Il est Trumplandia: No quarter given

With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.  -- William Lloyd Garrison

I should have taken that bet with Kenny Rose, a former colleague at U of L who I shared office space with in the basement. I should have taken the bet, but I didn't want some messed karmic consequence for calling the election a year ahead.

I should have that kind of luck with the horses.

Back when people -- mainly centrist liberals and conservatives --  were insisting that Donald Trump could never win a presidential election I pointed out that national elections are, for the most part, popularity contests. I also pointed out that Trump had made a career of selling everything from overpriced real estate to himself.

Still, I was told: it would never happen.

Well, we're here now, working on how to move forward in this, the Grand Republic of Trumplandia.

I have friends, comrades, and former colleagues who have taken to the streets today in Washington,

From Reuters

D.C. I wonder why I'm not there with them. When I'm being honest, I'm not sure I have much faith in the actual impact of street protests. I do believe that direct action works best, and sometimes that many require taking to the streets.  For me, though, the work is here. I don't know what kind of impact I could have on the street in D.C.  I do know what kind of things there are here in River City to do. We have our own little fascistas here. We have people who will be targeted by them after being emboldened by a new President who cares nothing for already targeted communities. We have mountains and trees and already polluted rivers that will need stewardship in the wake of President Trump's disdain for climate change science.

We have the poor. We have the homeless. There are battles here.

And if the early reports are true and Trump intends to eliminate The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, then I really have work to do.

And so does everyone else who writes, who plays music, who creates art of any kind. The work is wherever you are.

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America in retrograde: of Ali and the Orlando Massacre

Our currency is flesh and bone. - Pink Floyd, Dogs of War

Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even. -- Muhammad Ali

“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.”-- Edward Gibbon, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

Burial of the Dead after Wounded Knee, 1890, in South Dakota

One of the wonders of this, our technological age, is that a person doesn't even have to be six feet under before the armchair historians will offer their pronouncements.* Sitting at the neighborhood watering hole I frequent and talking to another one of the regulars, I could barely contain my frustration. Muhammad Ali was dead, his funeral -- which the city of Louisville treated like his last great title fight -- was planned, and local gas stations took the opportunity to raise the price just in time for the influx of people coming into River City to show The Champ their respects. The political and cultural opportunists on all sides had already dug into their positions to lay claim to the dead boxer's voice, legacy, and life.  

Personally, I can think of no worse a fate for a man who spent his life making sure his voice was

clearly understood in spite of his industry's and the media's attempts to handle him.  But that wasn't my frustration, really. While I recognize Ali as a talented boxer and a cultural icon, I don't have the same sort of personal connection that many who are Louisville natives have.

My frustration? Racism masking itself as Patriotic indignation. For every person calling Ali a hero, for every person who signed that impromptu, well-intended, and, I can only assume, ill-thought out petition to replace the University of Louisville's memorial to the Confederate Dead** and erect a Muhammad Ali statue (that I can only assume would resemble slightly the statue of Rocky Balboa*** that still stands in Philadelphia) in it's place, there are, of course, all the angry old (white) guys who insist on calling him a draft dodger and a bigot.

I tried to point out that when Ali refused to present himself for the draft during the Vietnam War, that was he eventually stripped of his title and served four years in prison. His reasons for refusing were moral and ethical ones, and were based on figures that were accurate. There were a large number of blacks serving as canon fodder in the war effort, just as there were a predominately large number of poor people -- black, white, brown, what-have-you -- who were cannon fodder in a misdirected war against global communism.  The regular I was talking to -- someone I usually talk about all the normal things people talk about in bars^ -- pointed out that Ali's tour probably would have not been in the jungle.

"They'd have taken his picture. He'd box a few matches, get his picture taken, and probably would have been stationed in Germany."

"So he would have been a PR tool,"

"Exactly!" 

 "Which probably would have been used to recruit more young black men to serve in far, more dangerous details in a war he was morally and ethically opposed to."

The conversation eventually moved on to how the Roman empire was toppled by sex (his view) and how Democracy, "like Communism, is a good idea on paper." But I'll come back to this conversation at a later date for another blog post.

