When I was in fourth grade I remember watching a movie in class where a woodcarver carefully shapes a toy canoe with a tiny figure in the seat, stabilizes his creation with lead and then walks from his cabin and out into the snow to set the boat down under a tree before returning to his hearth. We did not expect what happened next.

[Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I needed less than 20 seconds to not only identify the movie—Paddle to the Sea:

a 1966 National Film Board of Canada short live-action film directed, shot and edited by Bill Mason, based on the 1941 children’s book Paddle-to-the-Sea by American author and illustrator Holling C. Holling. The film follows the adventures of a child’s hand-carved toy Indian in a canoe as it makes its way from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, through Canada’s waterways.

—but to also find the full, 28-minute movie on YouTube.]

This memory came to me this morning while reading the sixth desideratum—Step Out From Under Your Parental Shade—of James Hollis’ Living An Examined Life because the woodcarver was a good parent. He did his best craft a fine creation with love and attention, provided the necessary stabilization with the lead ballast, and even carved a helpful message—I am paddle to the sea. Please put me back in the water—on the bottom in case the journey was interrupted. Then he let his creation free in the world. That is my idea of a good parent. Hollis writes:

There are no “good old days.” Memory is deceptive, and what is longed for is the unconsciousness, that “certainty” that comforted the ignorant and kept them safe within their fixed categories of belief and behavior. It was a constrictive world, an ignorant, fear-bound, prejudicial and bigoted world, and I am grateful so much of it is gone. p. 29-30

I hated my high school years. They sucked in so many ways I cannot begin to describe them. College, and my time in the Navy, however, I remember with great fondness. But I agree with Hollis, there were many more moments that I thought were horrible than those that weren’t. Yet, for some reason, perhaps because I felt a certain agency, an ability to steer my course, those were good years. I’ve never longed for “the good old days” (though there are seminal moments I would like to relive and perhaps get better the second time) and even in the final portion of my life, I am not nostalgic. I relish the adventure ahead.

In the face of such large examples, such overt and convert instructions, we have three choices: repeat what we saw, serve the messages; run from them in to over compensation; or try to “fix the problem,” heal the split within in any way, little knowing what gave rise to and sustains the split within us.

Most commonly we serve the model, the instructions, the stuck places we experienced in our families of origin, churches, synagogues, mosques and neighborhoods. All children desperately need some security, some reassurance, and what is more secure than common values, common practices, common prohibitions, common marching orders and common expectations to meet? Only if we make the mistake of travel and find that there is another world, another set of choices over that hill, do we tumble into the larger world of possibilities. And so the stifling patterns roll over into the next generation until, as in the ancient Greek tragic trilogies, some person suffers enough, comes to consciousness enough and breaks the skein of cause and effect. Only when the incestuous values of tribalism—the most emotionally seductive but psychologically primitive, culturally impoverished, and dangerous idea of all—are transcended does renewal ever come to the person or group. p. 30

I’ve been fortunate to have been afforded the third path. My early life models came from books because both my grandfather and father were readers and I followed their example. I learned what I knew of a world outside of my home inf Warren Township, in rural southeastern Ohio, because I had a library card.

Jung’s comment that the largest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent is a stunning reminder of the silent cost these generations bear. p. 31

I was spared, whether intentionally or no—this burden and like Holling’s caoe, I was set loose in the world by a loving woodcarver. Hollis concludes:

Through the years, so many conscientious parents have asked me, “How can I spare my children this discord through which I have had to pass?” My answer has always been something of a disappointment to them. The one thing parents can do for their children is live their lives as fully as they can, for this will open the children’s imagination, grant permission to them to have their own journey and open the doors of possibility for them. Wherever we are stuck, they will have a tendency to be stuck also or will spend their life trying to overcompensate. Living our own journey as fully as possible is not only a gift to our soul, it also frees up the generations behind us to live theirs as well. The very freedom to live our lives that we wished from our parents, we thereby grant to our children to live theirs. p. 32

Without knowing of Hollis while I was a teacher, this was always my philosophy; to provide the example and provide the basics so that my students might do with what they have what they will.

One common insult leveled at President George Walker Bush was that he was born on third base, but thought he had just hit a triple. The truth is that everyone in my cohort—white males born in the United States—may lay claim, with no credit to ourselves, to that advantage. I first realized this when I was serving in the Navy: I am a member of a global One Percent.

The reality, of course, is that Bush was born crossing home plate with the ball lost somewhere behind the backstop. Yes, there are many people better off than me, but for everyone above my station there are probably a few billion beneath me. (Let’s see, with a current world population of 7.594 billion, that puts the 99 percent at 7,518,060,000. Ouch.) Why that is should concern us all.

We many think that our lot is no more than our due, but untold generations have suffered and must begin by acknowledging the truth of that reality and begin to consider how we make that right. Or, in the terms James Hollis chooses: how we make amends.

In the fifth desideratum—Seek To Make Amends—of his Living An Examined Life James Hollis writes:

The easy part [of making amends], as it is not easy, is to come to an awareness of how our narcissism, our self-interest, our selfishness, our ignorance or our unconsciousness has brought harm to others. This difficulty certainly applies to members of groups, such as nations, institutional organizations, and political, social and economic movements that overtly or indirectly have brought harm to others. Those of us cast by fate into so-called first-world nations have long lived on the back of the disadvantaged. Upon whose back have our comforts, our clothing, our shoes, our products, our lifestyle come? Whose continued exploitation will our lives demand? These are not easy questions, and if we dare answer them, what then? Do we harden the heart one more time, find the rationalization and distract ourselves as before? And how do we make amends to generations of indigenous peoples, whose civilizations were destroyed in the name of our “progress?” How do we compensate ethnic groups suppressed and oppressed by the juggernaut of history that privileges one group at the cost of another? Making amends must start, then, with a greater awareness of the sins of our ancestors, how we have been privileged by those injustices and how that injustice is perpetuated by unconsciousness, indifference, rationalized self-interest and sheer momentum to this present day. p. 25-26

How? Easy? Determine just how much the offender benefited in today’s currency and begin making restitution. OK. So, not so easy. But other’s have figured this out. The two biggest examples are Post WW II Germany and Post Apartheid South Africa. Neither is perfect, but they made the effort which is more than we in the Western Hemisphere can claim as regards to the extermination and exploitation of First Peoples and the enslavement of West Africans.

Making such grand statements is easy for someone who won’t be doing the work or paying—at least directly—the bill, but what about amends on the personal level?

Making amends to those whom we have personally hurt, through our actions or inactions, is also difficult, for it requires us to become conscious first of all. In Swamplands Of The Soul, I examined three levels of guilt: contextual guilt, direct guilt and inauthentic guilt. Contextual guilt is described in the paragraph above. No nation has come to power without oppressing some of its citizens, no economic system represents a level playing field and no exceptionalism is free of rationalized injustices. Those who argue otherwise are morally obtuse or overtly evil, for much evil arises from such indifferent worship of self-interest. p. 26

Those last two sentences are very powerful. We’re all guilty. None of us have clean hands. We do, however, have choices. Hollis continues”

It does matter whether we serve something redemptive or something demonic. And it matters even more that we discern the origins of whatever we do and whether doing so serves something healing or in us or something that binds us in new ways to the disabling past. p. 26

Hollis makes an odd word choice here since redemptive is not an antonym of demonic. I might suggest corruptive for demonic, or, if he were really wed to demonic, then go with the obvious antonym: angelic. But that is just the editor in me.

