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The Long View

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Being an Optimist in the Long Run

Being an Optimist in the Long Run

As a student of history, I tend to be an optimist in the long run. It’s quite possible that the American people will take a generation or more to act upon discovering that they were being had by super wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations. By then, I and most of my friends will have passed on. But then, remember that all those old stupid white people inhabiting the Confederate States of America will all be gone, too. Some of the most annoying commentators on the political scene today, people such as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and and Ann Coulter will be seen as passé as the John Birch Society and Father Coughlin. (You do remember them, don’t you?)  And the Rand Pauls and Ted Cruzes of this world will either have been voted out of office or decided it was better to pursue power than ideological purity.

History is made up of large cycles. Ever since the end of World War Two, the United States has been in a “Let’s Go to War with People About Whom We Know Nothing” cycle. The list of our military incursions over the last sixty years would take several pages—though I’m tempted to try to list them one of these days, but after tax season. One of the things that will happen rather sooner than later is the realization that America is no longer viewed as “the City on the Hill” for all the world to look up to and follow. We will be just another large country thathas shamelessly squandered its power. By the way, that’s happening to Russia now. I think the Crimea will, in the long run, be a poisoned cookie for Putin.

I think I will read Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age, for a look at the last time we let rich and powerful individuals have their way. Then, too, there is Frank Norris’s The Octopus and Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood trilogy (The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic). It was the labor movement that put an end to much of that. Even though GOP stooges like Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, have done everything they could to destroy labor, I think it will be back again … but in the long run.

People my age have seen both worlds. It’s so depressing to straightline tendencies that we hate until they assume monstrous proportions, I would like to quote a GOP President whom I admire. Calvin Coolidge once said, “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.” You just have to be ready for the one that does.

 

The Pendulum Swings Both Ways

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The SCOTUS Retards: Thomas and Scalia

The SCOTUS Retards: Thomas and Scalia

Although I am by no means a Communist, I have a certain belief in dialectics. Somethings happens (THESIS), opposition emerges (ANTITHESIS), and finally some sort of compromise solution emerges (SYNTHESIS). With the McCutcheon vs. FEC case just concluded, the U.S. Supreme Court gives wealthy individuals the right to in effect donate as much money as they want to the party or issue of their choice through SuperPACs which redistribute the funds. Although they still cannot write a megacheck directly to a particular candidate, I’m sure that won’t be long in coming.

What the so-called 1% (actually, a much smaller percent that) don’t realize is the hatred and opposition they are sowing. The superwealthy and the corporate elite have succeeded in infiltrating and gutting a major political party’but not without hard feelings. The more they ride roughshod over the feelings of American voters, the more likely there is to be a reckoning of some sort to redress the balance. There will be no Thousand Year Reich for the likes of Sherman Adelson and the Koch Brothers. They may be at their apogee wight now in terms of influence, but angry crowds are massing in front of the Bastille, and with luck their efforts will be taken apart brick by brick.

I am convinced that many or perhaps even most viewers of the Faux News channel are aware that the fix is in and are just waiting for the right time to cast their vote.

At least, I hope so.

De Incommodis Senectutis

Old Man

Old Man

But even then, if anyone does reach old age, his heart weakens, his head shakes, his vigor wanes, his breath reeks, his face is wrinkled and his back bent, his eyes grow dim and his joints weak, his nose runs, his hair falls out, his hand trembles and he makes silly gestures, his teeth decay, and his ears get stopped with wax. He will believe anything and question nothing. He is stingy and greedy, gloomy, querulous, quick to speak, slow to listen, though by no means slow to anger. He praises the good old days and hates the present, curses modern times, lauds the past, sighs and frets, falls into a stupor, and gets sick. Hear what the poet says: Many discomforts surround an old man. But then the old cannot glory over the young any more than the young can scorn the old. For we are what they once were; and some day we will be what they are now.—Pope Innocent III, On the Misery of the Human Condition

Shaky Town

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The Aftermath of the 5.1 La HabraQuake

The Aftermath of the 5.1 La Habra Quake

In Citizens Band (CB) radio parlance, Los Angeles is called Shaky Town because of our earthquakes. It’s even in the C. W. McCall song “Convoy” that marked the apogee of the whole CB craze in the 1970s. (I suppose that’s marginally better than the truckers’ parlance for San Francisco: Gay Bay.)

We have been shaking often, but in a small way, ever since the quake swarm began a couple of weeks ago. The actual shaking was not great where we live, because we are some 25 miles from the epicenter, but there is always that sickening few seconds when you wonder whether the intensity is going to ramp up into something more devastating, like the 1971 Sylmar or 1994 Northridge catastrophes. But all that’s happened to me so far is that three or four books have fallen off their overcrowded shelves.

The activity has been along the La Puente Fault, which runs from downtown south and then east. I believe it’s the same fault that was in play for the 1987 Whittier Narrows quake, which I had the good fortune to miss because I was camping in New Mexico at the time. But because it touches downtown, the emergency officials are concerned it may knock down a skyscraper or two—maybe even City Hall.

There have been so many hundreds of aftershocks that I am beginning to think we dodged the bullet this time. When there are so many aftershocks, it’s unlikely any of them can be viewed as fore-shocks, or even five-shocks—or worse.