I will comment on those who called him a bigot, thought. Ali joined the Nation of Islam -- a Black Nationalist religious organization, not to be confused with actual Islam. I don't know if that made him a bigot. The Nation did not, like the KKK (to which some people try and compare it) string people up for sport and take pictures of their burned, eviscerated, raped, and sodomized corpses the way hunters pose with their kills. The Nation probably DID have Malcolm X killed. But he actually did something -- he spoke what he saw as an evolving truth... much in same way Ali did through the course of his life. I don't know if he was a bigot. I don't believe, like some of the more granola loving pundits do, that he "transcended race." To suggest that entirely co-opts his struggles, his mistakes, and his triumphs into a weak and untenable ideological standard -- and in doing so, erases it. Bigotry is as much a response to a situation as it is a learned habit. I really hate idiots. So there. I guess I might be a bigot, too.

In the realm of death manipulated for by political and cultural pundits, the 50 deaths at Pulse in Orlando over the weekend has once again gotten the NRA crowd and those who want to see fewer guns on the street marshaling their forces and organizing full on meme wars for the hearts, minds, and digital device memories of the American people.

The NRA has gotten pretty good at shifting the conversation away from the fact that guns that shoot more bullets faster do, in fact, tend to result in higher casualties. This is the truth of war, and any kid who grew up playing Risk^^ knows that.  There is a faction of the Democratic Party, and liberals^^^ in general, that have gotten pretty good at shifting the conversation away from the fact that the 2nd Amendment can be interpreted a couple different ways depending whether you're a strict constructionist or not, while avoiding the central problem of having the government monitor or limit access to what are arguably unnecessary weapons^^^ -- that such a system would leave all the really dangerous guns in the hands of the people who have racked up more dead bodies than a Death Race 2000 reboot*:

the United States Government.

People are understandably outraged. We should always be outraged when violence rips apart people's lives.  What we need to be careful of, however, is falling back on simple solutions for what are complex issues. Everyone having a gun all the time is not a solution. No one having any is not one either.

Violence is a part of human nature. The earliest examples of law was meant to restrict and penalize this impulse. Law -- new laws, old laws -- will only do so much, and I am unconvinced that a change in law will bring forth the necessary change in our cultural consciousness.  Denying that we have the capacity for violence by claiming we have evolved because we have cell phones and electric cars and don't have to eat meat if we don't want to is delusional. Denying that we will never cease being violent creatures driven by our most basic needs and therefore need a tighter yoke to keep us in line is where totalitarianism finds root and grows, using whatever ism happens to be in vogue at the time.

How we respond to this violence will determine how future violence plays out -- because we are far from that utopian dream of a peaceful world. Besides the fact that humans are violent by nature -- or we still wouldn't be here -- the other fact at play is that as long as violence pays out in money and in power, we will never come to terms with our violent nature.

As it's an election year, of course all politicians of note are laying claim to the narrative being spun around the death of 50 people who only wanted to have a good time in a place they felt safe enough to be themselves. Ever the astute showman and salesman, Generalissimo Trump had to step his fat foot in it early:

Of course, the other megalomaniac got hers in, too, now that she conveniently supports marriage equity.

As I write, they are still identifying the dead. Their families are being notified. The carnage is far from cleaned up, although the larger narrative, with all of it's plot twists and Choose-Your-Own* Moral of the story is being polished to a shit shine that might even inspire Gov. Matt Bevin like plain old chihuahua shit apparently does.

And even as public officials and families work to identify the victims of this massacre, their deaths are being used by both sides to scare their armies into one battle or another.  Flags are at half mast again. We are mourning our fallen brothers and sisters in live CNN time... until the next tragedy.

At some point we will realize our entire lives are being filled with death, with violence, with fear. At some point we will decide to move beyond all of this and advance. At some point we will let our dead be dead.