For most of us, the pragmatic question always remains, What does my honest guilt make me do or keep from doing? p. 26

We each will answer that question in some unique manner. Do we set our error right? Do we dismiss the error as no error? Do we ignore the error outright and continue on? I don’t have an answer here.

The third form of guilt, inauthentic guilt, rises from the misnomer: we are not guilty, we are anxious. Most of us learned early that enacting who we are was not particularly welcome, was even risky, so we learned to split from our own nature and did so long enough to lose contact with it. In each of us there is a protective monitor. When a natural impulse arises, a spontaneous motive or act, some old, archaic warning system is also alerted and shuts it down. So, people who perfectly understand that the power to say yes or no to a moment constitutes the essential freedom and dignity of every soul will also say, “And I feel guilty when I say no.” p. 26-27

Hollis’ discussion of inauthentic guilt really caught me unawares. I have told many white lies in my life by giving inauthentic responses to questions such as: Do you like my new car? or Isn’t this a great band? I have also learned the hard way of the power of No. Particularly in business, but also in personal interactions, people make demands upon our time and other resources. When they do we have to decide how to allot our finite abilities, and there is no way to do that without saying No far more often than you say Yes. Hollis recognizes this and offers this simple test.

When, for example, we feel guilty, we can submit the feeling state to a simple test. Is it harm I have brought to another, whether intended or not? Or is it some form of inner split, in which I ally against my own reality in service to fitting in or avoiding retribution of one kind or another, and therefore continuously undermining the possibility of this moment with the protective programs of the past? p. 27

Doing so, requires a kind of courage—remember the need for courage and endurance—that we have to learn to practice.

If we find the third guilt, the protective mechanism in its familiar play, then renewed intentionality is demanded. In the end, we can address these self-imposed constrictions in only one way: counter-phobic behavior. That’s right: we have to do what we are afraid of. p. 27

I like Hollis’ use of renewed intentionality here. None of this is one-and-done and the endurance part can seem crushing, but we can save this starfish, and this one, and this one. Hollis concludes:

For all the amends we owe this broken world, for all the recompense we owe others, we also owe ourselves permission to be who we really are, finally, before we are no longer here. We have to make amends to our soul for all the moments of complicity, cowardice and co-option that were once protective but now sour the soul and render it bitter. p. 27

Yes we do.

Bonus No. 1: Liberals’ Wishful Thinking about Joe Biden.

Bonus No. 2: When Everything Changes: Is There Opportunity in Crisis?

Bonus No. 2: A former student of Ta-Nehisi Coates| 5 Writing Tips He Taught Me!

Bonus No. 3: Hasan’s Home Workout.

Do you know what the word “irony” means? I’m not too sure.

But try this: The big guy at the Pee Dee dumps a bunch of his reporters—during a pandemic and economic depression. No tears, please.

Then he turns around and seeks $10 contributions from the Pee Dee web readers. Even though he must know that the Pee Dee is owned by, yes, a BILLIONAIRE.

BILLIONAIRE BEGGING! That’s really rich.

The Pee Dee is owned by the Newhouse family of New York City.

They’re billionaires 18 and a half times over. Yes, worth $18.5 billion. The 11th richest family in America in 2016.

With a tin cup, courtesy of Chris Quinn. Only $10 a month.

Chris, get a hold of yourself.

This is embarrassing.

Please, let this bright idea just fade away.

Let it go, big guy, let it go.

You are going to embarrass the family.

I’ve written quite a bit about the family’s Cleveland business.

Here’s how they handled a hot potato. Tossed the reporter and the paper:

As I walked Gillighan—or more correctly, walked behind Gillighan as he scampered ahead, behind and around me—this morning, I thought about the nearness—less than five months away—of the 65th anniversary of my birth. The milestone is completely artificial, but yet like previous markers—nos. 16, 21, 30 and 40—this one calls to me.

Having read the first eight chapters—James Hollis prefers the word desideratum—of his Living An Examined Life I’ve finally identified what I think was the beginning of what Hollis calls the second half of the journey (More on that deeper down). At 65 I understand that I’ll be entering something of a final phase of life’s journey that, with luck, could become the closing panel of my life’s triptych. I can do quite a lot in 30 years if I’m so fortunate to be granted the boon.

In the fourth desideratum—Recover Personal Authority—Hollis begins:

In Shambabla: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, [a text found in my own library, JH] Chögyam Trungpa defines the warrior not as a agent of destruction but as one who is “brave,” and then observes “that this is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.” p. 19

I have longed thought of myself as a Spiritual Warrior and that thought was what drew me to Trungpa’s work. Bravery is recognizing your own fear and then doing what needs to be done in spite of that fear. That last part is important. The very idea of bungee jumping from New Zealand’s Kawarau Bridge scares the fuck out of me and I’ll never have the experience because there’s no good reason to think that such a jump needs doing. I did, however, while living in Northern Colorado learn to rock climb and I’ve had experiences in military helicopters that make bungee jumping seem tame.

Being brave is not the same as being stupid. Hollis continues:

The first half of life, at least for most of us, is essentially a giant unavoidable mistake. When I have offered this thought with deliberate hyperbole, to various audiences, inevitably people laugh, the laugh of rueful recognition. When well-meaning parents have asked, “What can I do to spare my child the disappointment and disasters of life?” I have said, “You can do little, if anything, because they have to try out their lives, make those mistakes and learn whatever they can from them.” In time, such painful experiences become the smithy in which a more authentic journey becomes possible—that is, if one does the work to learn what there is to learn. p. 20

And boy, did I make those mistakes; and I don’t regret them because I learned. And what I learned prepared me for Part II.

