article details the differences in their goals and approach.

Elon Musk scares me. Something doesn’t smell right.  Maybe it’s the pigs he’s implanting mind control devices in that bothers me; the oinkers shitting themselves as Musk keeps their eyes open — ala Clockwork Orange — and forces them to watch the animated Animal Farm film and choose between Napoleon and Snowball. Fascism or Socialism. Supplementary feed is up for grabs. No time to wallow in the mud.

After watching that snippet, do you feel like having a banana smoothie? Bad enough the shite wants to mess with the porkers, but he reckons that humans will be ready for implants sometime next year. Check it out:

Can we have any doubt that he’s mad? You’ll be able to recognize these new age pig people by their snorkel sounds, of course, but also look for bald spots on top of their heads.

Musk will be looking for volunteers to get implants. *Sigh*  It recalls the crazy thing that happened when he ‘put it out there’ that he was seeking people willing to strap into one of his rockets and go on a one-way trip to Mars. That’s right, one-way. I almost lost my cookies when I read that 80,000 people signed up for the suicide mission.  It disturbed me the way it does when I think that Americans have 400,000,000 guns at their disposal — that’s a lot of unprocessed anxiety waiting to explode.  But it got worse, because I stopped counting one-wayers to Mars at that figure. However, a more recent tally indicates that 202,586 sorry souls  put their hands up. WTF?

Jeff Bezos is another one.  This guy.  Don’t get me started. It still stings that I gave up torrenting books and dutifully purchased Kindle books, grew a nifty little library that made me feel warm inside for words, only to discover that all those mofo books I “purchased” were actually rentals. I was leasing them. No notice. On their site the button says “Buy Now.” But you’re leasing them. I deleted my account to Amazon, thinking the heck with them, I have my library and won’t “buy” more from them. But, no, it turns out my Kindle reader needs to sync with mother ship once in a while or the books become unopenable. I wrote about it. I was angry. Still am.

He followed that up by announcing he’d be working with the CIA (and other intels) to set up web services, which immediately called into question what he might do with Amazon buyer data.  Would he turn off — quite cooperatively — the habits of lefties and dissidents?  Then he tried to bury an ax in Hachette’s head.

Then getting that Power rush, he went head to head with Pierre Omidyar in a bidding war for the purchase of The Washington Post. He won, and Omidyar settled for establishing The Intercept with Glenn Greenwald (and company). This battle between the two probably has future implications, besides news, as Omidyar owns eBay (and recently purchased Paypal), and is Amazon’s main competition (most of A’s sales are other-than-books). Bezos has a non-democratic mindset.  Doesn’t want to pay taxes, in exchange for jobs that people complain they are poorly treated at. During the recent Union stoush in Georgia, some workers were complaining that delivery drivers had to pee and poop in bottles and bags (presumably brown bags), insinuating that Bezos wasn’t providing rest time.

And the fudrucker got even crazier rich during the current pandemic. He’s so evil-seeming that I wouldn’t put it past him if he – not the Chinese, as Rudy “Where Are My Keys?” Giuliani says – was responsible for the Covid-19 outbreak. I’m told by normally reliable sources that his ex-wife didn’t particularly like him much either – his shlong wasn’t as effective as he claimed it would be — although, she signed a non-disclosure statement, so…

All of that is prologue to Bezos’s crazy schemes for space colonization. Bezos is developing his own line of rockets called Blue Origin.  The main thing he wants to do is the sensible thing and put a permanent base on the moon as a staging platform for deeper interstellar travel and the colonization of Mars. That’s what I’d do, too, if I could pull out a wad and finance it like that (snaps fingers). Long term, in development long after he’s gone. (Of course, Bezos will probably want to change the image of the moon we see at night to his image. Shlong in the sky.) But the main stick in my craw regarding Bezos’s plans is his intention of putting bedroom colonies in near space, orbiting Earth. Gated communities in the heavens?  Or maybe he’ll go low-ball and settle for Motel 6s, a place for losers on their way to Mars to tuck in for the night before the hard yakka ahead. Or maybe Air BnBs. I could see that too. Thing is, WaPo’s motto is: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”  Do you see the same problem I do?

I Zoomed with a guy recently (I’m not proud of it), Al Globus, a former contractor (now retired) for the Nasa Ames Research Centre in California. I wanted to follow up on a Daily Mail piece that he starred in as an expert on future space colonization.  In the piece, Globus said of such a settlement that “It would be a place to live, raise your kids, where your friends and family have Thanksgiving dinner and celebrate Christmas, and visit Earth on vacation.”  He said that it would be resemble the twisty, wormhole-informed landscape of the film Interstellar. In the Zoom session he reiterated that that was the kind of scenario he had in mind.  And in case I was wobbling in my thinking, he added that it could be a place where “the rich go get away.”  Uh-huh.  I was unimpressed, but a Gizmodo piece seems to hint that we just need to change our attitude and presto – Space Barrios R Us. Hmph.

