The Day I Met Stephen Bannon

The Day I Met Stephen Bannon

When the weather’s warm I have my lunch outside. You need to get outside, out from the big old office building. Because it’s right across the street, and it’s a little different from most benches, I go over to the Joe Serna bench, next to the old city hall. It’s built of bronze and has a statue of Joe Serna and his wife having a picnic, with a little bowl of fruit on Joe’s knee. So I have lunch with Joe and his wife.

I see and sometimes meet all kinds of people out there, including homeless people, who congregate down around Cesar Chavez Park and the central hub downtown. I’m fascinated by the behavior of people, and the homeless present a perplexing view, and the contrast with all the business and governmental types is stark. And though it may not be true on the deeper level, it at least seems as though there is an acceptance of the situation by everyone – at lunchtime at least.

So, I was bemused when I looked over on the bench to see this disheveled old man in a rumpled suit sitting next to me. His face was pock-marked and his eyes were bloodshot.

I knew who he was right away.

“Where the fuck did you come from?” I asked.

“Your worst nightmare. Live with it.”

“You’re not my worst nightmare, asshole.”

He was a little offended at my calling him an asshole.  He seemed to think he was better than that.

“You’re much too much of a joke to be my worst nightmare. You’re getting this rep for being an intellectual! That is quite funny, my friend.”

“Your globalist crap just makes me want to vomit.”

“”Vomit away, fool. I’ve had a few people vomit over here in the Rhaphiolepis behind me. What’s with all this sovereignty stuff anyway? Why are you so het up about this? I’ve struggled to find the logic in this and I can’t find any real threat to the US’ sovereignty.”

“We’re being overrun with immigrants! This country is being taken over! Can’t you see that?”

“Well, yes and no’”

“Typical Leftist spinelessness.”

“No, seriously, I’ve sometimes been baffled at all the people who don’t speak English worth a damn, or that it seems like every motel you stop in, or cab driver you hail down, happens to Pakistani, or something Middle Eastern. Or that the college campuses are overrun with Asians. And…well, I guess that’s the kind of thing I’ve have been a little perplexed about, at times.”

“You are an idiot if you’re not with us. You can’t see what’s right in front of your face.”

“OK, clue me in, hotshot.”

“Because we’ve had open borders for decades, which, by the way, is because the Democrats need to get new voters into the country, we have lost our country! America was founded on the Judeo-Christian world view. You have no identity apart from that, it’s not America, and by the way, we’re not the world’s babysitters! Economic nationalism is imperative to save our country, and by the way, this is not about corporations, it’s about working people, we’re talking workers!”

“This is the 21^st century, you know? Has this all been a conspiracy, all this upwelling of international collaboration and cooperation?”

“You better believe it has been, globalism is the death of us. MAGA! baby, MAGA! We’ shout it out from the skyscrapers!”

“What the fuck are you talking about, asshole? How’d you ever pull off this ruse that you were an intellectual, anyway? Fake intellectuals, you and Gorka, and others. Don’t you ever get interested in other cultures, peoples, ways of doing things? I find it so striking and interesting when I hear other languages in the halls of my place over there. Hell, I lived in Africa for 8 years, and that was the thing – being plopped down into a different situation.”

“You’re hopeless. You’ve been listening the that liberal crap so long you can’t even think anymore.”

“You know, unlike you, I actually was a working man for 25 years. I fucking worked in factories, drove trucks and cabs, picked fruit in the orchards and crushed grapes in the wineries, I dug ditches for rich folk’s houses (with a view), endlessly raked clods of clay to landscape fancy ranch houses. I walked on 2 X 4 exterior wall plates, 3 floors up from a rocky ground. What the fuck have you done? Goldman Sacks? Some crappy and shallow political film rants, running a shoddy and poorly researched website that stirs up hate and vengeance?”

I think he was a little taken aback by my autobiography. He could tell that I was not a bullshitter, and, as much as he hated to admit it, he knew that that I had one over on him.