The second half of life is not a chronological moment but a psychological moment that some people, however old, however accomplished, however self-satisfied in life, never reach. The second half of life occurs when people, for whatever reason—death of a partner, end of marriage, illness, retirement, whatever—are obliged to radically consider who they are apart from their history, their roles and their commitments. Every young person “escapes” home and then goes out to repeat it, to be owned by it in overcompensation, or to attempt to “treat” it unconsciously through an addiction, a fugitive life or some form of distraction. Given that the farther away one gets from those primal influences, the more these special influencers still call the shots, most people sooner or later hit a wall. What they do then makes all the difference in their life. p. 20-21

The second half of my life began with what I came to think of as my walkabout when in 1995 I walked away from a job as a magazine editor and began writing what would become my first (unpublished) novel: Cold Silence. Several other major changes followed over the next five years that culminated with my divorce and,for me, a kind of rebirth. Those years provided the insights I needed to move on. Hollis continues:

In a letter in the 1950s, Jung observed that the work of being an evolved human being consists of three parts. Psychology can bring us insight, but then, he insisted, come the moral qualities of the individual: courage and endurance. So, having potentially come to consciousness, to have embraced insights as to what a dilemma is really about, one then has to find the courage to live it in the real world, with all its punitive powers, and to do so over time in the face of opposition both external and internal. p. 21

The courage and endurance bits ain’t easy. Other people may, hell, must, suffer for your insights and my own were no exception, but I had to find the courage to, as Hollis suggests, align my outer choices with my inner reality. He writes:

Whatever health and wholeness is, it surely involves aligning our outer choices with our inner reality. When the path we are on is right for our souls, the energy is there. When what we are doing is wrong for us, we can temporarily mobilize energy in service of goals, and often we must, but in time such forced mobilization leads to irritability, anger, burnout and symptoms of all kinds. When what we are doing is right for us, the feeling function supports us. That is, our autonomous feeling system supports rather than opposes our choices. The support of this autonomous evaluative process confirms the rightness of our choices, even when those around us do not endorse them. When we are doing what is right for us, we will feel a sense of purpose, meaning, and satisfaction and that communicates itself to others also.

Living our personal authority will not spare us from conflict, from suffering, from marginalization or even martyrdom. Many whom we most admire in history lived wretched lives, but we venerate them because something truthful was served through them. They lived their calling in the way in which we all are called. p. 23

At the end of my marriage I came to understand that my desire at age 30 to grow up and be a productive adult after ten years spent in the Navy and college had been a mistake. That I had no idea what being an adult meant and that I would waste another 10 years of my own life and that of my wife. (Thank gawd I remained firm on my no-children rule.) Hollis concludes”

Insight, courage and endurance—not a bad litany of which to be mindful every day. The days we remember and do our best—all that is ever asked of us—are the days we reclaim personal authority from the vaults of history. Then we may know we have truly moved into the second half of life, the part where we get our life back.

That beautifully sums how I felt, and feel. I’ve continued to make mistakes. I’ve gotten many decisions wrong, but I’ve been in charge. I’ve learned to put my hands up and say to myself “I’m done” when I realize that, as Hollis writes, my: autonomous feeling system supports rather than opposes [my] choices.

Bonus No. 1: Thousands of dollars in fines have been issued by police clearly loving the freedom to penalize pretty much anyone.

Bonus No. 2: Jamie Oliver, Keep Cooking & Carry On—Homemade Egg Fried Rice.

We, at least in the Western world, are all about tossing out the old to bring in the new; celebrating New Year’s Day and making resolutions; seeing each day as the first day of the rest of our lives; except when we aren’t. James Hollis seems to argue that we keep marking the new day in an attempt, and failing, to free ourselves from our past.

Why do we cling to the past, to our glory days, when we couldn’t wait to get them over when they were our present? Perhaps because we’ve internalized the idea the we’re better off with the devil we know. In the third desideratum —Let Go Of The Old—of his Living An Examined Life James Hollis rhetorically asks:

How often do we look back, “longing for the freedom of our chains,” rather than stepping into the opening maw of uncertainty?

Freud identified what he called “the repetition compulsion,” the drive within us to replicate the old, even if it is painful and leads up to predictable but familiar dead ends. First we can acknowledge the power of negative programming in our lives. The examples are plentiful. How many abused children seek out, even marry, abusers? How many abusers repeat their pathologically circumscribed images of relationships? But Freud also speculated that one might repeat the traumatizing experience as somehow “safer” than the original, believing somehow that it will be better this time. p. 13

We’ve all seen, hell, lived, this. From an evolutionary perspective, I have to wonder how this obvious glitch occurs. We don’t need to learn twice that fire burns or that eating a bad mussel will end with us hugging the porcelain gawd and praying to Ralph. We also, however, all have bad behaviors that initially produce pleasant results. Then they don’t. Hollis continues:

Letting go of the old is apparently much more difficult than we think. We believe we do so by relocating our homes, taking a different kind of vacation, even swapping relational partners, but the replicative patterns remain. The only constant presence in every scene of the long-running soap opera that is our life is us. So, undeniably, we have to bear responsibility for how this story is unfolding. And yet, who do these patterns, especially those that are harmful to us and others, have such a grip on us?

Where we find patterns, we also will likely find core, emotion-laden ideas within us, ideas that may or may not be conscious, may or may not be accurate, may or may not be ours but have been part of our formative experience and the primal atmosphere we inhabited. p. 14

I see these ideas as aspirations, you know, like Charlie Brown wanting to kick the football to the Moon. (This does put a certain spin on Lucy’s side hustle.)

Never in human history have individuals been freer to choose their life path, their values and to serve what is true for them. And with this freedom comes a tremendous backlash that opportunistic politicians utilize to their advantage. Those who want the “good old days,” who “want their country back,” are really wishing (a) that their once-privileged position be ratified and reified and (b) that the anxiety of ambiguity be treated with the anodyne of “certainty,” “recieved authority” and “traditional values.” What is not addressed—indeed what is most exploited, in every country, every culture, every religious or political hegemony under the onslaught of change—is how much of the blow-back is fueled by human psychopathology. That is, how much cultural tension, conflict and frenzy arise out of the anxiety of change, of ambiguity, of evolution, of eroded “certainties.” Little do such groups realize that their normative stories are just that: stories, interpretations, where were once repressed and resented as they too, overthrew the certainties of their age. As well, our present culture wars will be viewed by succeeding eras as laughably archaic, uninformed and constrictive. p. 15

Hollis’ book was published in 2018, but I have no way of knowing when he actually wrote the above, but I couldn’t help but see images of bright red Make America Great Again hats as I read. Which brings me, and Hollis, to another kind of clinging to the past, nostalgia; the certain knowledge that we did have a better life before—kind of like how Louis-Auguste felt as he swayed in the tumbrel.

[Letting go of the old] requires that we let go of what we thought certain and cast our lifeboats on a tenebrous sea. The more we resist change, the more we are allied against the nature of nature and the developmental agenda of our own psyches. Being aligned against our own nature is the very definition of neurosis. p. 16

But only if we have examined and understand our nature. Hollis makes the point that our nature is not, by necessity, static. We are not today who we were yesterday. Life is a process.

Life is a series of attachment and losses, beginning with our disconnect from the womb, a primal trauma from which we never wholly recover. During our journey, we link with, attach to and also separate from others on a continuing basis. People come and go in our lives. Some of these losses are traumatic: a marriage that sinks, a child lost, a career ended. These things hurt, yet not to move forward in service to life, in service to bringing more into this world, is abrogate our reason for being here—to bring our more evolved chip to the great mosaic of being, a humbling and ennobling participation in the vast puzzle that the human venture has been adding to or subtracting from since its beginning in the Africa veldt many millennia ago. p. 16-17

We lose parts of ourselves as we adapt to the demands of the world. Those for whom we care are often lost through death, divorce or dysfunction. Whether we absorb those loses into our system and soldier on or remain stuck at the level of the loss is the question. For example, those who have experienced betrayal in their lives often remain attached to the wound and the implicit message of that experience. p. 17

Until we realize that we are still in relationship to that complex, that intrapsychic imago of self and other, we are doomed like the ancient mariner to wander with our repetitive story. p. 17

We have to tell, and retell, our story until someone, perhaps we ourselves, actually listens.