And I asked, What about space debris? Wouldn’t be kind of like the movie Gravity, high velocity items pinging and puncturing our capsule? Rattlingly unreassuring, he affirmed that such debris would be a problem, relating tales of astronauts caught up in the hijinks of near-destruction. But, Globus insisted, things would be fine if they place the colonies over the equator. Mumble Jumble, cookies and cream. I changed the subject and grew alienated when he said he hated one of my favorite films, Silent Running, about a guy that, as I recall, found himself traveling Out There One Way with a spaceship-sized terrarium of marijuana. Little Enya, Grateful Dead, you’re golden. You definitely wouldn’t throw stones in that glass house, you might think, stoned. Getting paranoid, you might wonder what would happen if the hot house turned into Little Shop of Horrors and started yelling “Feed Me.”  Anyway, Globus went on, praising Musk, and my mind, such as it is these days, drifted.

That’s outer space.  You wanna go inward we got that feckin Facebook wonk to worry about. What’s his name. Eisenberg? No. Mark Zuckerberg. Knucklehead, or what?  He wants to control inner space, the real final frontier. His is a future of algorithmically-driven hivemindedness that toys with “our” desires and turns us all into Truman Shows – together. Real scary shit.  The film, The Social Dilemma, really plays up the dangers of us all losing our fucking minds together, our thinking literally controlled by motherzuckers who play with us like Doctors Phibeses or the cover of that Mario Puzo book. Shhh.

If you wanted to push the idea, and I do, you could see how They want to colonize our minds the way they did the West Indies.  Sending in thought conquistadores to occupy Broca’s Brain, go all terra nullius in attitude (I don’t see no lease, they’ll whine, when dining doesn’t work). Maybe the rich and famous would go on vacation among my fantasies, my Sophia Loren porn stash – she and I together in Dong Quixote: The Windmills Were Only the Beginning, and stuff. Or maybe it could get self-referential and they attend a TED-like talk that my sophist mind delivers to them, as they bask under artificial sunlight nursing pina coladas.

This last notion is probably a silly over-reaction I had to another crazy Silicon nutjob, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who so detested Julian Assange and what he stood for – all laid out in his tome, The Empire of the Mind, later changed to The New Digital Age.  On the positive side, you have to give Schmidt credit for the expanse of his imagination, but, then, he has the leisure time.  But some of his predictions and desires are daft.  He predicts that, one day, “everyone” will have a personal robot. Uh, I don’t think so. There are currently 8 billion people on the planet and the mind buckles trying to imagine such nincompoopery.  Billions don’t have a pot to piss Christ into, let alone room for robots who just look at them stupidly all day and finally say, “I already swept around the hut.”

And these guys like to support each other’s fantasies, Schmidt exudes emollients over Bezos ideating:

As for life’s small daily tasks, [Amazon’s] information systems will streamline many of them for people living in those countries, such as integrated clothing machines (washing, drying, folding, pressing and sorting) that keep an inventory of clean clothes and algorithmically suggest outfits based on the user’s daily schedule. [emphasis added]

Will robots tell us when to change our underwear?

Another fantasy Schmidt conjures up is the holograph machine that can transport you to other milieus.  His sales pitch: “Worried your kids are becoming spoiled? Have them spend some time wandering around the Dharavi slum in Mumbai.”

In the film, The Illustrated Man, an uppercrust couple buys a hologram device for their two kids, who use it to “go to” the Africa Savanah, where they hang out with lions, introject their predatory natures, and, when the couple try to take it away from the kids (think COD or Grand Theft Auto), the kids lure their parents into the, uh, den.  Just their clothing left and a satisfied purr. Check it out:

If only the Schmidt kids, and other rich Silicon Valley holograph-owning kids, could lure their parents in. Wouldn’t it be awesome to see the look on Eric Schmidt’s face when the Mumbai kids sized him up, rolled him, and tossed into the ancient Ganges?

Okay, maybe I’ve gone a little too far (I doubt it though) in rubbishing these billionaires with the money to continue their adolescent sci-fi/erector set fantasies and totally block out the rest of humanity, or, at least, the 99%, by building edifices to their egos.  But still, I recall what Schmidt said, in criticism, of Julian Assange’s decision-making when it came to exposing the lies of State and its corporate assets:

Why is it Julian Assange, specifically, who gets to decide what information is relevant to the public interest? [and] what happens if the person who makes such decisions is willing to accept indisputable harm to innocents as a consequence of his disclosures?

Well, same question to you, Mr. Emperor of the Mind.  Same to all the slick Silicon Valley churls who do little to alleviate the pain and suffering of the truly needy, and who already suspect that End Times are nearing because they are making weaselly getaway plans, buying houses away from the global fray that’s ahead in places like New Zealand. New Zealand, Outer Space, let’s send them packing to Alpha Centauri.

