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What I Meant About Bernie

bernard

Yesterday, my friend Max wrote to me:

There’s a sentence in your recent post “Why not Bernie?” that I keep wondering about. You say, “And yet by choosing Biden over Sanders they virtually guarantee Trump will win again.” Does this mean that you believe people who would’ve voted for Sanders but don’t like Biden will, if Biden is the Democratic candidate, refuse to vote for Biden and allow Trump to win? Wouldn’t anybody who’d vote for Bernie be willing to vote for Biden just to keep Trump from winning? Or how does the choice of Biden to run against Trump guarantee that Trump will win, in your opinion?
bernie
And I replied:
When Bernie was smooshed by the Dem elite and Hillary was the nominee, two big things happened, and probably more, but these two big things I know about. First, a fair number of Bernie supporters did not vote for Hillary. They didn’t vote for Trump. They just didn’t vote. Secondly, there is a large and important demographic of independent voters and undecided voters who vote for candidates they like and not out of party loyalty. In poll after poll, Bernie did really well with independents, and Biden does not. Ironically, Trump got lots of independent voters to vote for him when he ran against Hillary.

Which is to say lots of people vote for people they like for reasons beyond ideology. Biden is not well-liked by lots of people. Trump is not liked by a majority of Americans, but the people who like/worship him ALL vote.

So what may happen is that some of Bernie’s supporters, again, won’t vote for Biden, and many independents won’t either.

The other statistic that is REALLY telling is how few people vote at all. In California, less than 25% of voters voted in the primary. But Republicans tend to vote in large numbers in elections they think matter. Bernie got lots of people excited. Biden does not excite people.

That’s what I meant.

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Bernie and Precious Dream

enjoying a story

I’m voting for Bernie Sanders and contributing to his campaign because he is the only person in my lifetime, seventy years, who wants what I want for our society and the world and has a chance, however slim, of becoming President of the United States. I hope you vote for him, too.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a song called ‘Precious Dream’. Marcia and I recorded the song on our CD So Not Jazz ten years ago. When the CD came out, we gave some concerts and ended each of our shows with a performance of ‘Precious Dream’.

Many people said the song would make a good campaign song for a dream candidate yet to materialize. And now Bernie Sanders has materialized and here’s hoping our precious dream can at least start to come true.

You can hear our rendition of ‘Precious Dream’ on YouTube.

Precious Dream

Last night I had a precious dream,

dreamt I woke into the dawn,

walked out of my little cottage,

found a newspaper on the lawn

When I picked up that morning tribune

it opened to the very front page

and the headlines they told me

it was the dawning of a brand new age

 

Yeah the rich folks had all decided

to share their money with the poor

and the leaders had disbanded all the armies,

not another dollar to be spent on war.

They’d stopped building prisons,

put that money in our schools and neighborhoods

and instead of building bombs and things we don’t need

we were all of us working for the greater good

 

Yes they stopped clear-cutting the forests,

killing all the animals,

stopped dumping poison in the ground

and the rivers and the sea.

Oh the cars ran clean, trains ran smooth and fast,

the air was clear,

food and shelter, health-care guaranteed

 

And the movies were about fascinating people

with real problems, you know, the real stuff

and our heroes were bright and generous,

pioneers of truth and love

 

When I woke up, my heart was pounding,

and I prayed my dream had all come true,

but I knew as well as you do

that that’s really up to me and you

 

Yes, we have it in our power to change the way we live

we have it in our power to take no more than we give

we have it in our power to love instead of hate

we have it in our power to make these changes

before it’s all too late

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Just Us

The Magician

The Magician (Lily Cai Chinese Dance Company) ©2016  David Jouris / Motion Pictures

“In 1978, Proposition 13 passed with almost 65% of those who voted in favor and with the participation of nearly 70% of registered voters. After passage, Proposition 13 became article XIII A of the California Constitution.” Wikipedia

We’ve been picking up our neighbor’s Press Democrat while he is away in Idaho hunting elk. The headline article of the Sunday edition is about the shortage of rental properties in Mendocino and all over California and America due to so many people choosing to go the Air B&B route with their rental units rather than rent long term to locals.

What does that have to do with the famous Proposition 13? In my view, the Airbnb phenomenon is the grandchild of Proposition 13, and the election of Donald Trump is a sibling of Airbnb.

There once was a concept known as the Greater Good, otherwise known as our community. Before the passage of Proposition 13, California had excellent schools, universities, parks, healthcare, mental healthcare, and public libraries, along with many other public goodies, too. Ten years later, those public systems were collapsing as the wealthy fled the public sector for private systems only they could afford—to hell with the middle and lower classes.

I recently fell into conversation with a woman who, upon finding out I owned a house in Mendocino, asked if I had a cottage to rent? “Or even a garage that doesn’t leak?”

She was expensively dressed and driving a new BMW, so I doubted she was looking to rent something diminutive for herself. “We decided to go Air B&B with our cottage,” she explained. “So now we have to kick our renter out and I’m hoping she can find another place around here so she doesn’t have to relocate. She’s the greatest person. I hate to do it, but we need the money. She’s paying twelve hundred a month. We can make five thousand a month doing the Air B&B thing.”