How difficult it is to grasp the wisdom of Samuel Beckett in Endgame: “play and lose and have done with losing.” p. 17

As he does throughout these desiderata, Hollis appeals to a soul. For me, the soul is a construct we’ve developed to accomplish two impossibilities: to extend our existence past death and to place humanity above all other creatures great and small. I reject both notions. But I do see some utility in the concept. I use the term spirituality not in some metaphysical sense, but rather as the expression of our emotional understanding of our particular observations of reality. I think I can use soul in much the same way. Hollis writes:

If we had no soul, that is, had no organ of meaning, our adaptations would be our reality. But the soul protests and registers its protest through our body, our troubling dreams, our affective invasions, such as depressions or our addictive, anesthetizing self treatment. While most of modern psychiatry and psychotherapy prefer to work around these protests and thereby drive the internal conflict deeper, the psychodynamic understanding of symptoms, dreams and behavioral patterns is rather to ask: Why have you come? What is you are protesting? What is the desire of the soul (as opposed to the desires of my environment, my complexes, my history)? These questions do not bury the issue, try to bypass it or medicate it into numbness, but rather approach the soul with dignity and ask, as we might of any stranger who knocks at our door, “Why have you come? What do you want? How might we converse?”

Only with this sort of respect for the dialogue with he psyche can we begin to leave the old behind. p. 18

This last, the idea that we are in dialogue—through, sadly, an unreliable interpreter—with our unconscious, our ghost within the machine, really appeals to me. How might we converse, indeed.

Bonus No. 1: Why the left can’t just roll over for Joe Biden, even if Bernie asks us to.

Bonus No. 2: …Obama Endorses His Former VP… Joe Biden Outshines Donald Trump.

Bonus No. 3: Trump Can Lie About His Coronavirus Record, But People Remember…

Bonus No. 4: A very different take on Bonus No. 2.

Bonus No. 5: Dr. Jon LaPook Answers Your Questions About Covid-19.

Bonus No. 1: Matt Taibbi—A Quick Note In Response to Naked Capitalism.

One of the video’s I watched over the weekend was What Bernie accomplished and where we go next with: Amber Frost, Michael Brooks, Meagan Day & Matt Karp from Jacobin Magazine. As I’ve watched the death spiral of the Bernie Sanders campaign over recent weeks I told myself enough is enough. I’m through. Finished. Done and dusted.

I was a fourth—maybe more—generation Democrat. Sorry, grandma. To borrow a line from Ronald Reagan, I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left me. So, where do I go now.

Four times since I became old enough to vote in 1973, I didn’t mark my ballot for a Democratic Party candidate for President. The first time was 1996 when, disgusted with Neoliberalism and William Jefferson Clinton, I voted for the Green Party candidate: Ralph Nader. The second time the 2000 primary when I vote for John McCain—not because I didn’t plan on voting for Al Gore in the general election because I did and I did—but because I didn’t want George Walker Bush to be the Republican nominee. He was too, flat-out, dangerous. Damn, but I was right on that one.

The third time was 2012 when, again disgusted with the performance of Barack Hussein Obama on so many fronts I couldn’t bring myself to vote for him a second time, and again I went Green Party, this time voting for Jill Stein. I would vote for her again in 2016 because there was no way I was going to vote for Clinton 2.0. I’m done with the Greens too.

So, what do I do in 2020? Well, I’ve nearly pushed the button on the Democratic Socialist Party more than a dozen times in recent years, but just couldn’t bring myself to close the deal. A couple of months ago I subscribed to Jacobin Magazine, a periodical I’ve read on and off for years, but never financially supported. I’ve like what I’ve read. Then, just before we all self-isolated, I picked up The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara, the Jacobin’s founder and editor.

In reading the book—published a year ago and probably written two years ago—I came across this passage.

As we will see, an emergence of the movement around British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and to a lesser extent that of Bernie Sanders in the United States, represents a surprising challenge to the Third Way. What makes Corbyn in particular, so remarkable is the he doesn’t just offer a return to twentieth-century Labourism but wants new “class struggle social democracy” in which party meeting, union hall and electoral rally are far from the only acceptable places to practice politics. Yet even if the more combative approach of Corbyn and Sanders succeeds in winning office, the new social democracy will encounter the same structural challenges as the old one, namely its reliance on the profitability of capital and the inflationary tendencies that accompany empowered workplaces and full employment policies. The resolution of these issues will lead us down one of two paths, albeit different one from those Palme suggested: back to economic orthodoxy or toward a more radical, democratic socialist tradition. p. 126-7

Here in April 2020, with both Corbyn and Bernie in the dustbin, that seems a little quaint. I can’t say that I’ve learned any new facts from the book, but it has helped me to recall my own political roots in the ’70s and to remember the feeling of passion for a cause. I don’t think I’m too old to feel that again. For that and other, less emotional, reasons, I’ve decided to formally join the national DSA and to see what I can do for the local chapter here in Cleveland.

I first learned of socialism from an unlikely source: Kurt Vonnegut. He was long a supporter of Eugene Victor Debs, writing again and again about the man in both his fiction and his essays. The line from Debs that he most often quoted was this:

As long as there is a lower class, I’m in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there’s a soul in prison, I am not free.

Back in 2013, Matthew Gannon and Wilson Taylor wrote Vonnegut and Labor for Jacobin. That’s on my reading list for this afternoon.

Bonus No. 1: President Trump’s brain is not a metrics guy.

Bonus No. 2: Trump’s Mishandling Of The Covid-19 Crisis Is Confirmed By Dr. Fauci.

Bonus No. 3: John Heilemann has a blast speculating on Joe Biden’s VP pick.

Back in 1979—when I actually lived on board a warship powered by twin nuclear reactors—Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas starred in the James Bridges film: The China Syndrome. The movie was laughable, but—unlike our baby-in-chief—at least attempted to be serious. You wanna bet that everyone but the president wants to shut down the daily briefings?

Today’s press briefing tantrum (you can watch the entire diatribe here) may be the new Der Untergang. I have no doubt that The Rising will lede with this story tomorrow and I’ll post that as an update, but for now, here’s David Smith’s report—Wounded by media scrutiny, Trump turned a briefing into a presidential tantrum—from The Guardian. Smith ledes:

A toddler threw a self-pitying tantrum on live television on Monday night. Unfortunately he was 73 years old, wearing a long red tie and running the world’s most powerful country.

Donald Trump, starved of campaign rallies, Mar-a-Lago weekends and golf, and goaded by a bombshell newspaper report, couldn’t take it any more. Years of accreted grievance and resentment towards the media came gushing out in a torrent. He ranted, he raved, he melted down and he blew up the internet with one of the most jaw-dropping performances of his presidency.

This was, as he likes to put it, “a 10”.