Happy Earth Day!

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“I am moved by these swaggering bodies, dressed in their Checkpoint Zipolite finest, walking to houses that look only seven feet high. I envy the ardor in their gait, a lack of hurry, as if by walking they possess a piece of the earth… I want to be these men.”

– Emmanuel Iduma, A Stranger’s Pose (2018)

Last year I reviewed Belén Fernández’s Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World, a travelogue that details her one-way flight from America in 2003 after being unable to cope with patriotic fervor and embracing of the national security state that overtook a traumatized America in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. She was sure Americans had been hoodwinked by neo-fascists. In Exile, she wrote,

Lest folks start to view the state itself as public enemy number one, however, more convenient menaces are regularly trotted out. In addition to the usual domestic suspects—blacks, poor people, immigrants, and so on—the wider world has proved fertile terrain for the manufacture of any number of freedom-imperiling demons.

After eight years of self-exile, the contributing editor for Jacobin still feels the same way.

Now moving toward the 20th anniversary of the near-freefall tumbling of Twin Towers and the nanny state well-and-truly keeping us “safe” with algorithms and keywords typed, Fernández (born in the USA) still feels the same way. From 2003 to the present her travels have included Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, Southeast Asia, and Central America. She’s a blogger, an editor and a journalist; and she has a finely tuned ironic sensitivity that picks up on the many quirks and foibles of humans at work or play wherever she goes. In Beirut, she’s acerbically noted government incompetence and the simultaneous rise of the nouveau riche; in Turkey, she and Amelia, a friend from Poland, are chased around near the Black Sea by a drunken, frisky Turk looking for some ‘tang; from a seaside cafe in Italy, she’s seen refugees “allowed to drown” in the sea over her cafe au lait.

In her new book Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place, Fernández’s ongoing quest to “find the world” brings her to Oaxaca and Playa Zipolite, Mexico’s only legal nudist community. It’s March 2020, things are looking up for her, when — WHAM — Covid-19 forces the community to go into a kind of quarantine and she can’t leave for six months. Worse, the local police are chasing bathers off the beach and setting checkpoints. When you come to a place where you’re supposed to let it all hang out, and you’re forced to practice sana distancia and retreat indoors to introvert against your will, you soon become stir crazy and full of anxiety. Although it doesn’t stop Belén from “traipsing” around her apartment nude, not that the reader found a reason to complain, reading is a performance after all.

Fernández had been in El Salvador prior to arriving in Mexico and early on she takes the time to remind the reader of “the Salvadoran civil war of 1980-92 killed upwards of seventy-five thousand people, with the vast majority of lethal violence committed by the U.S.-backed rightwing military and allied paramilitary outfits and death squads,” summing it up with the macabre naming of the airport after the Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, whose “critiques of right-wing atrocities and the injustices of capitalism had gotten him assassinated.” So they named an airport after him? Why not something more appropriate — like, say, a soccer stadium? Imagine if they renamed every airport after someone done by a death squad. Flying from martyr to martyr. Better than a Che Tee.

Fernández is a jogger, having noteworthily jogged around “mortar shell scars” in Sarajevo in festive bunchy clothing in her previous book, but tells of hobbling around at the beginning of this journey, as the result of having been bitten by a dog. Ouch. In Zipolite she lives in a small flat not far from the famous beach. She hooks up there with Marwan, a Palestinian-Lebanese friend, who recalls her itinerant jack-of-all-trades lover, Hassan, from Exile. Marwan arrives on “the ides of March” just as the announcement of “an impending Jornada Nacional de la Sana Distancia” is coming out on the radio:

A coronavirus cumbia that would quickly come to inundate radio waves similarly endowed the pandemic with a semi-festive air, with its upbeat reminders to frequently wash hands and use disinfectant because “es muy efectivo.”

Festive, no masks, but not much nudity either. The two set up, fully clothed, on the beach with wine. Fernández is up to her old tricks — getting shitfaced by the sea.

The first quirky encounter of what will prove to be an endless string of poco loco ways occurs when a police officer

arrived on an all-terrain vehicle to inquire if Marwan was the person who had just drowned. Given Marwan’s lack of Spanish, I had replied, as one does: ‘But he’s not even wet,’ and the policeman … moved on to interrogate the next person.

Fernández recalls that she’s known Marwan “since May 25, 2013, the date easily rememberable as it was the thirteenth anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon after twenty-two years of military occupation.” Marwan was barred from going to the Gaza Strip, where his mother lived; “his uncle, a top intelligence aide to Yasser

Arafat, had been assassinated by the Mossad in Paris in 1992.” Soon, before a quarantine can lock him in, Marwan is on his way back to his studies in Lebanon, leaving our leisurely lush alone to make do with the locals.

