I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time in the iso-box 54 floors high, so my views might be skewed. (Heaviness alert)
It feels like these days are more confusing than any I can remember. So many of us are angry, dissatisfied, and not as active as we want to be. We feel the absolute passion to change the system, but it’s not as hopeful as earlier times that screamed for change.
The con-man-crook-scary narcissist is getting away with it. Joy and hope we crave are embedded in fear. It’s numbing to be flattened out by a steamroller.
The 90-minute Trump performance in the TV show (first debate) was absolute proof of who he is and how he sees everything exclusively in his own reality. He was a screen-monster who showed that he knows no limits. He also did what he does best: act on a TV show that he controls by any means possible. He doesn’t and can’t follow the rules, any rules. I was reminded of his performances as a billionaire with WWE and Wrestlemania on TV as preparation for the “debate” (Watch the last four minutes if nothing else).
He has shown no limits as President. He knows no limits or accepts no precedents. The 2020 election is more threatening than ever. Just as he and his people are masters at gaming the tax system, they’re as skilled at gaming elections. In 2016, they figured out how to succeed in the Electoral College by spending an enormous amount in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin because that’s where the electoral college votes were vulnerable. They figured out the only way they could win. It worked for a bunch of reasons, including some proven to be illegal. But he lost by more than three million votes! If you were looking at our system as an outside observer/consultant, you’d absolutely dump the Electoral College, establish term limits, and regulate the money candidates spend.
This time their game is different. It looks like the plan is in place for an army of lawyers to do whatever it takes to keep it all in court for as long as possible, courts that are now Trumped up. It might work, even if he loses the popular vote again.
His leadership has done enormous damage to everybody in the world, except for a few clubhouses full of b/millionaires. Four more years of it would be globally toxic in ways and places we can’t imagine. Nobody could have convinced me or the majority of Americans in 2016 that he really was going to preside over an ideological and operational takeover that would jeopardize progress and our very lives. The worst part is that his people know what they’re doing. Their agenda is not about values or what helps ordinary people. It’s all about him. And power. His sickness has made the whole country polluted.
Say Her Name!
Breonna Taylor went from a local and uninvestigated Louisville police killing story to an indelible place in history. In downtown Louisville, it has been 120 and counting days of protest to honor her life, insisting on charging the three police who shot her be charged with murder. Wonderful reporting by ZZ Packer appeared in the New Yorker online last week: The Empty Facts of the Breonna Taylor Decision.
In part it reads:
Breonna Taylor got no notice whatsoever for doing no crime whatsoever. To be given notice, you’d have to be considered deserving of notice, important enough to be notified. She’d served her country, her state, her city, and her adopted home town of Louisville, Kentucky, as an E.M.T.
She was a mentor to her friends, her sister—even her own mother, who wrote, after the verdict, “You didn’t just rob me and my family you robbed the world of a queen. A queen willing to do a job that most of us could never stomach; a queen willing to build up anyone around her. A queen who was starting to pave her path. I hope you never know the pain of knowing your child is in need of help and you’re not able to get to them. I hope you never know the sounds of hearing someone crying and begging to get your child help and those cries be ignored. I hope you never know the pain of your child being murdered 194 days in a row!”
Breonna Taylor. A queen willing to do a job that most of us could never stomach. But what if she hadn’t served as an essential worker, or been so wonderful? What if she hadn’t been as ebullient and bubbly and as amazing as everyone says? What if she hadn’t done a single thing but breathe in and out, long enough to stay alive and to live out the rest of her days?
And my bottom line: What if she had been white?
Conspiracy in the Digital World
The word has taken on new meaning now that so much of how stuff works is defined by social media. Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Who is the wolf? Why can they get away with it? Why do the rest of us care?
We care because THEY are winning. In the old days, it wasn’t a visible conspiracy—it was the way the system worked. Now, it’s on a completely different level, an ever-expanding digital social disease. Algorithms are pushing it all into what might be irretrievable and essentially unexamined territory of unwitting mega-consuming.
This is exposed and explained in Social Dilemma, the two-hour 2020 Netflix documentary-drama by Jeff Orlowski. The drama part doesn’t do much explaining. Reminds me of an update of Encyclopedia Britannica movies we use to see in school as kids. Just tune it out. It’s not our family, not our world.
But the documentary part is stunning, a must-watch. Young and thoughtful brains behind much of social media explain how it works and say it exists without caring about or understanding the big picture effects. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others were invented because they could be invented to exploit the massive amounts of data, inconceivable only a few years ago. I must admit that there’s a huge amount of everyday lives in the digital world of millions that I can’t begin to comprehend. Yeah, it’s my age. But, beyond that, it’s a runaway semi-conductor.
We see that social media platforms are powered by a surveillance-based business model designed to mine, manipulate, and extract our human experiences at any cost, causing a breakdown of our information ecosystem and shared sense of truth worldwide. This model is not built for us but built to exploit us.
Beyond buying stuff, the targeting capabilities give anyone with a motive the power and precision to influence us cheaply and with phenomenal ease. Governments of most countries are actively spreading disinformation to discredit political opponents, bury opposing views, and interfere in foreign affairs with ever-increasing disinformation campaigns.
From the movie, it’s clear that giant data ownership and sales to advertisers based on rock-solid systems of delivering to the right eyeballs and brainstems has earned a small number of people/companies countless billions.
It’s pervasive. Everything we do online is monitored, sliced, diced, and used by them. The whole thing is to sell stuff and create the overall environment of material culture, regardless of any mental, economic, or environmental side effects. We’re only beginning to understand what it means, not taking into account what it’s doing to us without factoring in the whys. Nothing has ever been as complex or as inescapable. Last century, we thought that TV and mass media were feeding and growing the monster consumption machine that was America, and then the world. We kind of understood it: they sold made stuff, advertised it, forced it into stores and people bought it. Corporations in all categories, including media, kept buying and merging with each other until only a few are left standing.
