I do not hate Rich people

politics, Social democracy

I want to make one thing clear–I do not hate rich people. Some of my best friends are rich. At least I think they are rich. Perhaps this is just jealousy speaking. I do not advocate class war of poor against rich. What I object to though is rich people using their considerable power and influence to bend the minds of our politicians to change everything in their own favor and to their own advantage at the expense of poor people. Poor people by definition don’t have the power that rich people have. As a result they can’t convince politicians to do what is good for them, like rich people can. This is inherently unfair. It is also inherently undemocratic.

This is why I despise plutocracy–i.e. government for the rich. That is what the Americans are moving towards at warp speed. Canadians too but at a slower pace. This is particularly true now that rich people have elected one of their own–Donald Trump–as their personal savior. And he is serving them well, even though he convinced a lot of working class people that he was their personal savior. He is not. He is doing everything he can to help his cronies and he is doing it on a massive scale and it is being done at the expense of everyone else.

What I really object to is rich people who forget that their wealth is not solely the product of their own genius, but more often than not, has been contributed to greatly by ordinary people. Rich people have benefited from the commons–i.e. those things we have created for the benefit of all, or have set aside for the benefit of all. This includes things like an educational system, a financial system, and nature itself.

I despise it when rich people think it is all for them to do with as they please without any thought for those who are less fortunate than they are. These are the vulnerable people who can vote for Donald Trump but can’t really influence him too much after that. For example, when I see rich Americans gleefully take billions in tax breaks at the expense of medical care for poor people, I am disgusted. Is it not disgusting? Poor and vulnerable people are being plucked to the bone at this time particularly in the United States at this time the rich people are doing exactly that. They are reaping what they sowed. For the rest it is just too bad. They can suck socks.

Position Available

religion

This message is more of a public service in case anyone wants to apply. In a local  parking lot in a mall,  I saw a car with decals of stick people. Like so many of them this showed an entire family. Except there was a space where the image of the mother/wife should have been. The image of her was rubbed out. Beside it the owner had printed the words: “Position Available.”

Concentration Camps Arizona Style: Pink Undies

politics,

Some of this stuff is impossible to make up. No one would believe it if it were fiction.       There is an old sheriff in town and his name is Joe Arpaio. He has announced that he is running for the US Senate in the upcoming Arizona election as a result of the resignation of Jeff Flake, the Republican who resigned to criticize Trump more freely. He is the former sheriff of the county in which I have lived for the past 4 years, Maricopa County. Sometimes this place seems like the Wild West. Now I know why. The sheriff is, as the saying goes, is a piece of work.

To begin with, the good sheriff initiated a very popular effort to round up illegal Mexicans in the County. It was hugely popular among some Arizonans–like older white people. This alone did not make Arpaio famous, but it helped.

Sheriff Arpaio first vaulted to fame in 1993 when he created an outdoor tent city in Maricopa County as a temporary makeshift prison. The sheriff created the tent city to cope with the overflow from prisons already filled to capacity, due in part to his crackdown on undocumented immigrants. We all have to remember that temperatures can reach 54 ° Celsius in Arizona in the summer. That is equal to 129 ° Fahrenheit. He added to his fame by making prisoners wear pink underwear, pink socks, and pink bedding. He said the color might deter stealing. Would you steal pink underwear? Of course would you steal white underwear?

Sheriff Arpaio caught the attention of 2 Arizona reporters Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin. They had a second reason for their curiosity. They noticed that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office had blown its budget in the first couple of months in the year and wondered if the issues were related.

They found that before Arpaio stepped up his dramatic enforcement of illegal immigrants, the arrest rate in the County was about 10 %. That is poor. Yet as his officers focused on immigration crackdowns that rate dropped to less than 4%. As they conducted massive immigration sweeps in manly Hispanic neighborhoods they needed to employ 100 deputies and spent huge sums of money.

The reporters also discovered that as the Sheriff’s office was fixated on illegals, nearly everything else was neglected. The Special Victims Unit did not have time to investigate sex crimes such as rapes, which they had been created to investigate. Many other ordinary duties were neglected so that deputies could go after illegals. According to Gabrielson, “They had just ceased to do criminal investigations for other reasons and nobody was paying attention and it piled up — hundreds and hundreds of uninvestigated cases that nobody was doing anything about because the force was converting into an immigration enforcement agency.”[1] The average police response time for serious crimes dropped rapidly.