“Lot of work,” I said, smiling wanly. “Sheets to wash, cleaning up after…”

“With the money we’ll be making, we’ll get someone else to do that,” she said, shrugging. “Really hurts. She’s the best renter we’ve ever had.”

Yes, for some people doing the Air B&B thing is a necessity, but for many people doing the Air B&B thing is simply a way to make more money than they were previously making. And making more money at the expense of a vibrant community and great people is precisely what people did when they passed Proposition 13. In the short term, property owners got to keep more of their money for themselves. In the long term, they wrecked our society.

The great appeal of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and the Georges Bush and Ronald Reagan, who might be called the Uncle of Proposition 13, was the message: you affluent folks can have anything you want and need not worry about the less fortunate people we destroy here and abroad so you can have your anything.

The appeal of Bernie Sanders was that he reminded people who remembered or had heard about that Other Time, the time of The Greater Good. And he suggested we could have another such time if we designed our systems of governance and taxation so everyone paid their fair share of the cost of a system benefiting everyone.

Alas, too much time had passed since the days of fair taxation, since the days of banks being banks instead of gambling dens, since the days of stock markets reflecting the actual worth of companies and commodities, since the days of high school graduates knowing how to read and write, since the days of superb public libraries, since the days when, truly, there were no homeless people—so in this last election most of those who voted opted for a continuation of privatization, voted for continuing to deny what is really happening to our world and our society, voted for a fantasy that capitalism can bring prosperity to more than a fraction of the population.

Now there is a movement afoot to recount the votes from the Presidential election and prove, some people hope, Trump didn’t win and Hillary did. And I marvel at the outpouring of money and support for this ultimately futile process, as if the system as it is now constituted would allow for a reversal of a national process predicated on the fantasy of fairness.

Fantasy. My hobby of monitoring movie trailers and ensuing box office results show that the most successful movies of the last two decades are fantasies about wizards and super heroes and invulnerable strong people (mostly men) battling the forces of evil. The public can’t seem to get enough of Harry Potter and the aftershocks of that pre-adolescent fantasy of kids using magical powers to conquer the nasty meanies of life, magical powers gained not through practice and wisdom and insight, but just because, you know, wizards are, like, granted magical powers because, you know, because they’re, like, chosen.

This pre-adolescent fantasy stuff is profoundly related to the election of Trump, for if we grow up believing important things only happen because of magic (luck) and not through clear intentions and hard work, we cannot possibly understand how things actually happen in this reality, nor do we know how to make things happen. And we grow up believing wizards or Super People will save us, save society, make things better.

I think we, the people, are now so passive and misinformed and entrained to stare at screens projecting fantasies, the spectacle of Trump versus Hillary was the best we could hope for. Bernie Sanders was too down to earth (and I don’t mean Middle Earth) and what he envisioned would have required us to share, to be part of a larger community, a society of equals. No wizards. No waving of wands for the easy fix. Just us working together and sacrificing together for the greater good.

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Solar Postage Socialist

goldens

Goldens photo by Todd

“At a time when the Post Office is losing substantial revenue from the instantaneous flow of information by email and on the Internet, slowing mail service is a recipe for disaster.” Bernie Sanders

I recently sent a little book, not much more than a glorified pamphlet, to Switzerland. The least expensive way to send the little thing was via the Post Office for twenty-three dollars.  Not very many years ago, the postal service offered inexpensive international mail service, but that was eliminated because…

No one seems to know or remember why the slow boat option was eliminated, but I suspect the cessation went hand-in-hand with all the other things Congress, in service to the Evil Ones, did to wreck our once great postal service.

As a cottage industry artist who sells my books and CDs via my web site, and then ships those goodies to lucky buyers, I am grateful for the wonderful and inexpensive Media Mail option offered by our postal service, with free tracking, but I lose several international sales every year because the cost of shipping books and CDs abroad is more than the value of my products. International postage turns a twenty-dollar book into a forty-five dollar book, and a five-dollar CD becomes a fifteen-dollar CD.

Well, Todd, if you’d make your books available as e-books…no, I don’t want to. I understand why large publishers make e-book versions of books, but the books I sell are limited edition, signed and numbered, actual three-dimensional coil-bound books. Original intriguing well-written fiction. What a concept. I rarely sell more than fifty copies of each book, and I rarely make a profit. And with international postal rates being what they are, I rarely sell to people abroad who express interest in my work. Such is modern life.

Speaking of modern life, I’ve been reading about Morocco, specifically the Moroccan government, turning to solar and wind power to free the country from a dependency on imported energy. In just a few more years, Morocco will go from importing 97% of their fuel and electricity to importing less than 50% of their fuel and electricity. This government subsidized conversion is not only creating thousands of jobs and boosting the economy, but eliminating pollution, saving billions of dollars a year and…sounds like socialism to me.

Why can’t we have a massive conversion to solar and wind and tidal power in the United States? And why can’t we have affordable international postage? And why can’t we have Single Payer Healthcare? Well, we can. But we won’t.

