The lack of transparency, so prevalent in our unapologetic, commercial win-at-any-cost culture, is a bone crosswise in my throat.   It comes up again and again, from the secret “dark money” that decides our elections, to secret national killing policies, to toxic family relations rooted in shameful secrets, and it gets to me every time.   Shameful secrets shamefully kept usually create more shame, lack of trust and other serious ills.  Doubt this at your peril.   

Without transparency we do not have enough information to make informed decisions, our conversations are about what we suspect is the case, rather than what we can actually see and understand.  Without a truthful report of the actual, verifiable facts, all we know are the rumors we suspect are most likely true.  We then act accordingly.

I offer a petty but recent example to stand in for the damnable reflex toward opacity, which is also a reflex toward small-mindedness and obstinate certainty.   The certainty of the lynch mob.

A baseball player, born in Cuba, hits a home run off a top pitcher in the World Series.  The pitcher is of Japanese/Iranian ancestry and grew up in Japan.  The hitter circles the bases, gets back to the dugout, flushed and laughing, and, sitting on the bench makes a ‘racially insensitive gesture’ which instantly becomes national news and results in the player’s five game suspension (longer than the usual suspension if he’d literally charged the mound and tried to punch the pitcher in the face).   

After the game Yu Darvish, the pitcher who gave up the home run (and was knocked out of the big game not long after) and then was victimized again by racism, was surrounded by reporters after the game, under bright lights.  He had just pitched terribly in the biggest game of his career.   The reporters wanted to know how he was feeling about the racist gesture.   Through an interpreter he made an admirable reply, under great pressure:

“Including him and I, nobody’s perfect. Everybody’s different. We’ve just got to learn from it. He made a mistake, and we’ve just got to learn from it. We are all human beings. It’s just learn from it, and we’ve got to move forward.”

Remarkably mature comment, I thought, particularly under the pressure he was under at the moment.  The Cuban player apologized immediately, expressed great respect for Darvish, said he could never get a hit off him, regretted what he had done after the home run.  He released this statement:

I did a search to find a video of the racially insensitive gesture.  I found it immediately.  I had to scroll through the video to find the gesture, two talking heads were clucking at length over how terrible what we are about to see was.   As though they were preparing us for grainy footage of a klansman tying up a terrified child he was about to string up in a tree.   Trigger warning:  please be advised, what you are about to see may really, really hurt. 

Then, I saw it.

The player is on the bench, smiling from ear to ear, excited after his World Series home run.   He appears to be sitting by himself on the bench, there is no other player in the shot.  He turns his head, shakes his ridiculous hair-do, lifts his forefingers to the sides of his eyes, laughs.   The micro-gesture takes a nano-second, literally.   

Luckily, since this happened during an internationally televised sporting event, we have multiple camera angles and slow-motion so we can get a good long look.  Let’s slow it down and show it from the left, look, Bob, both hands.  He used both hands, yeah, you see that left forefinger?  Definitely a two handed racially motivated attack on the Japanese pitcher.  I did see that, Kyle, both hands, yeah, he used two hands, definitely.    The fingers didn’t actually touch the eyes, Bob, but you could see the intent there, clear as day, here, let’s see it from another angle.  Yep, it’s racially insensitive, all right, Oh my Lord, yes it is.

I watched as it was replayed several times in slow motion thinking “what the fuck?”   It was unlikely that Darvish, the intended victim, even saw the gesture, unless he was staring, unblinking, at the Houston bench instead of pitching.  The full mockery was done and over, based on the video which showed the same horrible gesture over and over, in the matter of perhaps three quarters of a second.   Then the mob of reporters investigate, put Darvish on the spot to act like a mensch after the worst outing in a big spot in his distinguished professional career, shelled and out of the game in less than two innings.   The new baseball commissioner later gets big praise for a prompt Solomonic decision:  the racially insensitive player will be suspended for five games, without pay, next season, but will be able to play the remainder of the World Series.   

I sent the video clip to a friend who wrote back, with characteristic slyness:

I was triggered by that gesture, so I’ve been in my safe space. I may come out tomorrow.

I sent the clip to another friend a few hours later.   He emailed me back that the clip was unavailable.  It had apparently been taken down by the copyright holder, or the account terminated by youTube, or both.   See for yourself.