Trump’s Easter had evidently been ruined by a damning 5,500-word New York Times investigation showing that Trump squandered precious time in January and February as numerous government figures were sounding the alarm about the coronavirus.

With more than 23,000 American lives lost in such circumstances, some presidents might now be considering resignation. Not Trump. He arrived in the west wing briefing room determined to tell the world, or at least his base, that he was not to blame. Instead it was a new and bloody phase of his war against the “enemy of the people”: the media. Families grieving loved ones lost to the virus were in for cold comfort here.

A CNN chyron is a worth a thousand words: “Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes”; “Trump uses task force briefing to try and rewrite history on coronavirus response”; “Trump melts down in angry response to reports he ignored virus warnings”; “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session”.

The thin-skinned president lashed out at reporters, swiped at Democrat Joe Biden and refused to accept that he had put a foot wrong. “So the story in the New York Times is a total fake, it’s a fake newspaper and they write fake stories. And someday, hopefully in five years when I’m not here, those papers are all going out of business because nobody’s going to read them,” Trump said.

Jesus Fucking Christ. We’ll see? WELL SEE!? At his worst, President Richard Milhous Nixon presented a more calm, presidential persona. Smith continues:

The briefing went on for well over two hours. Even Fox News gave up before the end. Adam Schiff, the chair of the House intelligence committee, spoke for many when he tweeted: “Why do reputable news organizations carry these daily Trump press conferences live?

“They are filled with misinformation and propaganda. From the president himself, no less. The country would be far better served and informed if they used highlights later. Enough is enough.”

Ya think? Any journalist or news organization would without the president’s dick in their mouth or up their ass will cease this kind of live, wall-to-wall coverage and do their damn jobs of reporting the news.

Update No. 2 at 1035: CNN absolutely LOSES it during Trump briefing.

Update No. 1 at 0439 on 14 April: Here’s how my local—libertarian/right-center—newspaper covereed the story.

Mano Singham posted the episode of Fresh Air yesterday and I included the link in this morning’s video fest, but I wanted to feature the transcript of final portion of Terry Gross’ interview with Michael Pollan in a separate blog post. I long ago became fascinated with how I could manipulate my own reactions to coffee by periodically taking caffeine fasts and Pollan got it.

I began to nodding my head vigorously when Pollan told Gross at timemark 25:48 about a lovely Saturday morning at their favorite local cafe in Berkley.

So my wife and I, Judith, we went to this local cafe where we used to go every morning before I had my fast, and I got my coffee and sat outside. It was a Saturday morning, and it was kind of a beautiful day. And there were lots of dads with little kids, you know, eating pastries. And I had this cup of coffee, and it was mind-blowingly good.

So, what did Pollan do to get that mind-blowingly good cup of coffee? Listen, or read below, to find out in Michael Pollan Explains Caffeine Cravings (And Why You Don’t Have To Quit).

GROSS: When we started our interview, you were telling us how you gave up coffee cold turkey when you were writing your book “Caffeine” because you wanted to know what’s it like – what impact does caffeine have on you and, to find out, you stopped it to see what the difference was. And to see how addictive it was, you did it cold turkey, so you could get the full force of ending your addiction.

POLLAN: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: And then after how many months you decided to start drinking?

POLLAN: After three months, yeah.

GROSS: And…

POLLAN: It was three months on herbal tea.

GROSS: And when you started drinking it again, was that still part of the experiment, or just ’cause…

POLLAN: Yeah.

GROSS: …You couldn’t bear to live without it anymore?

POLLAN: Oh, no. No, it was part of the experiment. I went as long as I could. But I knew before I finished the book that I would want to describe, you know, getting back on caffeine. I fully intended to get back to it. There—I didn’t learn—you know, aside from the sleep issue I mentioned earlier, there are not a lot of reasons to avoid caffeine. I mean, there are a lot of health benefits to drinking coffee and tea in moderation. Coffee and tea are protective—appear to be protective against several kinds of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular disease. There’s been a suspicion that coffee must be terrible for you. From the very start, in the 1600s, they claimed that it reduced male potency. And…

GROSS: (Laughter).

POLLAN: But it’s been cleared of that, too. So there isn’t a good reason not to drink it unless you have a problem with it—it makes you jittery, or, you know, your doctors told you not to. So I fully intended to get back on it. And I looked forward to the day, and I planned it very carefully. Initially, I thought I’d go to the original Peet’s, and that would have a kind of poetic logic to it, but it’s a little strong for me.

So my wife and I, Judith, we went to this local cafe where we used to go every morning before I had my fast, and I got my coffee and sat outside. It was a Saturday morning, and it was kind of a beautiful day. And there were lots of dads with little kids, you know, eating pastries. And I had this cup of coffee, and it was mind-blowingly good.

GROSS: (Laughter).

POLLAN: I just—I—you know, I just had this sense of well-being suffusing my body that, you know, rose to the level of euphoria. And I was like, wow. And it seemed like I had taken some kind of illicit drug, that this was cocaine or something. And that lasted for maybe 20 minutes, and then I got a little jittery and a little tetchy. And there was a garbage truck that was, you know, violently shaking these garbage cans into it across the street, and I was like, let’s get home. I have to—I want to get some stuff done.

And I felt this incredible surge of almost compulsive desire to get to some—get some stuff done. And I sat down at my computer, and I unsubscribed from about hundred listservs that were really bugging me (laughter) that—you know, these things come up on your computer every day, and you never have time to deal with them. Well, I dealt with them. And then I turned to my closet, and I saw that the pile of sweaters was all scrumbled (ph), and I organized all my sweaters. And I was incredibly productive for a couple hours.

Anyway, the experience made me realize that getting back on coffee and tea is very different than having your maintenance dose. And so I thought, is there a way I could hold on to the power of this drug experience? Otherwise, I was going to slip back into the ranks of, you know, normal caffeine addicts. So for a long time, I said, all right, just have coffee on Saturdays. And for a long time, I did that, and it worked pretty well. And I looked forward to Saturdays. I got a ton of stuff done. But eventually, the slippery slope intervened.

GROSS: So what is caffeine doing for you now?

POLLAN: What caffeine is doing for me now is kind of organizing the rhythms of my day. I mean, something, you know, I missed when I was off caffeine is there is that – you know, that morning surge and that sitting down to work and having that kind of real focus as you attack whatever you’re doing for the day. And then even—I enjoyed even the subsiding after lunch and that lull that you got around 3 o’clock, and you could have a cup of tea and that would kind of restore your energy for another hour or two. It just—the rhythm of the day was shaped by ingestion of this molecule. And it’s doing that for me now, and I understand that rhythm, and I can—you know, I thread my work through that rhythm, and it works for me. And I did miss it. You know, would I do another fast? I might. I mean, it—you know, I have to say that the pleasure of breaking that fast (laughter) was so great that it’s almost worth the work.

GROSS: So some people say, in comparing coffee and tea, that coffee is such an upper that it gets you to lose focus, whereas tea gets you to increase focus. What do you think?