Many people I know are still reeling from the election of Donald Trump. I find it fascinating that most of these folks see the election of Trump as some sort of wholly unexpected and surprising event, rather than the inevitable conclusion to a long-developing process, the effect of a cause. This has been coming for a long time, and I think it behooves us to look beyond the person who got elected and remember (know) his election is the end result of a long-developing process of privatization and the decimation of our foundational socialist institutions.

Next in line for demolition are Social Security and Medicare. The Evil Ones encountered little resistance to wrecking the postal service, and they are having no trouble stalling the conversion to solar, wind, and tidal power. And now that they control Congress and the Presidency and will soon control the Supreme Court, we will watch them attempt to privatize/destroy Social Security and Medicare. Will we stand by and let them do it? I think we probably will, in the same way we stood by and let them do all the other rotten things they’ve done since 1980.

So now millions of Americans are looking into migrating to Canada to escape the corporate takeover of the United States. Canada, however, does not want Americans moving there and taking advantage of Single Payer Healthcare and other groovy socialist programs that benefit everyone. Create your own socialism, they say, but we won’t.

Ten years ago, I was contacted by a Canadian movie director who wanted to make a movie of my novel Forgotten Impulses, from a screenplay by an American writer, the movie to be set in Canada. The Canadian government was considering funding the project, but after much preliminary excitement, they decided there were too many Americans involved to qualify for Canadian government funding. Darn.

However, a few weeks ago, I was contacted by that same Canadian director, and he said he was interested in making a movie from an original screenplay of mine. He thought if the film was set in Canada and I was the only American involved in the project, perhaps the Canadian film board would this time be open to funding the project. Turned out not to be the case, but for a few days the possibility got me interested in the script again.

And while I worked on the script, I kept wanting to feel excited by the possibility of a movie being made from my screenplay, but after so many near misses with movie producers and publishers over the last thirty years, I found I was far more interested in my latest coil-bound creation that will actually come out into the world and be read by actual people. What a concept.

However, the fact that I was dealing with socialists, as opposed capitalists, gave me a nice tingling feeling—so I let my imagination run wild. I saw myself taking a train to Montreal to watch the filming of my script, the movie became an international sensation (with a cult following in America), and the Canadian government invited me and Marcia to become Canadian citizens so long as I promised that all my future books and screenplays would be set in Canada.

In reality, Trump really did win the election and I’m sending out my annual holiday shopping reminder to my few avid fans, reminding them that no matter how many books and CDs or art cards they purchase, shipping to anywhere in the greater United States will only cost them five bucks. Socialism strikes again.

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Heart Bern

moving over life tw

Moving Over Life painting by Nolan Winkler

Dear Todd,

Max here. I’m wondering how you feel about Bernie Sanders supporters at the Convention who just don’t want to let go of Bernie and join the others in backing Hillary Clinton. I feel empathy for them—they’ve wholeheartedly believed in someone and felt represented by him, and now they’re told to drop that and get behind this other candidate who doesn’t embody what they loved. Bernie was an alternative to everyone else, including Clinton. Are they supposed to act like there is no great difference now? Even using the Anything-but-Trump scare tactic seems to ignore something basic: the fact that they genuinely loved their candidate, believed his message, and still feel he’s the best person for the job. But it’s as if they’re being asked to “grow up.” Does it strike you that way too?

How are you feeling about Bernie and everything?

Dear Max,

Pursuant to wresting control of my brain from the negative forces, I have been avoiding news of the larger world for the last few weeks with good results, though I have heard some news about the angry Bernie supporters at the convention. I also got an e-letter from Bernie (I think it went to fourteen million of his closest friends) inviting me to join him in the ongoing political revolution he says his campaign was just the start of; and I picked up a leaflet from the local arm of Bernie Ongoingness in Mendocino.

The gist of Bernie’s message is: now we must work hard for several years to deepen and expand the grassroots movement to get socialist Bernie-type people elected to local and state offices and Congress so we can be ready for the next few tries at the Presidency four years and eight years and twelve years hence. In this way, some day maybe we’ll have Single Payer Healthcare and throw off the yoke of the Wall Street gangsters and corporate overlords who control our government and are swiftly destroying the earth—Hillary and Bill and Barack their current functionaries. This, I think, is Bernie’s way of asking his followers to grow up.

I went on my first march protesting the Vietnam War in 1963 when I was fourteen, and went on my last of hundreds of marches eleven years later in 1974, a year before the United States military finally pulled out of Vietnam. Did all our protesting and organizing actually help end that terrible war? Maybe not. Credible histories suggest the United States was simply defeated and going broke pursuing that war, our troops mutinying.

I mention Vietnam because that anti-war movement was the only time in my life that millions of young Americans persisted for several years in a political effort to change a major policy of our federal government. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that many of Bernie’s older supporters are former anti-war protestors who joined today’s young people who feel disenfranchised by the current economic system and crushed by debt they accrued going to college.