Now, the outsize scale of consolidation and power in the Facebook-Google-Amazon-YouTube-Twitter-Microsoft-Instagram is unprecedented. It’s not healthy for people or other living things.
Maybe in the mid-1920s, vast and practically unlimited wealth was created for the few while nearly everyone else was struggling. Then it all fell down. The pandemic of 1918-1920 (Spanish Flu or H1N1 virus) from which over 50 million people died worldwide was a lead-in to the Great Depression and it lasted until World War II. Some people who think about this stuff all the time are pointing out historical parallels now.
Too Heavy?
As I have in other editions, especially during the pandemic, the big stuff has gotten me going more than what I wish this House Organ could be. More fun and funny for you and me.
I started out thinking that the quote defining this month’s PY-O-MY would be pegged to:
We like our phones more than we like actual people
But that leads into a path that feels dark and uncontrollable and yes, heavy!
From the Bound Volumes
OK, here’s some wisdom from the original proprietor of the Weinberg House Organ. My dad, Lou Weinberg, cited a commentary by Eric Sevareid 60 years ago, just before the Nixon-Kennedy election of 1960. A sobering thought: I remember it. Calling it the first time middle managers had become the two candidates took on new meaning. The particulars are different, but some of it rings so true.
Many of us are uneasy about these men [Nixon and Kennedy] because they represent a clean break from the past and we have not yet adjusted…Perhaps what chiefly bothers me is that this should happen with my own age group. There were brilliant, strong, unorthodox individuals in great supply. They sweated to understand the new ideologies of facism and communism sweeping the world; they marched in peace parades; they sickened at the Republic Steel massacre of strikers; they got drunk and wept when the Spanish Republic went down; they dreamt beautiful and foolish dreams of the perfectability of man; cheered Roosevelt and adored the poor.
Yeesh. That’s something of a lament, too. Is it me or is it the biological and cultural shit we live in? Is it yearning for something better or being beset by age? Again, I protest: it’s not what I want to see and feel—it’s what we’ve been dealt at the moment. The way so many are dealing with COVID-19 defies common sense. Paying attention to the facts we know about the virus, it seems impossible that people are flocking to crowded public places, frequently without masks.
Raise Your Hand…
…if you know anything about Karen Bass.
She’s a five-term Congresswoman from Los Angeles, Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. As a state representative, she was the first African American speaker in any state legislature.
Republicans hate her. They call her a communist. I call her smart and tough.
It’s hard for me to disagree with almost every position she has taken.
I can’t think of a better person to succeed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House who will be 81 next March. Bass is 66.
Here Come the Judges!
Trump judges. Forever.
By my sketchy researcher’s reckoning, the Senate has voted and approved for lifetime appointments for 216 Federal Judges: two Supreme Court (as of this moment), 53 in Courts of Appeals, and 161 in District Courts.
I haven’t researched what percent are under 50. Or how they got to be selected. I wonder how it really works. Do these Republican uptight preservers of the status quo, primarily anti-abortion Trump-appointed judges, think and decide to be that way? Is it because of their principles and experience, or because they’re on a path to the next level as an ambitious lawyer-judge-politician?
Is it that the more they stand out as assholes, the more likely the assholes who tell the main asshole what to do to pick him (or a few hers)?
And while I’m venting about the damage that has been done in the last four years, think of all the restrictive, racist, and loss of personal liberty matters that have been done by all the assholes in all the parts of the government, not only in the courts. We got what we might’ve feared most from a cabinet of mainly billionaires: disregard for ordinary people/families and the worst of corporate-style payoffs and benefits to the wealthiest. If that sounds like Bernie, I guess there’s a reason.
Donald J. Trump is a rubber stamp for global gangs of pirates. Like Reagan, and GW Bush (less for the Bush I, Clinton and Obama) Trump only knows ANYTHING about anything of substance if he’s reading it from the teleprompter. Then he retains just enough of it to sprinkle into his diatribes.
One flaw in my mostly accusatorial beliefs is Franklin Valderrama who was approved by the Senate for the District Court here. He’s a Chicago Associate Cook County Circuit Court Judge who I wouldn’t expect to be on the list.
He was born in Panama, went to DePaul Law School was a partner in a local firm, and has been on the bench for three years. He’s the judge who ruled in favor of publicly releasing the video of the police killing LaQuan McDonald, where cops fired 16 shots into him lying on the street. Now, Judge Valderrama has been promoted to the Federal District Court.
How in the hell did that happen? The guy who turned unpopular Rahm Emanuel into an ex-mayor, appointed by Trump to the Federal bench. Small favors!
How Bad Is It?
OK, one more dark and dreary item. The cartoon is by Ron Cobb, who died last month. He was an American-Australian cartoonist, artist, and film designer, who worked on numerous major films including Dark Star, Star Wars, Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Conan the Barbarian, Back to the Future, The Abyss, and Total Recall. He was 83 and a design genius of his generation.
As almost always, the counterbalance to the gloom and doom is the kids. There’s no substitute for fresh minds and open joy in so many of their waking moments
I close quoting from dear Australian friend Russell Porter’s email this week:
“Let there be light at the end of the tunnel
that is not a freight train coming at us at high speed.”
And may the exciting explosive White Sox and José Abreu win a few more postseason games in this weird year.
Stay well and see light on the bright side of fall, despite all the heaviness of this edition.
PY-O-MY 