POLLAN: I think it all depends on how you kind of titrate it. When I have a cup of coffee by my side and I’m writing, I don’t take a bunch of sips because you can get – you’re right; you can kind of overrun yourself, outstrip your mind and get a little too forward, get ahead of yourself. So I think though that we kind of automatically do that. I mean, if you look at when people take a sip of coffee, something’s going on. It’s not just that they’re thirsty. They’re reaching—you know, there’s some rhythm of the experience that they’re modulating, and we do this subconsciously. I think you can do the same with coffee or tea. I don’t think it’s inherent. But for me, writing, sipping coffee is, you know, really helpful. I didn’t feel the same when I was doing that, certainly with herbal tea. You know, I say in the book, what masterpiece has ever been produced on chamomile tea?

When you’re right you’re right. And Honoré de Balzac would be in total agreement.

Our imaginary world is filled with imaginary heroes. So much so that we ignore the very real heroes in our very real world. I’ve lost count of the times I asked students over the years: Who are your heroes? Sometimes I would get some sports figure or an entertainer but when I pressed them for a reason that person was their hero, I most often got blank looks.

I got those blanks looks because, to the student, the reason was plainly obvious: the person was rich, famous and admired. None of which have anything to do with being a grown-up. In the second chapter of Living An Examined Life—It’s Time To Grow Up, James Hollis argues that to be a grown-up is not to have heroes but to be a hero.

…we may from time to time come to realize that we are accountable for how things are playing out. When that realization occurs, a heroic summons follows: What am I asking of the other that I am not addressing myself?

I call that question heroic because it embodies a shift in our center of gravity brom the other “out there” to the other “within.” In other words, something in each of us always knows when we are shirking, avoiding, procrastinating, rationalizing. Sometimes we are obliged to face those uncomfortable facts when our plans, relationships, expectations of others collaspe, and we are left holding the bag of consequences.

Hollis a bit further down in the essay writes:

The moment we say, “I am responsible, I am accountable, I have to deal with this,” is the day we grow up, at least until the next time, the next regression, the next evasion.

Being a hero, being a grown-up is not a one and done. Being a grown-up is a never ending struggle that heroes take on because that’s what they do.

The hero archetype is an energy we have lauded for millennia: a person who addresses a task, overcomes a fear, acts where needed and provides an exemplum for others. But do we realize the presence of the hero archetype within us? To call it an archetype is to recognize its universal presence, found in a all peoples in all eras. The task of the hero within us it overthrow the powers of darkness, namely fear and lethargy. All those tales of defeating the dragon are mythopoetic versions of overthrowing the power of that which would swallow us, as both fear and lethargy do on a daily basis. Sooner or later, we are each called to face what we fear, respond to our summons to show up and overcome the vast lethargic powers within us. This is what is asked of us, to show up as the person we really are, as best we can manage, under circumstances over which we have no control. This showing up as best we can is growing up. That is all life really asks of us: to show up as best we can.

One of my writing mentors has been Joseph Campbell because I’ve found his Hero’s Journey so compelling for understanding storytelling. Reading Hollis’ narrative has made me consider—and I don’t know why I didn’t get this before—that Campbell was a Jungian. Robert Segal, in Was Joseph Campbell A Jungian?, makes the case that he was not.

When I was tutoring, I often found that my students lacked a pencil and I would give them one from my stash. At one point I decided to add a message to those pencils and I had a gross made up with Genius is doing the work… Now! embossed in gold lettering. I understand now that I could have just as easily substituted heroism for genius.

In concluding, Hollis reveals his admiration—an admiration I share—for the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He writes:

To compensate for my intimidation by fear and my inducement to lethargic avoidance, I often read the words of Marcus Aurelius as he rose in the morning, full of doubt, flush with fear and replete with ready rationalizations to avoid what threatened:

At day’s first light, have in readiness, against disinclination to leave your bed, the thought that “I am rising for the work of man.” Must I grumble at setting out to do what I was born for and for the sake of which I have been brought into the world? Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under my blankets and keep myself warm? “Ah, but it is a great deal more pleasant!” Was it for pleasure, then, that you were born and not for work?

When I read those words to myself, I imagine I can see him, sharing the fate of his comrades, cold and shivering on the freezing Donau, and facing implacable enemies.

Many of my students would know of Marcus Aurelius only from the movie the 2000 Russell Crowe movie Gladiator where Richard Harris played the emperor. If only I could have gotten them to read his Meditations. Hollis in his penultimate paragraph writes:

I remind myself to show up, in the best way I can, winning some of those internal battles against fear and lethargy,losing some, but with the the fond hope that if I show up as best I can , then I will also be a grown-up, be present. That is what our partners ask of us, our children ask of us and our world asks of us. When we show up as best we can, then on any given day, we are a grown-up and contribute to to carrying the world’s burden, rather than adding to it.

And finally:

Ask yourself these simple questions: Where do I need to grow up, step into my life? What fear will I need to confront in doing so? Is that fear realistic or from an earlier time in my development? And, given that heavy feeling I have carried for so long already, what is the price I have to pay for not growing up?

The fee, no matter what is charged, will be paid.

I’ve been watching more videos than usual during this government-enforced isolation spiritual retreat. Some of the videos are educationable and informative, some are funny and some are simply entertaining. I’m watching a lot more documentaries on Kanopy and British television on Hoopla (both free from my tax-supported public library) and a lot less on Netflix.

I’ve also taken to watching a lot more hard news from three primary sources: Democracy Now!, The Rising and Jacobin. For my late-night humor I also have four favorites: Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Hasan Minhaj and John Oliver. For pure escapist youtubering I have CruisingTheCut, Little Wars TV and Plasmo.

So, I’m starting to write this early on Saturday morning and I’ve scheduled the post for 0800 Sunday morning. I’ll add videos—in no particular order—throughout the day AND after the post time tomorrow—up to the most recent Last Week Tonight which I’ll post sometime Monday morning, to track just what I’ve been watching.

Enjoy.

• How to Legislate From Home with Rep. Katie Porter.
• The Week: Did Democrats guarantee Trump’s victory by pushing Bernie out?
• Chomsky: Trump’s…Coronavirus Response, Bernie… & What Gives Him Hope.
• What Bernie accomplished & where we go next with Frost, Brooks, Day & Karp.
• The Trump Administration Isn’t Social Distancing From Its Usual B.S.
• Sam Nails the Getty Museum Art Challenge.
• 73 Q’s with Samantha Bee.
• Michael Pollan Explains Caffeine Cravings (And Why You Don’t Have To Quit).
• Economist: Why we need a federal jobs guarantee NOW.
• Matt Bruenig: How the Nordic model works, and why you should care.
• Sanders former advisor Chuck Rocha: What went wrong and right for Bernie.
• American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs.

As promised, I close out this list with John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. The first link is to a pirated copy of the complete show. YouTube will take this down sometime Monday morning. The second link is to the core show which will not be taken down. Enjoy.

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 4/12/20.
• Coronavirus IV: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

Chapter 2 of James Hollis’ Living An Examined Life—Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey is It’s Time To Grow Up. Clearly the topic is important for him because he gave an earlier book—Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life—the subtitle: How to Finally, Really Grow Up. The admonition rang true with me because of a conversation I had with my dad.