“Look, you can believe what you want to believe, and I’ll believe what I know. We’re gonna take this country over, better resign yourself to it.”

“I doubt it, asshole. I really do.  That’s not a world I want to live in, and I’m nowhere near alone in that.”

“Well, maybe you won’t have to. Live in it, I mean.”

He got up and kind of shuffled off, to somewhere. He seemed to think he knew where he was going. Right then I felt something plop down next to me on the bench. It was another old guy, disheveled and in rumpled clothes. His breath came with difficulty.

“How long have you been on the streets?’ I asked.

“Too long.” he answered. “I’m hungry.”

He was truly miserable. He needed help. I had a dollar in my wallet. It seemed like I should give it to him. But how would that help him? I felt pretty helpless, because it seemed that the only way to really help him was to forget my job and devote myself to this cause, or at least take a substantial chunk of time. Not too many of us can do that, and I’m way too selfish to even try. Why deny it?

“Good luck.” I told him. Bannon would probably say that this guy would have a job if it wasn’t for all the illegal immigrants. I had some serious doubts about that. But there was an inalienable truth that continually reverberated in my ears: we’re all full of crap. From our puny perspective, how could it be otherwise? I got up, crossed the street, and went back to work.

TWO SIX PACKS OF COLT .45

Pretty much a true story at age 14, with a recently departed friend, at age 66. Written maybe 35 years ago.

TWO SIX PACKS OF COLT .45

 