One problem: Bernie’s support of Hillary, which he promised from the very beginning of his campaign if he didn’t win the nomination, now feels to me like something he was always planning to give her. So I think it probably feels that way to many of those angry Bernie supporters, too. Feels different than being asked to grow up and more like being asked to give up. Also feels like a betrayal because Bernie did such an excellent job exposing Hillary as a lying shill of the oligarchy. That he would then endorse her, and do so lavishly, is plain sickening.

Another problem: we are now three generations into the Culture of Instant Gratification and I would wager that a vast majority of Bernie supporters are not going to work hard for several years to deepen and expand the Bernie revolution. The Green Party has existed for twenty years promoting the identical platform Bernie ran on and they haven’t exactly lit the world on fire, politically speaking. Bernie was never tempted to run as a Green because he has always been something of a political loner and didn’t want to insure the election of Trump.

However, if the election were held tomorrow, Trump would win. Was that the oligarchy’s plan all along? I don’t think so. I think their plan was to elect Hillary to insure the continuation of the transfer of wealth upward and endless war. The overlords knew very well that almost any slightly moderate and not too repulsive Republican would trounce Hillary. So they directed the mass media to trumpet Trump into Republican supremacy because Hillary, they felt certain, could beat him because he’s such a buffoon. Right?

Well…it turns out that she is so hated and mistrusted by so many people, and is so blatantly criminal and such a horrid abrasive vindictive person that she probably can’t even beat Trump. Unless…

And that is why I have been avoiding news of the larger world. I would rather fill my brain with the ongoing mysteries of my garden, walking to town, watching the waves roll into Mendocino Bay, helping my friends and neighbors, listening to Giants games, communicating with you, cooking supper, writing, playing the piano, and creating new and improved neural pathways.

I feel sad about Bernie. I think he illustrates that the super individual is what resonates most powerfully with the American people. Bernie proves again that if there is ever to be a political revolution bringing us those things we desperately need, a charismatic such as FDR will have to lead the charge. Remember, FDR was president for thirteen years and would have gone on being our president for another twenty years had he lived so long.

But there’s a problem with charismatics who gain massive support while pushing for serious social and political reform. They tend to get killed when they pose a serious threat to the ruling elite.

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Brexit Musings

you just looked up at the stars site

You Just Looked Up At the Stars painting by Nolan Winkler

“Greece should go back to a national currency to have more autonomous decision-making with regards to it own economy, which it needs if it wants to pave a more sustainable path.” Jennifer Hinton, co-author of How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050

When I heard that a majority of British voters wanted to leave the European Union, my first thought was, “Well, I would want to leave, too, after what that union did and is continuing to do to the people of Greece and Spain in order to funnel more billions into the coffers of the corporate overlords via their putrid toxic derivative hedge funds.”

A friend and I were discussing Brexit and she said she had spoken to a British couple residing in Mendocino and was told that many people in England voted to get out of the union because EU laws allow member nations to plunder the dwindling fisheries of England, and the British people were fed up with that. Didn’t read that anywhere in the mainstream news.

The results of the election showed that sixty per cent of London voters wanted to remain in the EU, while the majority of people outside that largest of corporate-controlled city-states wanted out. What does this tell us? One sector of British society is flourishing at the expense of the rest of the society. Sound familiar?

I’ve read dozens of articles about what a disaster Britain’s exit portends, but so far the only disaster to have manifested is that stock markets, otherwise known as Ponzi schemes for rich people, went down for a day or two all over the world because the rigged game was temporarily upset by this unexpected rebellion of working people tired of seeing the quality of their lives deteriorate.

Meanwhile, Hillary, the darling of the corporate overlords, is preparing to push through any and all trade agreements favoring corporations over the states composing the United States of America, and this one aspect of her criminality not only portends disaster for anyone not among the super wealthy, but is an echo of what the European Union does, which is give corporations disguised as the EU governing body the power to supersede the will of the peoples of supposedly sovereign nations.

Had not Greece given up their national currency when they joined the EU, they could have Grexited long ago, and the Greek people, save for a tiny elite class, would be a thousand times better off than they are today. The media does not report that Greece has been ransacked to serve a few obscenely wealthy hedge fund crooks, something that could never have happened if Greece had been equipped to leave the EU, which I think they will do eventually.

Our media’s coverage of Brexit reminds me of our media’s coverage of Bernie Sanders, Single Payer Healthcare, the accelerating poisoning of the biosphere resulting from the constant increase of greenhouse gases, and everything else we desperately need to be informed about but aren’t unless we have the chutzpah to go looking for the truth. Thus when I hear people parroting the media consensus that Brexit is terrible and nothing good will come of it, I think about the media consensus on Single Payer Healthcare versus what the vast majority of people want and need, and then I’m not so sure Great Britain choosing to leave the EU is a bad thing.

Certainly on paper the idea of a unified egalitarian Europe is a good idea, but the idea has never matched reality. The European Union, NAFTA, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the soon-to-be ratified Trans-Pacific Partnership were all designed by and for multinational corporations to facilitate the takeover over of more and more of the global economy, and specifically to disempower working people, labor unions, and most people on earth.