So we are left, without the ability to judge the offensive act itself, with the instructive moral lesson that we do not tolerate racial insensitivity in our great nation.   Which, of course, is true, self-evident, in fact.  America is a land of exceptional equality where race is never a factor in anyone’s behavior.  The proof is our president, if you need proof.   Never a less racist person in that Oval Office, except, arguably, Woodrow Wilson, maybe. 

Seriously, how about we make the author of that racially insensitive gesture do a sincere public service announcement about how hurtful racism is, show it during baseball games.   The lost five games of salary that is part of his punishment, let’s put those tens of thousands of dollars to good use by donating it to an organization that fights racism.   How about something meaningful?  Instead of this pious fucking feel good bullshit.

Those Americans killed earlier this month in Niger, what’s the deal with them?  They are part of the now thousand American force initially placed in Niger as advisors in the War on TERROR by… oh, gosh, Barack Obama.   We never heard about that.   We never heard about the drone strikes in Yemen, until disloyal Americans like Jeremy Scahill investigated and revealed that American, not Yemeni, drones had launched those murderous, if mistaken, strikes.   How many countries are we doing that in?  Top secret, commie.  Campaign donors who give more than $5,000 to a political non-profit are granted anonymity in the exercise of their First Amendment right to political self-expression.  They’ve earned it.   

Well, we have to take our symbolic victories where we can.  Thankfully, that fucking racially insensitive Cuban motherfucker got what was coming to him.

NOTE:

Gurriel will lose $322,581 of his $12 million salary next year, which the Astros will donate to charitable causes. He also will be required to undergo sensitivity training during the offseason.

Darvish said he couldn’t decide whether Gurriel’s suspension was appropriate, but he said that he understood why commissioner Rob Manfred didn’t impose it during the World Series.

Darvish said a Dodgers employee informed him about Gurriel’s gesture, which was caught on television, after Game 3.

“I didn’t think it was going to be this big of a deal,” Darvish said. “But to me I wasn’t that frustrated at that point when I saw it the first time.”

source

This guy, Johann Hari, wrote an excellent, comprehensive and very readable book called Chasing The Scream, about the almost unimaginable horrors of the misguided century-long WAR ON DRUGS.  His book lays out what he learned about the nature of drug addiction and the best policies to help addicts.  He contrasts these successful programs with the endless War on Drugs which winds up killing addicts, and many others.   Here he delivers a talk that distills the book (which I highly recommend) into a smart 14:42.   

I got a kind solicitation from a bot/person recently who wrote, of a fairly incoherent first draft of an ambitious recent post on this blahg:  

Would it be OK if I cross-posted this article to WriterBeat.com? Therev is no fee; I’m simply trying to add more content diversity for our community and thought this was insightful. I’ll be sure to give you complete credit as the author. If “OK” please let me know via email.

I visited the site, and read this insightful piece:

How to debate the subject of inequality with liberals

Of all the issues that separate liberals from conservatives, I’d argue inequality is the one where the two sides are the furthest apart on.  Typically liberals vent about the pay of corporate CEOs or bankers and compare their salaries to minimum wage workers, teachers or anyone that gets paid less.  Then they advocate for higher taxes on the rich or higher minimum wages as the means to fix inequality.  Conservatives usually counter with something along the lines of “the free market should decide what we make for what we do.”  Many than add “In America we promise equal opportunity not equality of outcome.”

If you’re a conservative, never say something like that!

It’s impossible to have equal opportunity for all.  The rich will send their children to the best schools, their children will then exit without the burden of debt and be handed a good paying job from a successful relative.  In other words, opportunity to succeed for the wealthy is bound to be far superior to the opportunity of success for the poor.

My advice to all Republicans/conservatives is to embrace inequality as being something completely healthy and natural within any capitalist system.  Only under socialist governance is the liberal dream of equality possible and we all know what socialism does to economic growth.  Of course liberals will counter by saying that “inequality has gotten worse” but they’ll fail to count the increase in food stamps, unemployment, housing assistance, EITC payments.   But now we’re into the weeds, stick with the concept that equality isn’t something to be celebrated and there is no such thing as equality of opportunity.

Good point, avoid the specifics and stick to the fact that some people just have to be brutally fucked so that others can have obscene wealth in a society whose laws are written by their paid hacks.   Made me hope Ari isn’t Jewish, reading this, though, his name suggests otherwise.   We Jews have enough trouble being a light unto the nations without this kind of insight.  (I’m only glad he didn’t get paid for the article).