At one of the schools where I was tutoring, another teacher and I was discussing if students were in less, the same or more danger than we had been in high school. I argued that the level was about the same, but that the sources of the danger were constantly changing. Curious about what threats my dad might have worried about when I was a teenager, I asked him. His reply shocked me. He said, “I don’t really remember, I was too busy growing up myself. My dad was 26 years older than me, so when I was 16, he would have been 42 years old. At 42, he was married for a second time and had three children with a fourth on the way. I should have asked him at what point he thought that he had finally grown up, but I didn’t. Now, at 64-and-half, Hollis is asking me the same question and I don’t know the answer. I think this chapter is going to need more than a single day to process.

So, what is Hollis talking about? On the first page he writes:

In traditional societies, hanging tenuously to this whirling planet, surviving the onslaught of the elements, harsh conditions and hostile agencies of all kinds, growing up was a matter of survival. The tribe could not afford to have children idling about. So, without a central committee sending out printed instructions, each civilization evolved rites of passage designed to ensure the transition from the naiveté and dependency of childhood to adult sensibilities that sacrifice comfort and sloth in service to the common interest.

Everyone had to pull their weight. There was no room for telephone sanitizers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. He then begins to detail how to prevent a load of useless bloody loonies from destroying the fragile society. On the second page, he continues:

Our ancestors were keen observers who understood that there is scant motive to sacrifice comfort and dependence unless one is required to do so. So, independently, without a central committee advising them, they came up with something useful: rites of passage. The six stages of passage varied in for, intensity, duration and cultural accoutrements, but essentially they were comparable around the world.[First] they involved departure from home, not with an engraved invitation, not with a polite request, but suddenly and decisively.Second, there was a ceremony of death, ranging from being buried in the earth, to immersion, to an effacement of one’s known referents.

I thought of George R.R. Martin’s Ironborn and their drowning ritual.

Third, there was a ceremony of rebirth, because an emergent being, a differentiated psychology was dawning. Fourth, they were given the teachings, in three categories: the archetypal stories of creation, of the gods, of the tribal history; the general roles and polity of adulthood in that culture; and the specific tools of hunting, fishing, child-bearing and agriculture unique to that tribe. Fifth, there was an ordeal of some kind, often involving isolation in order that one learn to cope with fear and find internal resources. Sixth, after prolonged separation, there was the return to the community as a separated adult.Only in this way did young people transition from the naiveté, dependency and avoidance of childhood to the expectations of adulthood.

Modern society has soft echoes of these rituals that are more social than practical and there are a few, more rigorous, trials such as outward bound camps and military training, but even within reasonably homogeneous societies, we’ve lost this common ritual. Hollis writes:

When we examine contemporary culture, we find these rites of passage missing. Instead of tools for personal strength and survival, we teach computer skills. We allow children to abide in the bosom of a protective culture, and accordingly we have very few initiated, separated, independent persons of adult sensibility. Aging alone does not do it; playing major roles in life does not do it. What is it that shifts one from a needy, blaming, dependent psychology to one of psychological independence? What characterizes our culture better than a needy, whiny clamor for instant gratification, a flight from accountability and an inability to tolerate the tension of opposites, rather than learning to live with ambiguity over the long haul and transcending the desire for rapid resolution of life’s quiddities?

The shift, according to Hollis, demands a heroic effort. (And quiddities is a great word.)

Life’s two biggest threats we carry within: fear and lethargy. Every morning we rise to find two gremlins at the foot of the bed. The named Fear says, “The world is too big for you, too much. You are not up to it. Find a way to slip-slide away again today” And the one named Lethargy says, “Hey, chill out. You’ve had a hard day. Turn on the telly, surf the Internet, have some chocolate. Tomorrow’s another day.” Those perverse twins munch up our souls every day

Boy do they ever. What jumps to my mind here is the myth of writer’s block. I long ago came to realize that the inability to write is nothing but Hollis’ first twin: fear, and that rising to write everyday, even when, especially when, what you write really, really sucks, demands that the writer face their fear—I use the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear—but I also have Walter Mosley’s words to the right of my desk where he reminds me each morning that:

The act of writing is a kind of guerilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory.

And yet, in the cool and shifting mists of morning, writers write.

Since Bernied Sanders announced that he was caving and tossing all his supporters overboard, I’ve written, or linked to, several posts and videos expressing displeasure disgust that he refused to kick the Democratic Party to the curb, or, at least, take the fight to the convention. Crowning Biden, and by extension, Trump, was the wrong move.

Make no mistake. Donald John Trump will defeat Joseph Robinette Biden in a landslide in November and the working people of this country will suffer as a result. Ralph Nader, however, disagrees with me. Perhaps Nader knows something that the rest of us don’t. Perhaps there is a path to victory. I’d love to be proven wrong.

Nader, in The Week We Should Not Forget for Our Own Sake, writes:

Much happened this week and we can’t afford to ignore any of it. The events of the last seven days provide significant opportunities for civic action.

1. Bernie Sanders suspended his peoples’ presidential campaign while staying on upcoming primary ballots to acquire more delegates to take to the Democratic convention. He concedes the nomination to Delaware corporatist Joe Biden. But he is determined to use his leverage to get Biden to adopt many important and practical reforms and redirections that would benefit the people instead of greedy big business CEOs. The unsteady Biden needs Sanders voters more than ever in several swing states.

2. The seriously unstable, ill-informed Trump is consumed by his destructive, all-consuming ego. This is no time to have a mindless madman at the helm of our careening ship of state. Each day, Trump spreads lies and misleading information and regularly and repeatedly contradicts himself as well as his honest government scientists and doctors. His delusional fantasies about the COVID-19 pandemic and his boastful role, combined with medical quackery, has led some media to stop broadcasting live his deceptive news briefing to protect the public. He nastily lashes back at criticism, blames, scapegoats and he flatters his easily manipulated sycophants. His delusions of grandeur know no bounds—on a scale of one to ten, he shamelessly rates his efforts to address the deadly pandemic a “Ten.”

When will influential Americans—in and outside of Congress—call for his resignation for the sake of the country? For far less erratic behavior, Senate Republicans, led by Barry Goldwater, visited President Nixon in 1974 and told him his time was up. Even stubborn Nixon quit, as do failing prime ministers in other countries.

3. The so-called Republican Party, which has long suppressed voters in minority, low income districts, is seizing on the coronavirus crisis to block more voters they don’t like from the polls. Republicans insisted on holding Tuesday’s chaotic and health-threatening Wisconsin primary.

Get this: only 5 of 183 voting precincts in Milwaukee were open. The regularly fascistic, gerrymandered Republican legislature refused to heed the Governor’s request for postponement, and shopped for Republican judges to support this criminogenic sham enterprise. Get ready for more tyranny in Republican controlled states, like Florida, Ohio, and Arizona in November.