Oh, but Scotland wants to stay in the EU. How come? Scotland has never wanted to be part of Great Britain. The history of England going back a thousand years is rife with wars between Scotland and England. This is yet another opportunity for Scotland to break free of the yoke of their imagined oppressors.

The mainstream media also continues to report that many of the people who voted for Great Britain to leave the EU didn’t know what they were voting for and now would like to change their minds. I wonder how the media found that out. Or maybe they just knew those people were flummoxed and pixilated because otherwise how can we explain why so many people would vote to leave such a wonderful organization?

I heard two young British socialists, one for leaving the EU, one for remaining, debating the decision to leave, and the one who wanted to remain in the EU said, “We should have stayed and reformed the EU, worked within the system to make it better.” And the one for leaving said something to the effect of, “Poppycock.”

Imagine trying to reform American politics or the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Imagine Hillary running a campaign without money from major corporations. Without hedge fund Wall Street crookster money she would be Hillary who? Imagine Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination in a country where the trillions spent on war every year were instead spent on the health and education and economic security of the American citizenry. Imagine a media that actually reported the truth so the citizenry could make reasonable choices about who and what they voted for.

In the big global picture, the possible breakup of the European Union is part of the breakdown of human systems all over the world in the face of overpopulation, resource scarcity, climate change, and the limitations of our collective capacity to live within our means. Technology has enabled the banksters to engineer a system that would eventually lead to a few people on earth owning everything, if only the eight billion other humans would just keep quiet and allow that to happen. But darn it, they won’t keep quiet.

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Coup

i've been waiting for the sun tw

I’ve Been Waiting For the Sun painting by Nolan Winkler

“If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.” Oscar Wilde

I think it is important to view the Bernie Sanders saga in the context of the larger takeover of our society and our government and our psyches that began in earnest in the 1970s and was vastly accelerated by the enthronement of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980.

True, our society and government were heavily influenced by the wealthy elite from the moment our nation was founded, but the Great Depression and FDR modified that influence tremendously, and thereby ushered in a social and cultural renaissance that peaked in the 1970s when the corporate oligarchy began to take the requisite steps to wrest complete control again. Every President of the United States since Reagan has obediently carried out the agenda of the corporate overlords.

I published my first novel in 1978 at the close of the era of independent publishers. From my point of view, the corporate takeover of publishing and the movie industry at that time were key steps in stifling dissent and preparing the population for submission to corporate rule. I worked very hard to break into publishing, only to watch in horrified fascination as virtually overnight, teams of politically conservative anti-creative money crunchers replaced the most creative and open-minded people in every large publishing house in America.

The first order of business for these anti-creative teams was the firing of any innovative editors, many of them middle-aged, who believed it was their purpose in life to find new and original voices to bring into the cultural matrix. In the movie industry, similar house cleaning took place, with innovation and counter-culture ideas verboten.

Whenever several corporations take over entire industries, corporate consolidation of that industry inevitably follows, and within a decade after the initial takeovers, a few massive corporations owned all previously freestanding publishers, all the movie studios, and eventually most of the mainstream media outlets: newspapers, television networks, and radio stations.

Simultaneously, our public schools were being gutted and turned into pseudo jails, citizens who could afford to would send their children to private schools, and our universities became little more than conduits for the best and the brightest to find their places in the corporate machinery that was quickly taking hold of every aspect of our lives.

Without a vibrant creative culture, the collective imagination withers, and this withering makes for dull minds, and dull minds cannot discern truth from falsity, nor can dull minds raise children capable of discerning truth from falsity. This, in my opinion, is the context in which the Bernie Sanders saga must be viewed.

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end…but not necessarily in that order.” Jean-Luc Godard

A few weeks ago, Marcia and I were walking along Albion Street in Mendocino on a windy evening, our stomachs full of excellent food from the Mendocino Café, when I espied a crimson geranium plant lying by the side of the road, leaves and flower clusters wilting, a tangle of roots spread out on the ground like the tentacles of a dying octopus.

I picked up the beautiful plant, soon we were home, and I planted the dying geranium in a big pot already containing a recently transplanted rose bush. I gave those withered roots a big drink of water, and for the next few days babied the plant until some of her leaves began to show signs of revival. I pruned off those branches and flowers that were clearly not going to survive, and now we have a spectacular blood-red geranium as companion to an equally spectacular pink geranium gifted us by our neighbor Marion.

“Remember, the music is not in the piano.” Clement Mok

So we live in a country that purports to be a democracy, and is certainly not. We live in a country where elections are now routinely rigged. We live in a country that is the home base of a huge and aggressive military-industrial complex that perpetuates war in order to perpetuate itself. We live in a country that has a government serving the interests of a small percentage of the population at the expense of a large percentage of the population. And we live in a country that is the leading cause of the demise of the entire biosphere.

What can we do to counter these truths about the country where we live? I think Bernie Sanders’ campaign provides an answer, though his campaign is not the answer. His campaign has lasted one year. In that short time, he galvanized tens of millions of people to give him money and support his candidacy. He harnessed the enormous desire in the population to take back our government from the corporate oligarchs.