     I lifted my third can of Colt .45 to my mouth, guzzled, a little bit dripping down my jaw. I was definitely high, on my way to becoming drunk. It doesn’t take much when you first start.
     My buddy was down on the floor, doing push-ups. He was getting drunk too, and starting to feel like a real strong man. I held my can of Colt over his back and gave it a turn. Splip, splish…it cascaded onto his back, cold beer.
     “Hey! What the hell! Jesus! Goddamnit! What are you doing?” He folded up on the floor like a wet straw wrapper, then got on his knees and stared at me, mad.
     I laughed my ass off.
     “Think it’s pretty funny, eh?”    
     “It was.” I was still laughing, my belly shaking. “It was. You shoulda seen yourself!”
     “Oh yeah? Well here!”
     He gave his beer can a jerk in my direction and a stream of beer shot out in my face and splashed down over my chest.
     “Well shit, man…” I moved to paste him with a gusher.
     “Hey! No! Wait! We’ll get beer all over! My parents’ll know we’ve been drinking.”
     “Yeah, yeah, you’re right.”
     It was the first time either of us had been drunk. We were to become steady drinking buddies for the rest of that summer, and quite a few summers afterward when we became old pros. But it was new then, and a novelty. It was a discovery of a new world. We were bored with the one we lived in everyday. To be transported to a different world was an exciting and vibrant thing.
     We both popped open new beers and moved into the living room. I started slapping my face.
     “Hey! I can’t feel nothing!  Not a thing! I’m all numb!” I sat there slapping myself on the cheeks, hard, more and more amused. We both began to laugh, the laughter building and building like a snowball until we were helpless with it. I felt like I was about to burst out of my skin.
     “Whoo! I can’t feel anything! I can’t feeeel anything!” I sang, I laughed, rocking in my chair.
     Then I got up and jumped into the air, letting myself fall freely. I made no effort to break or soften the fall.
     “Wheee! Up we go!” Crash. “Down we fall! I can’t even feel this!”
     My friend joined in and there we were, both of us, jumping damn near to the ceiling and smashing to the floor like sacks of potatoes, rolling around on the rug in hysterical laughter. Everything in the room was quivering and jingling, the floor was shaking.
     “Can’t feeeel anything! This is crazy!”
     We got tired of that after awhile and sat with our beers. Colt.45 Malt Liquor. This was the strong stuff.
     “You ever wonder what it’s all about?” I asked.
     “What what’s all about?”
     “All of it. Everything. I mean look around. Why do we do what we do? Why do we go to school? Why do our parents work? Nobody ever enjoys their lives! I’m not going to be that way. I’m going to enjoy myself. I’m going to really live! There’s something wrong, but I don’t know what it is. So many people just work all day and watch T.V. all night. They don’t even notice what’s all around them! Then they get old and retire and they’re too old to enjoy things anymore. There’s something wrong.”
     “You’re drunk that’s what’s wrong.”
     “No, that’s what’s right! I feel alive! Everything’s vibrating!” I lifted the beer to the sky and swallowed, spilling it over my face. “Let’s go out!”
     We went stumbling down Rahway Ave. clutching our remaining beers, past the rows of tract houses that all looked the same. In a few blocks you’d leave one subdivision and move into another one of a different design. Then for blocks there would be that sameness, then you’d move into another, and so on. The purple eye seemed to stare out from all the windows. Everything was the same, everything was dull and boring and dead.
     “Look at all this, man! Look! Nobody’s doing anything! How come nobody’s doing anything?” I did a little dance in a circle pointing it all out to my friend.
     “Because they’re not drunk.” He grinned a large, stupid grin, like the Cheshire cat.
     I laughed loud and long, not worried about the neighbors.
     “Let’s go see Rita.” he said.
     Rita was a school friend of ours. She was a little girl, but she was also a very big girl. We were all very attracted to her for this but also because she was fun to be around. She was lively and laughing and just on the verge of loving, we felt. We all imagined ourselves up against that buxom body. She played with us like a cat and its nutmeg.
     Rita answered the doorbell and saw two wobbling idiots on her stoop.
     “Are you drunk?”  She was so full of energy and vivacity that drunkenness was incomprehensible to her. We knew it was not our night even for the fun of Rita, much less the deeper pleasure of her. We were shooed away and left on our own.
     We stumbled further on down the road, dragging our beers along by their plastic leashes, until we ended up among the factories, the industrial park in the next town, across the railroad tracks. There was a little stream that went under the road there, then into pipes and under the factories and warehouses. We didn’t know where it went, or what happened to it after it disappeared here. My pal went down into the gulch to take a leak.
     I stood on the bridge looking down at him, his white shirt almost glowing in the reflected electric light of the plant parking lights. I pulled it out and let the stream arc out into the air. From the bridge it sailed beautifully, down onto his back, sssshh, ssschip!
     He didn’t really know what was happening.
     “Hey, what the…?” then; “You’re pissing on me! You’re pissing on me! I can’t believe it! You’re pissing on me!”
      I was.
     He buttoned up and the chase was on, across the well tended plant and warehouse lawns, me screaming and hooting, him cursing and panting. We darted through the factory grass, into the parking lots, around the piled up pallets, laughing and cursing.
     Finally he caught me and rubbed my face in the wet grass. Helpless with laughter I couldn’t fight him off. We both rolled on our backs in the grass, blowing like whales. We couldn’t help but be friends again.
     On the way home we danced in front of the spotlights that shone onto a big brick warehouse wall, creating crazy pantomimes, wild shadow shows, falling on the grass in an ecstasy of release.
     We scuffed and stumbled back down Rahway Ave., heading for home where we’d have to put it all back in our pockets. We’d have to hide our crazy joy, push our breakthrough back into our brains and act as though the world really wasn’t a kaleidoscope of wondrous things. I fell off the sidewalk and into the street and lay on my back on the asphalt, as happy as if I were in a mountain meadow, stared at the sky and laughed and laughed. I laughed at the whole craziness of it, the absurdity of it, the wonder of it and the fear of it.
      We were fourteen and drunk and knew almost nothing and caught in the middle but we were still glad to be alive. We had that much.

 

Commonalities between two 'movements'

On the question of why the Nazis succeeded so rapidly in Germany in 1933, without much resistance (in spite of 56% of voters voting against the Nazis in 1932), one contemporary observer* suggested the main reason was fear; go along to avoid being beaten up. But he posited other reasons, such as the ‘intoxication of unity’; a betrayal by the weakness of previous leaders causing going along as ‘revenge’; a jumping on the bandwagon; and finally, the idea that they could change the direction of the Nazis from within.