This allows Fernández to reflect on the name of the beach — la playa de a muerte (the beach of death) — in itself an interesting name for a strip of sand covered, ordinarily, by buttered buttocks and backsides, face-down folks on blankets listening to cumbia. She decides to go for a swim:

I was thus mercifully without spectators as I marched into the ocean and looked up to find what was not so much a wave as a supernatural wall of water bearing down on me. In the manner of a cartoon character that remains suspended in midair before realizing they’ve run off a cliff and plunging accordingly, I felt time stop just long enough for me to contemplate the magnitude of my imbecility before being hurtled backward with a force heretofore never imagined.

She gets smashed onto the beach, crawls to her comfort blanket and vat of wine, Funny stuff.

But that’s not all. She begins reading a book (she’s always got a book). Now she’s reading Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman. Goldman tells her,

“Zipolite is called la Playa de la Muerte because every year there are so many fatalities there.” I downed the rest of my vat and wondered if I was really still alive.

This is typical Fernández. and you want to be with her in this moment of need.

Her writing is energetic, engaging, loquacious. Probably she’s a Yerba mate junkie, having traveled the world with kilos of it ‘crammed in” her suitcases; and from Zipolite she will make checkpoint defying excursions out there to find more; “a beverage critical to my existence.” Mate (pronounced like the Aussie all-purpose equalizer) or cimarrón (“barbarian”) is a hot beverage derived from the leaves of a Holly species. Usually served in gourd and sipped with a specialized straw. One must be careful not to pronounce it with an accent, as maté means “I killed.” But, as she says, she can’t live without it.

Fernández discovered that she’s a collector. Maybe an eccentric. A water tap problem sees her buying plastic buckets at a local store, and it goes from there:

I purchased two plastic buckets, one green and one pink, for a total of three dollars, an act that unforeseeably unleashed an obsessive-compulsive bucket-buying habit. I bought a bucket to wash clothes; I bought another to wash the Turkish Airlines blanket. I bought yet another to wash cleaning rags. I bought a blue bucket and a purple bucket to give to a neighbor, but then kept them because they were pretty. I bought buckets to carry fruit and vegetables, and buckets to store water for whenever there was none or I didn’t feel like spending half my life washing a fork under the tap.

If this weren’t odd enough, she travels the world with a collection of plastic bags she’s gathered as she goes.

Zipolite was a legendary getaway destination for “hippies” in the 70s. And it continues to draw the backpacker crowd into its “thatched roof huts, cabins, hammocks” and Fernández points out the many nationalities, including Americans and Canadians who come there to forget that they are gringos. Fernández herself recognizes the daft irony of coming to a place like Zipolite as a privileged foreigner looking to culturally slum it with Mexicans. Her self-consciousness allows her to feel like a “super gringa” and realize that “I was also well aware that having a nervous breakdown over being stuck on a pristine Pacific beach was rather less than charming in a world of actual problems.” She’s American, but not “like the woman whose life I ruined by taking too long to pay at the convenience store and who entered into an apoplectic fit in the way that only Americans know how.” She’s definitely not ugly.

She takes the time to indirectly compare Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) to Donald Trump, noting his inconsistency regarding the wearing of masks against Covid-19. His hugging and kissing and general shirking of social distancing alarms some and makes others feel that the whole pandemic thing is a hoax. He leads the news:

As media reports of his counter-social distancing measures spiked, AMLO took the opportunity at a news conference to display the amulets he said were protecting him from the virus. A studious avoider of face masks, the Mexican leader would eventually commit in late July to donning a mask and ceasing to speak only when corruption had been eradicated in the country, i.e., presumably not prior to the self-destruction of the human race.

And some believe AMLO was all too willing to go to Washington to seal the NAFTA 2 deal.

NAFTA was bad enough for Mexicans, Fernández muses, despite what Trump says to the contrary. She tells us that “Diabetes and obesity levels soared, ultimately putting Mexico and the U.S. neck-and-neck for the title of world’s most obese population and, now, increasing the risk of COVID mortality.” For a moment, this factoid presents a different image to the mind of the naked bodies lolling on the nudie beach — pods of beached whales that the voracious sea gods have rejected. She ponders Coca-Cola: “Coca-Cola is so ubiquitously present—and effectively pushed down people’s throats by relentless advertising campaigns—that one is liable to conclude it’s the national beverage.” Evidently, when that TV ad featuring hillside children singing “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” came on, locals bought, maybe thinking the beverage still contained cocaine, like in its early days (Coca — get it?). Probably that hillside lot is all dead now from diabetes brought on by too much Real Thing.