But we the people don’t just want an honest government; we want a decent society and a vibrant culture. And those are things we might create without the influence of corrupt government. Imagine a hundred million Sanders supporters boycotting movies and television shows that promote violence. Imagine a hundred million Sanders supporters working to institute Single Payer Healthcare state by state. Imagine those Sanders supporters actively and rigorously supporting local businesses instead of out-of-town corporations. Imagine a hundred million Sanders supporters striving to use public transportation instead of cars.

Part of why the corporate oligarchy never greatly feared Bernie Sanders or his followers is that they thought we were not going to do much more than support Bernie and hope he would win and do all sorts of wonderful things for us, rather than start doing wonderful things whether Bernie won or not.

Smart phones are portable computerized televisions that tether us to the corporate system. Unless we are willing, en masse, to change our lives so we are not servile users of the system, we will never have a Bernie Sanders become the leader of this nation. Bernie Sanders proved there are many people who want big changes. But he has yet to prove there are many people willing to make big changes.

Shortly after the anti-creative corporations took over the book publishers and the movie studios, the collective imagination began to wither.

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Sad Scary

Quantum Something Or Other

Quantum Something Or Other painting by Nolan Winkler

 “Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?” Maurice Freehill

Now that the people of California have spoken at the polls and assured the nomination of the poster girl for Monsanto, fracking, endless war, tax breaks for the wealthy, the continuing ruination of the lower eighty per cent of Americans, and the destruction of the biosphere, I feel sad. Where were all the Bernie Sanders supporters? The vote wasn’t even close, not that very many people voted.

Yes, I know. The Hillary machine colluded with Associated Press to crown her the nominee the day before the New Jersey and California primaries in order to suppress voter turnout. So does that mean Bernie’s supporters believed such evil nonsense? No. I think Bernie supporters are just more visible and demonstrative and passionate than Hillary supporters, but not more plentiful.

And why would so many people support a person who has dedicated her life to serving the wealthy and screwing everybody else? Her record is there for everyone to see. Her disgraceful tenure as Secretary of State, her shameful career as a United States Senator, her votes against bills that would help people and protect the environment, and her zealous advocacy of fracking and ruinous trade agreements and free government money for the big banks are not secrets. Why would people vote for her?

The only plausible answer I can come up with is that most people do not respond to facts, but to feelings, and for some reason those who voted for Hillary feel more comfortable with the idea of her as President than the idea of a person suggesting enormous changes in how we interface with the world and each other being President. Change can be scary.

“One has to fear everything—or nothing.” Jean Giraudoux

Speaking of scary, I’ve been following the news about Lake Mead and what that news portends for tens of millions of Californians in the very near future. Lost in the maelstrom of meaningless blather about Trump and Clinton is the news that Lake Mead, heretofore the largest fresh water reservoir in America, is no longer the largest such reservoir because the massive lake has shrunk to its lowest level since engineers began filling the lake (behind Hoover Dam) in 1937.

Eighteen years of drought in the southwest combined with the not-so-slow death of the Colorado River watershed largely because of Hoover Dam, has caused this disastrous decline in the amount of water in Lake Mead, which, by the way, supplies almost all the water used by Las Vegas and roughly half the water used by…wait for it…southern California.

In fact, the level is so low and so swiftly falling, that this year Arizona and Colorado and Nevada have to take less than their usual allotments of Lake Mead Water, and if the level drops to where it is expected to drop next year, California will have to take much less Lake Mead water, too. And a few years hence there will be very little water for anyone to take from Lake Mead, at which point we hope they remove Hoover Dam so that after humans have mostly vanished from the earth, the Colorado River basin might become a living ecosystem again.

This means, of course, that most of the twenty million people in southern California will have to move. Soon. Where will they go? Scary.

“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” Swedish Proverb

I do, actually, conflate the exhaustion of Lake Mead with people voting for Hillary instead of Bernie Sanders. Call me silly, but that’s how my mind works. Thousands of shortsighted decisions made by people afraid of change have brought us to a time in our individual and collective lives where the earth we depend on for life is being ravaged by forces set loose through our shortsightedness.

We cannot say we didn’t have sufficient information to make better long-term decisions. We cannot say we didn’t have the means to make fruitful substantive changes. We can say that greed, which is the child of fear, is the most obvious engine of planetary and societal destruction.

We can also say that everything happening today in the larger world is a technologically advanced version of how humans have behaved for tens of thousands of years. One might even say that humans are genetically hardwired to act as we are acting today in the face of the accelerating global climatic and environmental disasters. The difference today is that we have no new places to migrate to, there are too many of us, and we have developed sufficient force, as a species, to destroy the entire biosphere and not just localized areas where we have tarried too long.