Or, the tyrants will take over. And then it won't matter because we'll be too tired, too exhausted, too demoralized to notice that there aren't any flags anymore, and that the number of dead is too high to be accurately counted.
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*Armchair Historians: those who, based solely on their life experience, act as if they understand all of human history. I suppose Google (or Bing) helps, too.
** See here, on UofL's own page about it. As a student of history, I think it's important to remember all of it. All I seem to hear from the apologists for leaving this statue where is, however, are cries and denouncements that liberals are trying to erase history -- usually spoken within the same two or three breaths that compare indentured servitude to chattel slavery, followed by the statement that African tribes often raided and sold neighboring and enemy tribes to sell them into slavery -- while conveniently letting the white slaver traders and the American economic system that depended on slave labor off the hook. After all, they were just trying to earn a living... and it wasn't ILLEGAL... right? Were American History taught as it actually happened, these apologists would not be so fired up about not revising it. The truth is they want the sanitized version we were taught to be the story -- not the blood, the bones, and the crimes against humanity, upon which all civilizations are built.
*** Proof that movie studios need to pay more for garbage pick up, and Philadelphia needs a better relationship with the Teamsters.
^ Sports, Politics, and the Downfall of Western Civilization. Not always in that order. 
^^For those who were born after the technological age: Risk was a kick ass board game in which you learned world domination.
^^^ Clintonian "New Democrats", or Republican Lite. Neoliberal (Friedman economics) sensibilities spiced up with JFK, MLK, and Gandhi quotes. Think of it as grand larceny, but they say please and thank you. And SMILE, BITCH, SMILE.
*With any luck, this won't happen. But then again... Amazon Prime needs a new show.
** There used to be a series of what would now be called YA books called "Choose Your Own Adventure." You read up to a plot point, and then were given a series of options with corresponding page numbers to turn to.  Sort of like Mad Libs*** for fiction.
*** Ah, forget about it. Google it if you want to know. 




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Every Man’s a VIP [For the Old Man]

At first I didn’t recognize him. Riley saw me at DeQuincy’s bar just as I was starting my second beer. When he said my name, the tone reminded me of the way people used to talk to me when I was a kid. The way other kids used to talk to me. I didn’t like it back then, either. The last time I remembered him talking to me was when he sat across the aisle from me in Mrs. Gorskey’s sophomore English class. He kept failing his writing assignments. I told him to borrow essays from old copies of The Reader’s Digest.

“Is that what you do?”

It wasn’t. I actually wrote mine; but I wasn’t going to tell him that or he’d try and get me to write his too. “Trust me,” I said. “She’ll never know the difference.”

She never did. Neither did he.

Riley sat on the empty stool next to me like we were long lost friends. “Shit, man,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “How the hell are ya? You living around here now?”

“For about two years. You?”

“Ten years,” he answered. “Off and on.”

The bartender came over and Riley ordered a beer. “So what’s it been?” he asked after his beer arrived.

“Twenty years.”

“Well shit,” he said, raising his glass in a toast. “It’s good to see somebody from the old hometown.”

“Yeah.” I raised my glass, too, though for no particular reason. “You ever go back?” I asked.

He nodded. “I went back once, for about six months. I hated it. You?”

“I haven’t lived there since I graduated high school.”

“I hear you’re a big college professor now.”

He heard? Who the fuck does he talk to? Who do I talk to?

“I WAS a college instructor. Now I’m a full time bar stool warmer.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, well, the hours are better and the general company is not so full of bullshit.”

“Politics,” he answered.

“And economics,” I said. “It’s one of those ‘We’re all in this together’ scenarios…”

“… where you’re the one who gets fucked.” he finished.

“Well said.”

He smiled. “I’m familiar with that.”

I looked at him. I shuffled through the card catalog in my mind trying to remember something about him. He moved slowly and deliberately, lifting the glass to his mouth. His head was shaved and he’d put on weight. There was a squareness to his jaw that suggested he’d gone the military route. Even chinless wonders end up, somehow, looking more Greco-roman when they get out of the military. “Didn’t you go into the military?”

“Yup. The Army.”