Not long after Marwan leaves, “checkpoints began popping up everywhere.” This proves triggering for Fernández, as she recalls their blighty effect in Beirut and the “fluctuating arrangement of police, soldiers, cement barricades, barbed wire, and other obstacles to drive home the point that this is a militarized border between haves and have-nots.” But, she adds that “the Israelis take the cake for checkpoint-based criminalization. The military checkpoint is a pillar of Israel’s repertoire of techniques for Making Life Hell for Palestinians.” But, except for at the US-Mexico border, checkpoints are not really a cozy fit for the culture, especially in Oaxaca, home of the nude beach.

Her lifestyle changes abruptly when soldiers decide to erect a checkpoint right outside her door, so that she literally has to pass through them on the way to chores or heading for the beach. She begins to feel somewhat uncomfortable going around the flat naked. On the other hand, she notes, “Granted, there were various perks to the checkpoint arrangement, like

the time I needed a jar of hot sauce opened, or a wasp slain—a feat requiring two policemen, one civilian, and a frisbee—or a coconut whacked with a machete.

Plenty of Johnnies on the spot, if she needed them.

Fernández is bummed when Zipolite implements its Quédate en casa policy. Although, along with mask-wearing, staying at home is only casually observed. It’s a loose community, and doesn’t intend on allowing the virus to shake its laid-back. But the cops, being cops, do try to inject a sense of gravity to the situations. She writes,

Even the beach itself was transformed from a venue of psychological escape into a reminder of captivity when it was temporarily decided that sand and sea were closed for coronavirus and that soldiers and police would be tasked with chasing everyone off, while simultaneously photographing their chasing-off efforts for publicity purposes.

Ay caramba! Reminds one that the only one, other than Peeping Tom (who paid for it), who saw the fleshy Lady Godiva on her steaming steed were the security guards leading her through town. Ay caramba! what a world.

What might have been a tale about a blogger quarantined in paradise against her will, because she starts to get antsy about being stuck there (indeed, as her 6-month visa draws closer to expiry her fear grows that she may be “deported” from Mexico to the US, in a kind of reverse-migration process), becomes a tale of characters. Fernández likes people and, even in our jaded age of relativism, it acts as a pick-me-up tonic to know that there are people out there like Belén are tickled by the characters they meet up with. I could picture her on Steinbeck’s Cannery Row brown-bagging with the winos one minute, hearing their tales of woe and what-might-have been, and the next highbrowing it with Doc and teasing out his natural socialism. Maybe sleeping with him, if I felt like performing the scene that way as a reader.

The tone and energy of Checkpoint Zipolite picks considerably up when she comes across Javier, “a diminutive near-septuagenarian sporting a modified mullet and old red undershirt, who, installed in a plastic chair by the water, remained unmoved by the exhortations of the forces of law and order.” It doesn’t take her long to discover that he’s grateful for everything, as if he, too, like some latter day Candide, lived in the best of all possible worlds. As their days together take on a pattern, she notes,

Javier’s gratitude became ever more immense in accordance with mezcal and marijuana consumption, and he would spend much of the night saluting the stars, moon, and sea—to which he committedly referred in its feminine form, la mar.

But unlike Candide, Javier won’t put up with any shit from anyone: “Javier explained good-naturedly that, while he understood that the cops were simply doing their job, both they and the coronavirus could chingar a su madre.” This is a man you can spend many hours getting faced with.

They became good pals quickly, he almost teary at times: “Javier would dispense gracias upon gracias for bringing to mind memories he hadn’t thought of in decades.” He tells her of a soccer career he put aside for mushrooms; he tells of a time his car flipped on the highway and he was rescued by a woman (“an angel”) waiting at a bus stop. She writes,

The same buoyant optimism applied to his recounting of other episodes, such as the one in which he had sustained a severe head injury falling off a Zipolite rooftop while urinating in the middle of the night.

Suddenly, and welcomely, we’re at the edge of a lapping magical realism, sticking in our toe.

Their conversations run the gamut from anecdotes and pedestrian chit chat to more feisty exchanges on politics and economics. In a world of limited fight-or-flight, Fernández has shown her mettle by running (what are you gonna do, she’s a jogger and blogger), but the cadgy old Javier thinks he’s fucking Santa Ana. She writes,

Now, the coronavirus constituted another opportunity for human improvement, and Javier foresaw the cultivation of a better, more just and equitable post-pandemic world that was not managed by hijos de la chingada, although it annoyed him when I asked for the details of how maladies like capitalism and climate change were to be suddenly rectified when capitalism thrived on mass suffering in the first place. Sometimes, his annoyance would abate, and he would admit that our sitting and staring at the sea was perhaps not the most hands-on approach to revolution.

It’s another sobering reality they face together, and it’s endearing. Javier is the star of her show.