“To the sea? To the sky? To the world? Who knows? The stars descend, as usual to the river, carried by the breezes… the nightingale meditates… sorrow grows more lovely. And high above sadness a smile bursts into bloom.” Juan Ramon Jimenez

So on we go. Bernie will not be the next President of the United States, but we have his example to emulate, which is to be kind, open, curious, generous, daring, compassionate, and forgiving. We’re only human, and maybe we humans have done as well, collectively, as we could ever have hoped to do on this little gem of a planet floating in the vastness of space.

I think we could have done better, could still do better, but that’s just me thinking. And when those millions of people from southern California drive north looking for places to live where there is still, for now, water, how kind and open and compassionate and forgiving will I be?

Scary. Sad. Here they come.

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Voting For Bernie

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I March in the Parade of Liberty painting by Nolan Winkler

Today I filled out my absentee ballot and voted for Bernie Sanders to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States, and I felt great about casting my vote for him. Then I tried to remember the last time I felt this good voting for someone who might end up the leader of our country, and I realized I have never felt this way before. When I voted for George McGovern and Ralph Nader, I knew they wouldn’t win, so I felt kind of wistful about voting for them. And you might say, “But Bernie can’t win either. You’re deluding yourself to think so.”

Well, I don’t believe the oligarchy’s media, and for once in my life I voted for a possible President of the United States representing what I want for America, someone who, in my current perception of reality, has a chance to win, regardless of what the lying distorting mass media tells us; and that makes this voting experience unique in my life. That got me thinking about other unexpected Firsts in my life that came later than sooner, and for which I am grateful.

When I moved to Mendocino from Berkeley ten years ago, there was something palpably different and better about living here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Having lived in a small town in Oregon, I knew the different feeling was not related to city life versus country life, and I had also lived in coastal towns, so I knew the different feeling was not proximity to the ocean. Still, it took me three years to figure out what the difference was—something I’d been missing since childhood.

This is the first place I’ve lived since I was a boy where the vast majority of people living here, want to live here. That was certainly not true in Berkeley where everyone I knew was being priced out of the area, and where the stress of that urban scene was unbearable for all but the young and the very wealthy. When I lived in Sacramento, four out of every five people I knew were desperate to leave as soon as they could afford to.

Thinking back over the many places I’ve lived, I could not come up with another place, except my childhood neighborhood, where the majority of people I knew in that community wanted to be there. The ramifications of this are vast, especially when one considers how highly interactive human beings are. We are hardwired to mirror the actions and emotions of others—so to live with mobs of people who don’t want to be where they are is, in scientific terms, an ongoing bummer.

After ten years in Mendocino, I have yet to hear anyone say, “I must leave here or go insane.” When I lived in Berkeley and Sacramento and Seattle and Medford and Eugene and Santa Cruz, I heard people say things like that daily, sometimes hourly.

True, this might say more about my acquaintances than about what life is like for most people in those other places, but I’m not talking about why nearly everyone I knew wanted out of where they were; I’m talking about how for the first time in my adult life I live in a place where virtually everyone I know and meet and overhear, save for the occasional disgruntled teenager, wants to be here.

When I turned sixty, six years ago, I decided to experiment with eliminating gluten and dairy products from my life, not including eggs. I had long ceased to eat cow dairy, but I still ate goat cheese. I was having digestive issues, notably bloating, and after decreasing my goat dairy and starch intake with little positive effect, I thought I’d see about doing without gluten for a few months.

After six weeks without gluten, the bloating problem was solved, and so I continued to abstain from gluten. And some six weeks later, I had an incredible experience—one of the best Firsts of my life. From the age of fifteen onward, I suffered from chronic debilitating joint pain, and was therefore a chronic user of aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs. Western medical doctors diagnosed me with ankylosing spondylitis, for which I found daily yoga practice helpful, though yoga did not cure the pain.

Thus every evening and every morning for the last forty-five years, I have done twenty minutes to an hour of stretching, without which I would be so stiff and pain-ridden, I would barely be able to move.

So…three months into being gluten free, during an evening stretching session, I was lying on my back on my mat and got up to turn off a whistling kettle. On my way to the kitchen, I was astonished to realize I had arisen with ease (in itself miraculous) and without any twinges of pain.

In a state of near disbelief, I returned to the living room, knelt on the matt, placed my fingertips on the floor behind me, and bent backwards a good five inches further than I had been able to bend in forty-five years—without the slightest pain or discomfort.

Over these subsequent six years sans gluten, I have not experienced any joint pain (save for the occasional injury from overzealous gardening or exercise.) I’m not saying this wonderful cessation of joint pain will occur for any other sufferers should they lessen or eliminate their gluten intake, but that is what happened for me. Now in the evening before bed, I look forward to getting on my mat to do some stretching by the fire, rather than dreading a confrontation with pain.

Voting for Bernie makes me happy in the same way stretching without pain makes me happy. After a lifetime of reprehensible narcissists running for and occupying the joint known as the White House, I finally got to vote for an intelligent, compassionate, generous person with a meaningful plan to improve life for all Americans, a person I believe has a chance to become the nation’s leader as we hurtle into massive economic and environmental turmoil.

Go Bernie!