That’s right, I thought. I was getting a clearer picture of who he was back then. Used to come into school wearing camos and black boots. He even shaved his head to look like a grunt. That was back during the first Gulf War. I’d met a few guys who came back from that one; some of them in bars. A few of them had been students at the same time I was – using the GI Bill to try and figure out how to get back into regular life. Most of them seemed to adjust ok. A few didn’t. Some came back with health problems they didn’t go there with.

“I stayed in,” he said.
“
Cool.”

He shrugged and laughed a short, bitter laugh. “I guess so.”

“Did you end up going back to Iraq this time around?”

He shook his head. “Afghanistan,” he said.

“You’re a pretty lucky guy, then,” I said.

“I guess so. Lucky.”

His beer was empty, so I bought him another one. We talked some more. I found out how he’d heard about me. His sister’s kid had my mom for homeroom last year. “Apparently she talks about you all the time,” Riley said. “She must be proud of you.”

“She leaves a lot out,” I said.

“It’s gotta be kind of nice, though,” he said. “Maybe she’s just proud that you followed in her footsteps.”

No. Actually she always wanted me to be a lawyer. I shrugged. “Moms,” I said.

“I hear ya.”

We drank and talked and drank and talked. We traded off rounds. Had a couple of shots. We talked about people from home – where they were the last time we’d heard of them. Who was married. Who was divorced. Who had kids. Who found religion.

“I seem to remember that YOU were pretty religious back in the day,” he remarked.

“I guess.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he went on. “You used to carry your bible and shit to school.”

“I remember.”

“So what happened?”

I shrugged. “It passed.”

“It passed? What do you mean, ‘It passed’?”

Like gas. Like the flu. I shrugged and drained my beer. “I reached the age of common sense,” I said. That made me think about what my mom had told me. That college had ruined me. Exact words. Ruined. It was time to change the subject. “Are you still in the army?”

He snorted. “No.”

“What happened? I didn’t think they were letting anybody out.”

“They didn’t want to let me out,” he said. “Tried to stop-loss my ass.”

I’d heard the term. There are two things you can count on in academic circles: that new terminology is dissected to the point of meaninglessness and political issues are discussed with the same intensity as the importance of poetic metaphor in literature.

“So what happened?”

“I let them the first time,” he said. “They sent me back to Afghanistan. I led a convoy unit. When my bit was up, they wanted to do it again. So I told them to shove it up their ass.”

“That couldn’t have gone well.”

“When I didn’t report, they arrested me. I spent a year in prison and was dishonorably discharged.”

“They didn’t consider all the years you put in?”

He smiled. It was almost sardonic. “Sure they did. That’s why I only got a year.”

“Oh.”

“They talk the talk about respecting service and those who serve. But really all they really say is ‘What have you done for me lately?’”

That sounded a little familiar. I bought him another beer. “That sucks. So what are you doing now?”

“I was working construction. Then the real estate collapse happened. So now I’m drawing unemployment and sleeping on a buddy’s couch.”

“You really told them to shove it up their ass?”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

His face darkened a little. The lines became harder, more defined. “I also told them I was tired of watching kids get blown to hell. I told them they either needed to let us fight or get us the fuck out.”

“They couldn’t have handled that very well.”

He snorted. “Chain of command bullshit. Most of those guys haven’t seen action in YEARS, man. Fucking assholes. I bet their kids aren’t get blown up in the desert.”

Probably not.

We sat and drank and talked about other things. We talked about baseball and how much the Series sucked last year. We talked about not missing the snow, and about how the old hometown never really changes – how nothing ever really changes. The bar was starting to get crowded and happy hour was nearly over. He gave me a phone number.

“Give me a call,” he said. “We should do this again sometime.”

“Sure thing,” I said. “You know where to find me.”

He laughed as he stood up. “You better be careful,” he joked. “I might just take your stool out from under you.”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

We walked out together. Then he turned and shook my hand. I always fancied myself as having a firm hand shake; his nearly broke my fingers. “Take it easy,” he said.

“You too.”

“See you around.”

“Sure thing.”

He went off across the parking lot, heading west. When I was sure he was far enough away, I shook the life back into my fingers and headed towards the bus stop.