In the Trump era we are nowhere near an environment of fear that Germany was in back then, but the intoxication of unity (Make America Great Again – Hitler was pumping people up to Make Germany Great Again); the vindictiveness of actions and policy from Trumpists reacting to perceived weakness of Obama et al.; jumping on the bandwagon; and going along in hopes that change, or moderation, can be effected from within - these seem to be common characteristics of the rise of Naziism and the rise of Trumpism. They are not unique to them though: Zumaism in South Africa, Mugabeism in Zimbabwe, others). But Naziism was the most extreme expression the world has seen, and Trumpism is the most extreme expression the US has seen.

The submergence of critical thought, of principles, the anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes, and the denial of and excuse-making for abhorrent actions and policies seem to be common as well.

There are enough differences in the character and institutions of the US and those of Germany in the 1930s (and in the historical conditions) to give me confidence that we will not go down that road, but there are threads of similarity in the two ‘movements’ that are still worth noting, and not forgetting.

*Referenced in ‘The Coming of the Third Reich’ by Richard J. Evans (2003)

Letter to Science

A letter submitted to Science magazine in response to an editorial by its Executive Publisher and Chief Executive Officer of AAAS, Rush Holt, where he claims the march was non-partisan. Guess it was too harsh for them to publish.

In response to Rush Holt’s editorial of May 5:
To claim that the impetus to rouse the tens to hundreds of thousands to march for science on April 22 was not the election and policies of the Trump administration is disingenuous at best, absurd at worst. The anti-science and anti-intellectual rhetoric of Trump and his cronies, the transformation and gutting of the EPA, the extreme climate change denial, the embrace of conspiracy theories, the eschewing of fact and evidence, the appalling budget proposals…etc. all acted on the slumbering passions of scientists who would not have engaged in this march otherwise.  The denigration of science and escape from evidence and reason has been ongoing for some time, but we can be quite sure that this march would not have happened had Clinton won the election.  It’s considered wise that science be non-partisan, but dissembling about it when it very much is partisan, does no service to anyone, and may in fact do a disservice to many.

An exemplar of misunderstanding and misplaced emotions

An exemplar of misunderstanding and misplaced emotions:

In Longview, Washington birch trees planted along streets have become infested with aphids (so the reports say, I have not checked to confirm that they are aphids and not a different hemipteran taxon). The city’s solution to this problem appeared to be removal of the trees, a solution that met with some resistance from tree lovers. The city council proposed applying imidacloprid in granular form around the bases of the trees. Not surprisingly, given the outcry against neonicotinoids, there was an outcry against this idea. A group of school girls, pictured in the news at their ‘pollination garden’, put together a presentation for the city council to ‘save the bees’ and when the motion came up for a vote it could not even find anyone to second it. The girls were lauded as having succeeded in ‘saving the bees’.

The problem with this story is the neglect in paying attention to the biology of the situation and acting in a rational way in the light of the biological knowledge: honey bees generally don’t spend time foraging at a wind pollinated plant such as the birch. It’s not worth their while and optimal foraging theory and empirical observation would suggest scout bees would not recruit other bees to such a resource. There is evidence of solitary bees and even honey bees using birch pollen though, especially when other resources are scarce. Birch blooms in the early spring and this can be accounted for by avoiding this time for treating the trees. Given the proper timing, the risk to bees from this application of imidacloprid would be very low and a cost/benefit analysis would suggest the treatment should go ahead.

Other solutions to the aphid problem are possible, of course, such as release of lady beetles, spraying with soaps or botanical oils, or even high pressure water treatment, but it’s a bit disconcerting that biology is often ignored when people attempt to ‘save’ the players involved in a biological game. This result is a clear abrogation of the basic principles of Integrated Pest Management (IPM).