Later, she meets up with other characters of delight and her observations; shtick continues. After Javier finally leaves the scene, returning home, hundreds of kilometers a way to his sociologist wife, the dramatic tension rescues the narrative in the form of an earthquake. Fernández commences the day: “At 10:29, I had been settling into my chair in the corner for some article-writing, congratulating myself on having resisted the temptation to have wine for breakfast—a clear sign I was getting my life in order.” Her flat rumbles, she runs to the door, sees the power lines sparking, police mobilizing, and she stands there playing “the role of Gringa in Doorway Having Flashbacks to TV Coverage of Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004.” Suddenly, a quiet morning becomes Dylan’s “Black Diamond Bay.” Good stuff. Then she’s off to higher ground and reminiscing about tsunamis she has seen, earthquakes that almost swallowed her, hurricanes to die for.

One of the really wonderful things about Fernández’s writing, aside from its mirth and ironic observation, is its humanity. Early on she considers the Emmanuel Iduma (quote above) about the mosque men, but adds to it, touchingly, “This is pretty much the story of my life—except that, not only do I want to be the Mauritanian mosque men, I want to be everyone everywhere at all times.”

While Checkpoint Zipolite is a travelogue, not a memoir, so more radiant with character and place than heavy with rumination on the human condition, Fernández brings a vibrancy to her gringa-hood that lacks the despondency you’d expect from one who has “rejected” American Exceptionalism and been on the road for almost 20 years. She doesn’t rue it; in fact, she brings what’s best about liberated Americans — freedom of thought and an ease dealing with the Other. She is the Other, who, as she says, wants to be “everyone everywhere at all times.” Special stuff.

Her travel writings can be further accessed at her blog: BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ

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Now that Derek Chauvin has closed out his defense of killing George Floyd by invoking his Constitutionally-protected right against self-incrimination — the Fifth Amendment — we who still care about such things can shake our heads at the farcical injustice that has framed this case, and all the other cases involving unnecessary police force protected by the Supreme Court’s gift to fascists, known as Qualified Immunity.

Cops like Chauvin are vigilantes with badges, but without the white sheets. (Recall, if you will, that many of the folks under those KKK cloaks were ‘respectable’ members of the community — cops, judges, smiths, bartends, etc.) They’ve been guaranteed that, if they snuff the life of a fellow citizen, they will get their day in court. With a virtual guarantee of getting off the charge if they can successfully invoke Qualified Immunity.

It’s this stark contrast of legal entitlements, this notion that you’re nothing at the hands of these flag-waving monsters, while they enjoy the privilege of protection, involving their Constitutional rights, that flat out rattles and enrages. And when you discover that there’s no remedy — that they can kill, steal your property, and piss on your cat — and you can’t pursue them criminally or civilly, and that little to no internal review of their actions will occur, then you have a right to wonder if America operates as a democracy under the rule of law anymore, and if it hasn’t reached, after “ a long train of abuses and usurpations,” that place in the Preamble to the Declaration where it is our “right” and “duty” to “throw off such government.”

In Above the Law: How “Qualified Immunity” Protects Violent Police, ice cream magnate and activist Ben Cohen serves up an unwaffling cone of Wiggly Piggly with jimmies, taking its place somewhere between Cherry Garcia and Chips Happen. In 150 pages of well-selected spoon-sized samples of police abuse dipped in QI nuttery, and explanations of how police are gaming and shaming the Constitutional protections meant to make us all equal before the law. Because, when it comes right down to it, Cohen demonstrates, Qualified Immunity (QI) is not only evil as a police protection against ‘frivolous lawsuits’ but absurdly illogical — circular Catch-22 “rules” apply that make it impossible to battle in court, and thus, a guarantee that QI abuses will continue, and, left unchecked, will foster the already fascist leanings of law enforcement in America.

Above the Law has multiple authors — victims, cops and lawyers– and is broken up into about 20 short chapters of incidents and anecdotes and court decisions and remedies. It’s quick-paced, well-edited, and educational. The intelligent reader will find it cogent, reasonable and offering actions that can be supported or accomplished — writing a letter to specific members of Congress to address QI, for instance. You can read the book in a couple of hours, get all fired up with principles, and get the letter off to Congress on the same day.

In the Foreword to Above the Law, rapper Michael Render (“Killer Mike”) provides an excellent emotional overview of the events at hand. It’s helpful to recall, with him, his reaction to hearing on the news the take-down of George Floyd, yet another Black man in America at the hands (and, in this case, the knee) of the police. Render remembers,

Looking back on that night, I know that a part of me wanted to watch the world burn, as well. A part of me wondered if it wouldn’t be better than the alternative, of living in a world like this one, where every day it seems I am waking up to watch another Black person die.

Black or white, most non-MAGA Americans can relate to this sentiment. It shouldn’t be happening in a democracy watched over by the rule of law that has been with us since the Magna Carta, and allowed humans to leave the Dark Ages behind and enter the Enlightenment. QI is a backslide.