The police also stopped all kinds of cars for spot inspections, particularly if people who appeared Hispanic were in the car. Cars with white people were seldom stopped. It was clearly racial profiling. This was clear to everyone.

Joe Arpaio became so famous that The Guardian from England came to investigate. Arpaio was the rock star of American Sheriff’s. At one time the TV cameras came to see what all the fuss was about. The Guardian described the event this way,

 

‘Hitler! Hitler!” the prisoners chanted to the TV cameras in protest. It was February  4th 2009. More than 200 Latino men in black-and-white striped uniforms, shackled to each other, were being marched towards an outdoor unit especially for “illegal alien” prisoners in Arizona’s infamous jail, Tent City. The chants were directed at the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who a few months before had called this outdoor jail close to downtown Phoenix – his own tough-on-crime creation – a “concentration camp” in a speech to political supporters at his local Italian-American club.[2] 

I have never believed that prisons should be country clubs, but a concentration camp is going a bit far. Remember it was Arpaio himself who called it a concentration camp, not some bleeding heart liberal.

Arpaio’s political career hit the skids in 2016. Many Republicans turned against him because his techniques were so costly and ineffective. First, there were numerous successful law suits filed against him and the County.

Michael Manning an Arizona litigation attorney was one of his most vocal critics even though he made a lot of money representing numerous plaintiffs in claims against the County of Maricopa. “He got away with it because people could excuse the embedded racism in his message,” Manning said. “Because he fashioned it always as: ‘I’m going to protect you from people who are out there breaking the law and threatening your lives and property.’” In other words, to return to a theme in these chronicles, Arpaio appealed to the fears of his rich constituents. That is all to easy to do in Arizona as in other places in the United States.

In 2011 an Arizona judge ordered Arpaio to stop detaining immigrants during traffic patrols, whom he suspected (without any evidence of course other than racial profiling) of being in the country illegally. Then another Arizona judge found Arpaio guilty of disobeying that court order.

Then Arpaio lost the election for Sheriff of Maricopa Count in November of 2016. His successor closed Tent City citing the astonishing costs of operating it (on average $9 million per year). His successor said, “This facility is not a crime deterrent, it’s not cost-efficient and it’s not tough on criminals.” There would be no more mandatory pink underwear. What a pity.

But Arpaio’s time in the sun was not over. He got national attention After all, there was a new sheriff in Arizona, but there was also a new President in Washington. Arpaio became the first person to be pardoned by President Donald Trump. Trump suggested Arpaio was convicted for “doing his job.”  As the CBC reported, “So was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job?” Trump called out to the crowd. “I’ll make a prediction: I think he’s going to be just fine.” His prediction turned out to be right. Surprise. Trump loved him because Arpaio was perceived as being tough on illegal immigrants. That was enough for Trump. Meanwhile Gabrielson and Giblin won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting. Only in America; only in Arizona. A concentration where prisoners have to wear pink undies.

[1] Ryan Gabrielson, “The Rise of Joe Arpaio,” East Valley Tribune (June 9, 2008)

 

[2] Valeria Fernández “Arizona’s ‘Concentration Camp’: Why was Tent City kept open for 24 years?” The Guardian (August 21, 2017)

 

Lady Bird

Movies

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0nfg4qryqxahdod/Screenshot%202018-01-29%2020.43.50.png?dl=0

 

We drove to Casa Grande to see one more film in our attempt to see all the Academy Award nominated films. This time we saw Lady Bird our 4th movie in 3 weeks. And all 4 were great. My faith in movies is renewed. Of course it helps that none of these films had a super hero. I don’t think I need to see one more superhero.

The film is a coming-of-age story from the point of a view of a bright, lively, rebellious, and far from perfect 17 year old girl, Christine, (who gave herself the name Lady Bird because she wanted a name of her own, not one given by her parents). It was minor rebellion, but not her last. The film was written and directed by Greta Gerwig who deserves an immense amount of credit cinematic gem.

Saoirse Ronan, the star of last year’s Brooklyn, which we also enjoyed in Arizona, plays Lady Bird. The central core of this movie is her difficult and complicated relationship with her mother whom she clearly loves, though not without challenges.