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Staunch Democrats

sometimes, it's a circus, isn't it?72

Sometimes, It’s A Circus, Isn’t It? painting by Nolan Winkler

Most humans, alas, are easily swayed by clever liars who pray on our fears, and such swaying will almost surely cause the human experiment to devolve into global chaos—possibly quite soon.

I’ve been pondering the end of quasi-viable human society in the wake of Hillary Clinton winning the New York Democratic Primary over Bernie Sanders and because a reader recently wrote:  “I, too, am a Bernie supporter but my entire family—four siblings, and a mother—are all voting for Hillary. They are all wonderful people, yet staunch Democrats. I would love to read something by you about staunch Democrats. They are mostly a fine bunch of people who believe in social justice, equality and all the good stuff. They are far better than their party, and they continue to believe their party can provide the changes that would make the world a more just place.”

In my opinion, the big block of staunch Democrats voting for Hillary represents the single greatest obstacle to positive change in our society, and I think it would be more accurate to call such people Fundamentalist Democrats because of their unswerving devotion to people and doctrine serving the ruling elite and screwing everybody else.

I have friends who are staunch Democrats, and when I present them with clear proof of Hillary’s many crimes, their response never varies. They reflexively shake their heads and say things like, “That can’t be true.” Or “Hillary will unite the party.” Or “Hillary has a better chance of winning.” Or “You’re just saying that because you like that socialist guy.” Or “You have to admit she’s better than Trump.”

As The Bible is infallible to Fundamentalist Christians so The Party and Hillary are infallible to staunch Democrats. Sit down with a Hillary supporter and carefully prove beyond all doubt that Ms. Clinton is a rabid servant of the big banks and the super wealthy, a proponent of endless war, racism, big pharma, fracking, and corporate dominance at the expense of the American people, and the response will never vary because Fundamentalist Democrats cannot, will not, hear the truth.

For some years I thought these people suffered from IDD (Intelligence Deficit Disorder) but now I think they are captives of a deeply ingrained delusion nurtured by the ruling elite. To wit: change is bad and the status quo, however rotten and amoral, is preferable to the unknown. Bernie Sanders wants to change things, and change is bad. Hillary promises to keep the stock market Ponzi scheme going, to keep robbing the bottom ninety per cent to fatten the upper ten, to keep students in debt, to keep wages low, to keep the healthcare debacle in full flower—and staunch Democrats not yet starving will support her sickening agenda over anything else.

In related news, speaking of the upper ten per cent, some anonymous person recently gave us a subscription to Sunset Magazine. I hadn’t seen Sunset in thirty years, and if you remember this magazine from the 1950s and 1960s, the only thing about the new Sunset you will recognize is the name. Gone are the articles on how to make dolls from empty toilet paper rolls, how to make papie-mâché piñatas, how to make gerbil cages from old fruit crates. Gone are articles on how to plant, harvest, and cook string beans. Gone are ads for garden tools and inexpensive armchairs.

The new Sunset is exclusively for rich people. Imagine Vanity Fair meets Gourmet meets Travel For the Super Rich. Celebrities grace many a cover and are featured inside modeling expensive togs whilst lounging by waterfalls adjacent to their mansions. Every month brings us a list of The Top Ten Most Expensive Getaways In North America and glimpses into the kitchens of new restaurants so expensive only Hillary can afford to dine there, not Bernie.

In news related to that related news, you won’t read an article in Sunset about the shocking and cataclysmic disappearance of the kelp forests along our coast from San Francisco to Oregon and the simultaneous population explosion of purple sea urchins, devourers of kelp.

Scientists are blaming the disappearance of the kelp and the rise of the urchin barrens on several factors: a mysterious “disease” in 2013 that wiped out nearly all the millions of starfish on the west coast of North America (starfish being big eaters of sea urchins), an absence of sea otters, also voracious eaters of sea urchins, the huge warm water blob off the coast that appeared in 2014 and the El Niño of 2015 that further warmed the ocean and deprived the coastal waters of the upwelling of nutrient-rich cold water that helps kelp grow as much as 10 inches in a day.

Without starfish to keep them in check, purple urchins on the North Coast are now sixty times more plentiful than five years ago, and these urchins are extremely hungry. Thus any kelp that starts to grow in their midst is quickly gobbled. Abalone feeds on kelp, too, and without kelp, abalone are shrinking and dying, and abalone may soon disappear from the local coastal scene.

I remember those reports of virtually all the starfish along the west coast of North America suddenly dissolving in 2013, and a few writers daring to suggest there might be a connection to this unprecedented disaster and the billions of gallons of radioactive water that have been continuously flowing into the Pacific from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan since 2011. These suggestions of a connection between that ongoing river of radioactivity pouring into the Pacific and the vanishing starfish were quickly dismissed by the scientific community because, well, staunch scientists are never eager to entertain the possibility that the failed nuclear power industry might play even a little part in the ruination of the ecosystem of the west coast of North America and beyond.

Staunch scientists are like staunch Democrats voting for Hillary. Confronted with unpleasant truths that should cause them to question their failed notions of reality, they reflexively shake their heads and say, “That can’t be true.”