QI is some crazy shit. You’re not sure you even understand as you’re reading about it, because you start thinking you must be mental when you just don’t get it. That’s the Catch-22 effect. There is no getting it. It’s a gobbledygoo olio of legalese and illogic — like some lampoon of lefty linguistics. With QI, you can only sue or convict a cop if you can prove a precedent had been set. As Ben Cohen writes,

Instead of considering whether a person’s civil rights have been violated, courts shut their eyes to whether a crime has been committed and look only to see if there has been a past conviction of a police officer for doing the exact same thing. Otherwise, it gets thrown out of court.

But this is an impossible hurdle to get over for a plaintiff. Cohen continues,

If you can only bring a case to trial if there’s already been a precedent for an exactly identical case, how do you create a new precedent? You can’t. In legal jargon, the law is “frozen.

Frozen Wiggly Piggly with jimmies.

Cohen,and others repeatedly point out that Qualified Immunity is at, at heart, not a police procedural issue but a Constitutional crisis waiting to happen. The three branches of government — Judiciary, Executive, Legislative — are meant to act as checks and balances to each others’s powers. In 1871, following a few years of former slave states trying to re-enslave African-Americans using “sheriffs,” Congress passed the Civil Rights Act (14th Amendment) to address such injustice and disguised criminality by making it a federal cause, overriding states that wanted to re-enslave despite the outcome of the Civil War.

In a chapter titled, “A Perverse Irony,” Ben Cohen explains the Problem and the Solution:

In 1871, shortly after the end of the United States Civil War, Congress recognized a growing crisis for post-slavery Reconstruction: police and other public servants were discriminating against and brutalizing Black people. To address it, Congress passed a series of laws that came to be known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts—a reference to the fact that many of those police and public servants were members of the Klan. Officially titled the Civil Rights Act of 1871, the law provides that a person who was discriminated against or brutalized could sue the public employee who broke the law by violating their rights.

Thus, the racial profiling connected to QI is, at the least, a throwback to the slaver days. In this context, a cop might see George Floyd as ‘uppity’ instead of merely a suspect in an alleged counterfeiting transaction at a convenience store.

It opens up other old wounds, too, resentments and festering mindsets that came when Abraham Lincoln signed the executive order, known as the Emancipation Proclamation, in September 1862, after the Civil War had begun. Most Americans have signed on to the idea (because it’s what they teach us in grade school) that Abe freed the slaves. But, unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Lincoln’s executive orders, including the Proclamation, were reversible by the next president (think: Biden reversing Trump’s orders on Day 1). But perhaps more germane to the current QI problem is that the Proclamation was seriously flawed. It only applied to Southern slave states; Northern states with slavery were unaffected. Look at the map below that delineates this discrepancy:

As Richard Hofstadter noted, the Proclamation was ridiculed because it only applied to slave states still in secessionist rebellion at the time, border slave states, such Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Abe’s home state, Kentucky, were exempted by the Proclamation (Striner, 2006). One can imagine how such an arrangement led to resentment at federal powers, and how QI, administered state by state, could be tough to eliminate and require federal intervention.

Above the Law details illegal and sometimes absurd searches and seizures of property, gross violations of civil rights, brutal arrests — often mistakes or overreactions. This is the same stuff that was going on at the end of the Civil War that the 14th Amendment (and the 8th Amendment) was meant to address and eliminate. Victims could seek redress against such behaviors, both criminal and civil. But Cohen notes that the Supreme Court led the way in eroding the protections guaranteed by the Amendment:

…in a series of decisions from 1967 to 1982, the Supreme Court gutted the Ku Klux Klan Act by creating out of whole cloth the legal defense of qualified immunity…Instead of considering whether a person’s civil rights have been violated, courts shut their eyes to whether a crime has been committed and look only to see if there has been a past conviction of a police officer for doing the exact same thing. Otherwise, it gets thrown out of court.

.But establishing such precedents is circular and absurd; cops walk, smiling.

Above the Law provides one example after another of the legal inanity that protects police. In “Surrendering While Black,” silliness prevails. Alexander Baxter, a homeless Black man, was caught in a B&E and cornered in the basement by police, a K9 dog circling him. He sat there with his arms raised in surrender. “Then, without warning, the officer sicced the dog on him” and dog ripped at Baxter’s armpits leading to his being rushed to a hospital. Baxter sued. Such an incident involving police releasing their dog had happened before:

But at trial, the judge ruled that since in the previous case the suspect had surrendered by lying down, and Alexander had surrendered by sitting on the ground with his hands up, that the cases were not similar enough. So the judge invoked qualified immunity and let the cops off scot-free.

It turns out that such absurdity is not an isolated case. It’s baked in.

In another case, “School Drop Off,” a 33-year old Malaika Brooks, pregnant and with a child strapped in the back seat, was pulled over for a minor traffic incident and handed a ticket that she was told by the cop to “sign.” When she refused repeated attempts to get her to sign (neither a requirement or violation of a law), the cop called for back-up and hell broke loose. She refused to get out of the car:

In less than a minute, the cops tased Malaika three times, sending 50,000 volts into her thigh, arm, and neck. They gave her no time between tasings to reconsider her actions or agree to get out of the car.