I’m also hoping the philanthropic Sackler motherfuckers who have profited so handsomely from the opioid addiction/overdose crisis are not Jewish.  I guess I may have to read the rest of this article. 

Oh fuck:

Arthur and his brothers, the children of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and Poland, grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression

Oy yoy yoy…

In 1997, Arthur was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, and a citation praised his achievement in “bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.” Allen Frances put it differently: “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.”

Americans, it is said, are like children when it comes to politics.   We are not really children, we are consumers continually sold snappy, brand-name products, including politicians.  We are marketed to around the clock, from the cradle to the grave, and our political system reflects this.  There are powerful reasons for this sad state of affairs.

I was often critical of President Barack Obama, a genius on the campaign trail, a perfect political product, a man I voted for twice.   I criticized him, in part, because I’ve been personally victimized, many times, by his compromise that left rabid corporate foxes in charge of the healthcare henhouse– not to mention many millions still uncovered by health insurance, and the tens of thousands who continue to die preventable deaths each year in the wealthiest nation on earth.   

Obama, like all presidents, did many bad things, quietly, as he gave inspiring speeches about our values.   Tragically, he lulled much of progressive America to sleep with his beautiful oratory, giving stirring speeches that often directly contradicted his actions; like when he told the correspondents at the annual dinner that they had been his partners in transparency, in keeping American democracy well-informed and robust.   We know, if we look at all, that Obama’s administration was not transparent; it was as opaque as the secretive, aptly named, Dick Cheney’s.   

That said, Obama was one of the better presidents of my lifetime, perhaps the best, sad to say.  A friend with a brilliant talent for argument beat me down thoroughly in a long comparison of the presidents of our lifetime.  He drove the point home.  Sure, Obama did some fucked up, inexcusable things; massive secret “signature strike” drone killing in multiple countries, repeated use of the 1917 Espionage Act to punish “traitors” who revealed shameful government practices, the secrecy about the actual terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but on the whole, may have done less harm, and attempted to do more good, than many of his predecessors.  The scale of presidential atrocity is now being re-calibrated by an insane idiot, as he scrambles to dismantle everything positive that Obama managed to accomplish, in the face of massive, organized obstruction.  All future presidential comparisons will be skewed by this petulant outlier we have in there now.     

The first test for an American presidential contender is one that should disqualify them:  that he or she truly believes they should be the most powerful person in the world.   They must secure massive financial backing and sell that sincere, if grandiose, self-belief to voters on television (and, increasingly, via social media) while at the same time assuring the most powerful entities in America that they will do nothing to affect the bottom line.   This process self-selects a certain egotistical, telegenic, born politician.  Branding and marketing, and skillfully deployed soundbites, will decide the battle.

The successful American presidential candidate must be prepared, and demonstrate a willingness, to do unspeakable things.   I’ve often thought there is a psychopath test for any serious American presidential contender.  Maybe  it’s a kid, strapped to a chair in some secret room, that the candidate has to kill, in front of the most powerful CEOs in the nation, to demonstrate he or she has what it takes, won’t hesitate to do what must be done.  

Presidential candidate Bill Clinton rushed back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged death row inmate.  Candidate Dubya mocked the final plea of the brain-damaged Born Again death row inmate he famously refused to pardon.  They had to, politically.   America needs its president to be tough.  Look how many kudos Trump got, from everyone, when he made himself “presidential” by launching tons of senseless missiles at a Syrian airfield, or when he dropped the Mother of All Bombs in Afghanistan.  How jealous Saddam would have been!   Imagine how presidential Trump will be if he gets to drop nukes on Little Rocket Man’s people.

The world is dangerous, mobs of people are maniacs, murder is rampant all over the place.  As sea levels rise and natural disasters grow dramatically more devastating, the danger from and for humans is getting worse.  Maybe we need a president who can kill, who will not flinch, when the situation demands it.  But let’s look for a moment at the rest of the picture.  

Obama’s winning personality, clear intelligence, gift for the felicitous phrase, encouraged those of us who voted for him to believe he was a decent person, a man of conscience.  He played one on TV, and perhaps he truly is.   He came off as thoughtful and fairly honest, to those of us who didn’t hate him, telling us early on that we have to push him to accomplish the hope and change he promised.  We can’t expect any elected official to do the right thing unless we push him relentlessly, he pointed out.  On the one side some people quietly tried to push, on the other side a few very powerful “persons” representing gigantic market forces generally prevailed.   Good, individually powerless people didn’t band together into a mass movement and push hard enough, Obama chided us when he was criticized from the left, while the people with all the power paid powerful experts who pushed harder to influence public policy.  