The movie opens with a scene in which the 2 have been on a car trip looking at colleges. Mother (played by Laurie Metcalfe) and daughter are both crying over the final passages of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. We get the impression that these two have a great ideal relationship. That feeling is quickly dissolved as they argue over which college Ladybird should go. Lady Bird wants to go out east where there is culture, not Sacramento, her hometown, which is “the Midwest of California.” The ride ends with a shock. Not a happy shock.

I loved the scene where mother and daughter were shopping together in a department store for a special dress. They constantly bicker and argue until the mother spots a great dress and Lady Bird is instantly ecstatic. This reminded me of another great movie, The Commitments, in which the band was constantly arguing until they got on stage and played music that was magic. All dissension melted away in the beauty of the songs.

Lady Bird’s best friend, Julie, is played by Beanie Feldstein.  Their relationship is also complicated. Life is never simple except in the Hallmark movies. There is a wonderful scene where the two of them wolf down a whole box of communion wafers as if they were fast food. Perhaps they are fast food? They play a great trick on the nun who is principal of the school, when they tie a “Just Married to Jesus” sign on the back of her car. After Lady Bird dumps her friend for a more popular friend Julie points out that she is a “moron in a deeper sense.” Not in the ordinary sense of someone like Donald Trump I suppose.

Lady Bird also has an interesting relationship with a seemingly perfect boy friend, Danny, played by Lucas Hedges, until she discovers he is more interested in boys than girls. At a school dance, when they are dancing too close, the nun walks by and says, “Leave 6 inches for the Holy Spirit,” which I have learned is what the Nuns always said.

Her second choice of a boyfriend is hardly better. That is Kyle played by Timothée Chalamet. He is a listless cad who deceives her into thinking that he is losing his virginity with her as she is with him. When he admits she is his 6th , Lady Bird starts to cry. She says to him, I wanted it (her first sex) to be special. He asks, “Why? You’re going to have so much unspecial sex in your life.”

When Kyle comes to pick her up to take her to the prom, he stays in the car car and honks his horn. Her father asks Lady Bird, “You won’t go to a guy who honks for you will you?” Sadly, showing her rebelliousness is not yet complete, she does run to him. Her individuality has limits. Those limits are shown again when the cool kids say lets skip the prom and Lady Bird, obviously disappointed, acquiesces in order to be cool. Fortunately she later asserts herself and goes with her best friend Julie instead. The rebel matures.

Lady Bird thinks that she has already finished the learning part of High School, but this is far from true. With her friends she learns that smoking, drinking, and sex aren’t all they’re cracked up to be either.

I also loved the scene with the Nun principal, who had read her essay to get into college. The Nun told her, “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento.” This comes as a surprise to Lady Bird (and me and probably all viewers who have learned how frustrated she is about her home town). Lady Bird has a thoughtful reply: “I guess I pay attention.” To which the wise Sister replies, “Don’t you think they’re the same thing?”

All in all I loved the movie about a young girl who was able to confront the fears that so many of us have. And not just young people either. have: Fear of not being accepted. Fear of not being loved. Fear of the future. Fear of failure. Fear of not pleasing your loving parents. Lady Bird makes missteps, but she shines. She shines for us all, lighting the way, because we all need more light and more bravery.

Pontificator-in-Chief

Travel

 

The Pontificator’s Hot Tub

One day at the pool we were sad to see the return of the Pontificator-in-Chief. He is an extremely opinionated right wing evangelist. He has boisterous, bellicose, and offered belligerent opinions that he loves to share with a voice so loud it can be heard across the pool. In fact, if he is the hot tub his is the only voice that is audible. Why is it such opinionators have such loud voices? I have to be careful in asking that question because I have a loud voice, but I don’t think my opinions are as extreme, but I recognize that extremism is in the eye of the beholder. In this case we were amused to see that within minutes of mouthing off the hot tub was vacated as fast as if he had shouted “Water Snake.”

All the Money in the World.

Movies, Philosophy/Ideas, Social democracy

 

 

When we are in Arizona we love to see movies. I am not sure why, but we seem to have much more time for movies out here. We always try to see as many of the movies nominated for best picture as possible. The first movie we saw was All the Money in the World.

This film gained notoriety when Kevin Spacey, who originally played J. Paul Getty, was discharged from the film after it was shot, because of cascading allegations of sexual misconduct. Christopher Plummer was hired to play the role and all the scenes with Spacey were reshot one month before the release date of the film. It is incredible that so much could be done in such a short time. And they did it well.