Then they dragged her out of the car, put her face down and arrested her. Malaika sued and won, but the decision was reversed on appeal, the judge allowing QI. No precedent.

In “Sleeping While Black,” Luke Stewart is apparently sleeping off intoxication, car parked legally, when cops come upon him sleeping, open the door without identifying themselves as cops, and, after Luke panics and begins to engage the engine, gets tased, punched in the face and, finally, shot a few times. Bam: The Big Sleep. His mother sued the cops for civil rights violations, but the judge “accepted [the intruding Officer] Rhodes’ claim that he was justified in killing Stewart because he feared for his life — in case Stewart crashed the car or kidnapped him.” QI.

In “Search and Steal,” we read of Micah Jessop and Brittan Ashjian being served a warrant by police to search their business premises. Surprised, because dumbfounded, they stepped aside while police ransacked their space looking, ostensibly, for evidence of money laundering and illegal gambling. The two weren’t charged, but:

The cops claimed they seized $50,000. But according to Micah and Brittan, the cops took $151,380 in cash and another $125,000 in rare and valuable coins. Micah and Brittan filed a complaint with the city, but they never got their money back.

The cops pocketed the money. The pair sued the cops, but a judge sided with them, preposterously giving them QI, which overrode any question of their criminality in taking the money. Brittan said after the trial,

“This is upsetting to know that if the police have a search warrant that’s valid, they could steal your things and you don’t have the ability to pursue it.” Indeed.

In “Broken Home,” Shaniz West is the victim of a WTF incident. She came home with her kids in tow to find cops surrounding her house, looking for her wanted boyfriend. She handed them the keys and went off while searched:

But the cops didn’t use the keys. They called in a SWAT team, who bombarded the house with tear gas canisters. They shattered windows, kicked in the back door, and ransacked the house. They tore through every room, smashing appliances, overturning furniture, knocking holes in the walls and the ceiling, and leaving behind toxic tear-gas residue all over Shaniz’s family’s possessions.

They utterly destroyed the innards of her home. No sign of the boyfriend inside the wall. WEst sued and lost, but “Since there was no previous case in which officers were found guilty of the exact same offense, the court granted them qualified immunity.”

On and on it goes, story after story, until your punch drunk from the police abuses. It’s like watching a fight where an aggressive boxer repeatedly punches his Black opponent below the belt in his constitutionally protected hairy walnuts. Ouch. And the referee warns the victim for the infraction. You double-take. You go huuunh? And the crowd stands in awe. And the ref shugs, “Den’s da roos.” By the time you read this review chances are there’ll be another Black Man Down.

Eliminating QI also has the support of many law enforcement officers. Toward the end of the book, Cohen brings in a retired cop (of 35 years) to refute the notion that

if the doctrine [of QI] is eliminated to the point where there is no threshold and every case goes forward, police officers will start to hang back and avoid risky situations, even if it means criminal behavior goes unchallenged…Yes, law enforcement will always have some “bad apples” for whom all the training in the world will not turn them into “good cops,” but continuing to afford them the protection of qualified immunity for their egregiously wrong actions is antithetical to the rebuilding of community trust that is so badly needed at this time.

The more the incidents pile up, the more we head toward a violent confrontation with the State.

Recently, the Washington Post ran a piece on police shootings in the US that graphically details both the steady rise of shootings and drawing the conclusion that “Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than White Americans.” It’s not simply a left illusion:

There’s a lot of insurrectionist fervor afoot today in America. On January 6, the nation got a taste of MAGA bizarro patriotism from the right (I guess: I mean they were co-opting Bob Marley songs; Proud Boys is named after a fuckin Disney tune; QAnon — Synanon Village full of queers (in the old sense, you know oddcuts and misfits)?). Had it been antifa (as Trump was trying to push) or, God help us, Black Lives Matter, there would have been blood and peaceful demonstrators would have been mowed down like cole slaw, to quote the Rifleman. It makes your hair stand up like Kramer’s because there’s talk that this virtual clown show assault could result in tighter domestic security allowing cops to have their way with us even more.

Cohen provides an excellent summary of the Derek Chauvin trial — the incident, the charges, and the stakes for the national community — on his ice cream website, where he maintains a blog of he and Jerry’s social causes. He urges action to end QI. He provides information for whom contact. Afterward, gather a bunch of like-minded buds and go find a Ben and Jerry’s joint and lick that Wiggly Piggly right out of existence (but eschew the fascist jimmies, would be my reco).

Finally, Cohen tells the reader:

“All royalties from this book go to the Campaign to End Qualified Immunity. To learn more or to make a donation, visit our website at campaigntoendqualifiedimmunity.org”

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