There is a sickening truth to this lack of American political will, except among extreme right-wing zealots, it seems.  We, who don’t share their values, have been reduced to a nation of handwringing spectators, waiting for our leaders to do the right thing.  Historically, this hopeful passivity has not been a good bet.  There were literally thousands of labor strikes during FDR’s first and second terms, when an uncommonly bold president seized the momentum for change to create a social safety net to save the country from Communism.   

Frederick Douglass hit the nail on the head in 1857:   

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. 

A century and a half later our first “post-racial” president presided over a nation as divided as on the eve of the Civil War, surrounded by in your-face racists intent on rendering him powerless, while membership in white supremacist hate groups rose dramatically and, mobilized, carried the president we have now into office.  With all of the threats we currently face, as a nation and a planet, are we still really watching wealthy talking heads argue over whether racism is bad and whether men and women are really equal?  While a global climate catastrophe gathers steam, no less.

Americans are trained from our earliest days to be consumers, to consume politics and culture as well as everything else.  We are trained to want, to feel a stimulated need, to buy, to binge.  Imagination and creativity is the realm of a small group of professionals who make huge sums to create the content we are all the audience for.   We are numbed now when it comes to our own powers, and overwhelmed with monetized distractions.  We leave the heavy lifting to the professionals, that’s why they get paid the monster bucks.

There is a deep sense of futility in America.  We have an opioid crisis that kills tens of thousands a year, Americans overwhelmed by hopelessness.  One person with a powerful argument, a hundred people, a thousand, a million, are often outmatched by a single billionaire who can spend whatever it takes to have their free speech heard everywhere.  We watch the results time after time and it beats us down.   Not only can’t you fight City Hall, you can’t fight one very rich asshole with a giant twenty or fifty million dollar megaphone and a skillful top-shelf media team.  Free speech, baby, take all you can afford to buy.

Yet we have Bernie Sanders, energizing millions with a real critique of the  indefensible status quo here in a wealthy nation that leads the world in death by gun violence, incarceration,  military spending, health care spending and annual preventable deaths by citizens too poor to afford the world’s most expensive health care.   With his average campaign contribution of, chant it with me, crowd, “$27”, Sanders reached millions and made himself a legitimate presidential contender.  

He did this based largely on his vision of a better, more fair America, as opposed to promising incremental change as the best we can hope for, or idiotically vowing to turn the clock back to the days when America was great, when you could openly wish everyone a Merry Christmas, when women were not so disgusting, when you could call an assertive black person a “nigger” without fear of losing your job for not being politically correct, where traumatic brain injuries to football players was not an issue, they knew what they signed up for and should be allowed to hit and be hit as hard as possible, where military widows respectfully shut the fuck up, etc. 

I don’t really fault this piece of shit we have in the Oval Office now, in a way.  I fault myself.   I fault everyone else who is addicted to the opiate of American celebrity.  What is this spoiled man-child in the White House celebrated for?  Being a born-rich, vulgar, relentlessly self-promoting jackass who made 185 million dollars producing a long-running “reality TV” show where he fired people every week.   That show was his only purely successful business venture, in a long, public career of mostly fuck ups, but it was more than enough to create his brand. 

He became a celebrity mega-brand as he decanted gallons of toxic kool-aid during the presidency of Obama, insisting, to the end, with no evidence whatsoever, that Obama was an illegitimate president, born in Kenya, a secret Muslim and a liar.  Today we’ve got the 1% president our system deserves, America’s racist, self-regarding, entitled chickens coming home to roost.  

The percentage that put him into power, and continues support him in spite of his performance in a job he is completely overmatched by, seems to be around 39%.   Like their president, they know only how to “double down”.  In my recollection 39% was also the high-water mark for German voter support of the energetic, no-holds-barred Nazi party.  Of course, once they had that 39% in Germany, the rest, as they say, is history.  It was 100% soon after that, no matter how many Germans may have opposed it.  

We need to get off our couches now and back into the streets.   We must be vigilant and take nothing for granted in the Age of Trump.  American political arguments are not won with logic, they are won by masses of people doing the hard work.