The movie is based (inspired by it says) real events that occurred in 1973 when Italian kidnappers abducted the grandson of J. Paul Getty, John Paul Getty III. The grandfather, according to the film, was not only the richest man in the world; he was the richest man in the history of the world. Even though the grandson was the most favorite of all of his grandchildren, Getty hardly raised an eyebrow when he heard news of the kidnapping because he was watching the stock market results on the ticker tape. That is sacred of course.

When the media asked Getty how much he would pay to have his grandson released he said, quietly, ominously, and matter-of-factly, “Nothing.” It was shocking.

Only when a cut off ear of the grandson was sent to him in the mail did Getty start to take this seriously and even then, he did it as a business tycoon. He tried to get the best deal he could. He bargained. He bargained for the life of his favorite grandson. Getty said he has no money to spare.

Later when Getty reneges on his promise to pay because the oil embargo has made him more insecure, his chief fixer, Chase, played by Mark Wahlberg, asks Getty, “But no one has ever been richer than you are. What would it take for your to feel secure?” “More,” was the chilling answer. The answer of a true businessman.

There was one more element in the movie I found interesting. Recently I have been thinking a lot about rich people. Rich people and their fears. Some people have criticized me for this saying I sow seeds of class conflict. I disagree but may deal with that issue some time.

The rich seem to have intense fears, not the least when they are most secure. That is what I find most interesting. Why do the most secure seem to feel the most insecurity? In fact, it often seems the richer they are, the more fearful they are. I always think this is a hint that they feel guilt over their wealth. They feel that they don’t deserve it and someone will be coming to take it away, and they had better be prepared.

Peter Bradshaw the movie reviewer in The Guardian had some interesting things to say about Getty in this context. As Bradshaw said, “This film suggests they (the rich) also have more fear of their own children – fear that they will parasitically suck away energy that should be devoted to building up riches and status; that they will fail to be worthy inheritors of it, or waste it, or cause it to be catastrophically mortgaged to their own pampered weakness. This fear is the driving force of Ridley Scott’s raucous pedal-to-the-metal thriller about the ageing and super-rich oil tycoon J. Paul Getty.”[1]

Fear makes the rich do strange things. Things that might not be to their own advantage. Things that reveal a stark lack of fellow feeling. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The rich are different from you and me,” to which Ernest Hemingway is famously alleged to have replied: “Yes, they have more money.” Hemingway should have said, “Yes they have more fear.”

Kris Kristofferson wisely said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” That was true. But he could have said, just as truly, “Fear is just another word for everything left to lose.”

[1] Peter Bradshaw, “All the Money in the World review–raucous crime thriller banishes ghost of Kevin Spacey,” The Guardian (Dec. 19, 2017)

The Return of History

Books, History, politics, violence, War

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4l7eqqbpyzwnka3/Screenshot%202018-01-26%2000.35.56.png?dl=0

 

One of the best things about an extended stay vacation is that it offers time for things it is harder to do at home–such as reading.  Reading is one of my greatest pleasures.  I will comment on a few of the books I have read on this vacation. Here is the first

Today I am recommending not just a book, but a series of books. I am talking about the Massey Lectures a series of outstanding books by great thinkers co-sponsored by CBC, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College at the University of Toronto. Oddly, I have actually brought the two most recent books in this series on this trip.

The book I just finished is The Return of History by Jennifer Welsh. Welsh’s book is a rethink of an earlier very famous article by American political commentator Frances Fukuyama entitled “The End of History,” in which he argued that the demise of confrontation of East and West epitomized by the apparent end of the Cold War in 1989, was actually much more than that. Fukuyama argued this was the end of humanity’s ideological evolution as it entailed the “universalization of Western liberal democracy.” In other words it was the final form of government and this would lead to a waning of traditional power politics and large-scale conflict and the emergence of a much more peaceful world. Optimistic wasn’t he? Welsh definitively puts an end to this thesis, based on historical events that occurred since then.

What I really liked about the book (and there were many things) was the way she knitted together a broad collection of international historical events into a rational narrative without over-simplifying them. She makes sense of history in other words.

Too many of us (me clearly included) catch only a glimpse of current events, particularly on the international stage, by reading newspapers and magazines, or watching news stories on television, or, horrors, listening to our opinionated buddies at the coffee shop. Naturally we miss parts of each story. Often we miss large parts of the story without realizing it. It is difficult to understand what is going on in the world that way.

It is really nice for someone like Welsh to put them together in a comprehensive and rational way and look at them that way. It makes us feel briefly smarter. Sadly, that feeling soon passes with each new overtaking event.

When we look at places like Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and closer to home like the United States Germany and Great Britain, among many others, complacency is hardly justified by the facts. Dread is a much more rational response. It is not the triumph of the west that we can reasonably look forward to, the decline of the west seems much more likely.

Welsh points out that liberal democracy has overcome many crises in its short history during which it has flourished, but this has lulled both its leaders and its citizens into a false sense of complacency that is rapidly crumbling. As she says, “Our relative success in the past has created blind spots that now threaten to take us into a decade or more of great political, as well as economic turmoil. History is back with a vengeance.”[1]

This is a very good book.

[1] Jennifer Welsh, The Return of History, (2016) p. 46

Hatred, Fear, and Sympathy in War

Television Shows, War, War in Vietnam,

 

Before they went to Vietnam, none of the American soldiers had been taught very much about the people they were fighting or the people they thought they were serving. American troops called the Vietnamese gooks–words first used by US Marines about the people of Haiti and Nicaragua during the American occupation of those countries. It hardly shows respect. They also applied the word to the North Koreans during that conflict. They had called the Japanese “slopes.” The Australians called the Chinese “dinks.” Those words were used in basic training. They said the Americans would be fightin gooks. “Vietnamese might be people, but gooks are close to being animals.” Soldiers referred to older Vietnamese women as “Mamasans” a term used to describe women who ran whore-houses in occupied Japan.   It was dehumanization again.

The North Vietnamese called G.I.s “invaders.” That is exactly what they were. They also called them “imperialists” which I believe they were, and Giăc Mŷ which meant “American bandits.”

By the summer of 1967 Americans were fighting in every part of Vietnam. Fighting was very intense in 1 Corp in the north. The Marines bore the brunt of the fighting there. 98% of the 2&1/2 million people who lived there lived within the narrow rice-growing river valleys along the South China Sea.

John Musgrave of the Marines was serving there. His company was heavily shelled by artillery hidden away in the Demilitarized Zone (‘DMZ’). They called that “the Dead Marine Zone.” His outfit was so heavily hit that it was referred to as “the walking dead.” Musgrave said that when he went to war “he wanted to be a part of the varsity”. He wanted to fight the North Vietnamese Army (‘NVA”). He said if he lived to be 62 some day he did not want to look in the mirror and see someone who had not given his all for what he believed in. He did not want someone else to do “the harder part.” He had pride. Some days when he was being heavily shelled he thought he was nuts, but he did it anyway. He thought it was his duty.

Musgrave said that every contact with the NVA was an ambush. They would contact the Americans unless they outnumbered them and “we were fighting in their yard.” Of course, I would ask him, why did you stay in your yard? They knew the ground; we didn’t. But that wasn’t all. “They were just really good.” Obviously he respected them. Why wouldn’t he?

All soldiers had weaknesses. According to Le Van Cho of the North Vietnamese his side had a big one. They smoked American cigarettes and left a trail that they could easily follow. The NVA also seemed to carry seemingly indestructible AK–47 weapons. The Americans used newly minted M-16s that for a time had a fatal flaw–they needed constant cleaning. They also often jammed in the middle of firing. Or as John Musgrave said, “Their rifles worked; ours didn’t. The M-16 was a piece of shit. You can’t throw your bullets at the enemy and have them be effective. And that rifle malfunctioned on us repeatedly.” I always thought American had superior weapons. I never realized that. I wondered, were the guns supplied by crony capitalists?

The Americans also had another “defect,” though in this case I am not sure that is the right word. As NVA member Ho Huu Lan pointed out, “When one of their soldiers was wounded or killed, and another ran up to retrieve the body, we were able to shoot them too.”

Though Musgrave obviously respected the soldiers, he said, “My hatred for them was pure. I hated them so much. And I was so scared of them. Boy I was terrified of them. And the scareder I got, the more I hated them.” Fear and hatred are indeed twins. In fact they are Siamese Twins.

Ho Huu Lan said, sympathy and hatred were interwoven, but on the battlefield hatred was dominant. The Americans were determined to kill us. We had to kill them too.

That’s what war is like. You have to fight the other even when you respect them.