Republicans falsely claim that mail-in voting opens the door to widespread voter fraud. Voting fraud is as rare as whooping cranes. Trump lies about mail-in voting fraud because he knows the higher the voter turnout, the more likely it is he and the Republicans could lose (See: A Short History of Presidential Election Crises: And How to Prevent the Next One by Alan Hirsch, Chair of the Justice and Law Studies program at Williams College).

4. Trump and the Federal Reserve’s multi-trillion dollar bailout of recklessly indebted corporations, from Wall Street to Houston, invites waste, commercial crimes, and price gouging. This bailout also opens the door to all sorts of scams harmful to consumers, workers, and the poor. Trump is busy firing his watchdogs and defiantly blocking Congressional efforts to shine bright lights on these massive hand-outs.

The big question is whether smug, profiteering corporate capitalism will come out of the pandemic with an even more control of local, state and federal governments. Will stock buybacks and other reckless practices continue unabated? Will Wall Street be able to avoid accountability for its crimes and misdeeds which triggered the 2008-2009 great recession? Will the taxpayers again be forced to bailout the business fat-cats at the expense of the American people on Main Street?

Less accountability, unrelenting crony capitalism, and weakened labor and consumer rights are on the horizon. It looks as if the voices of the people may again be ignored. Dear citizens, you must politically mobilize to ensure that the 535 members of Congress use their awesome constitutional powers for the public good.

Bernie Sanders is right to call for a people’s political revolution to roll back the silent corporate coups d’état. Corporatism has taken over public budgets, destabilized the tax system, and undermined the checks and balances that came out of the American Revolution against monarchical despotism. Corporate control left us totally unprepared and defenseless against pandemics that our public health officials, scientists, and yours truly warned about for years.

The problem is that too many voters have lost confidence in themselves as the sovereign authority in our constitution (“We the People”) and did not listen to Bernie Sanders, an honest and dedicated elected U.S. Senator, who has been so truthful and right for forty years.

When the lies are shouted loud enough, and long enough from the bully pulpit, hearing an honest and dedicated senator can become nearly impossible.

Bonus No. 1: Letter to Chairman Jerome H. Powell of the Federal Reserve—April 7, 2020.

Every Dane or Norseman who ever went viking would be in total awe of the way that Americans just cower in place while raiders steal billions, trillions, from the economy of the United States, with the full cooperation of all three branches of the federal government. And no one bothers to even pretend that what they’re doing isn’t just a normal part of doing business.

First there was the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 which created the $500 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. $500 billion. That number seems quaint in 2020 when the dollars are measured in trillions instead of billions. For a brief moment at the beginning of the decade there was a glimmer of hope in the Occupy Wall Street movement but that evaporated under financial influence in Congress and elsewhere.

Matt Taibbi became known beyond the reach of Rolling Stone Magazine with his reporting on the financial shenanigans. Now, with his independent gig at Substack is all over the the Wall Street grifters and corporate pirates collecting insane scores while more than 16 million Americans don’t know how they’re going to buy food or pay their rent. Taibbi, in The S.E.C. Rule That Destroyed The Universe, ledes:

The Covid-19 crisis has revealed gruesome core dysfunction. Drug companies have to be bribed to make needed medicines, state governments improvise harebrained plans for emergency elections, and industrial capacity has been offshored to the point where making enough masks seems beyond the greatest country in the world.

But the biggest shock involves the economy. How were we this vulnerable to disruption? Why do industries like airlines that just minutes ago were bragging about limitless profitability – American CEO Doug Parker a few years back insisted, “My personal view is that you won’t see losses in the industry at all” – suddenly need billions? Where the hell did the money go?

In Washington, everyone from Donald Trump to Joe Biden to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is suddenly pointing the finger at stock buybacks, a term many Americans are hearing for the first time.

This breaks a taboo of nearly forty years, during which politicians in both parties mostly kept silent about a form of legalized embezzlement and stock manipulation, greased by an obscure 1982 rule implemented by Ronald Reagan’s S.E.C., that devoured trillions of national wealth.

Between 2008 and 2020 the looting has gone on and on and on. Trillions have gone into the pockets of the billionaire class and no one seems to care. Taibbi writes:

It’s hard to overstate how much money has vanished. S&P 500 companies overall spent the size of the recent bailout—$2 trillion—on buybacks just in the last three years!

Banks spent $155 billion on buybacks and dividends across a 12-month period in 2019-2020. As former FDIC chief Sheila Bair pointed out last month, “as a rule of thumb $1 of capital supports $16 of lending.” So, $155 billion in buybacks and dividends translates into roughly $2.4 trillion in lending that didn’t happen.

Most all of the sectors receiving aid through the new CARES Act programs moved huge amounts to shareholders in recent years. The big four airlines – Delta, United, American, and Southwest – spent $43.7 billion on buybacks just since 2012. If that sum sounds familiar, it’s because it equals almost exactly the size of the $50 billion bailout airlines are being given as part of the CARES Act relief package.

The two major federal financial rescues, in 2008-2009 and now, have become an important part of a cover story shifting attention from all this looting: the public has been trained to think companies have been crippled by investment losses, when the biggest drain has really come via a relentless program of intentional extractions.

Corporate officers treat their own companies like mob-owned restaurants or strip mines, to be systematically pillaged for value using buybacks as the main extraction tool. During this period corporations laid off masses of workers they could afford to keep, begged for bailouts and federal subsidies they didn’t need, and issued mountains of unnecessary debt, essentially to pay for accelerated shareholder distributions.

All this was done in service of a lunatic religion of “maximizing shareholder value.” “MSV” by now has been proven a moronic canard – even onetime shareholder icon Jack Welch said ten years ago it was “the dumbest idea in the world” – and it’s had the result of promoting a generation of corporate leaders who are skilled at firing people, hustling public subsidies, and borrowing money to fund stock awards for themselves, but apparently know jack about anything else.

Money only flows one way, up. The only trickle down that 99 percent of Americans might see is if they get caught in a golden shower. Lots of people are hopeful. People like Economist Lenore Palladino, whom Taibbi writes:

hopes Covid-19 and other looming crises will force politicians and the public to see fundamental changes to corporate structure as inevitable.

“I believe there will be a political mandate to ensure business resiliency in the 2020s, not only to survive coronavirus, but so that the American workforce can thrive in the era of climate change,” she says. Banning buybacks, she says, would (among other reforms) comprise “one step towards rebalancing power inside corporations.”

However, unless the public puts more pressure on politicians to keep the issue alive during the coronavirus crisis, the $2 trillion rescue and the near-daily barrage of radical new bailout facilities being introduced – the Fed as of this writing is introducing yet another amazing “bazooka” program to hoover up junk bonds – could just end up subsidizing the last decade of buybacks.

If political focus on repurchases becomes a purely temporary policy fixation, a la Joe Biden’s “CEOS should wait a year before gouging their own firms again” proposal, this bailout will be massively counterproductive, enshrining buybacks in non-emergency times as a legitimate practice. If we can’t fix a glitch as obvious as 10b-18, what can we change?

Bernie walked away. We’re alone here. The 99 Percent, of the people in America who actually work for their living, can change all of this and build a future for the generations growing up today and those that will follow if we can stop buying the bull shit the One Percent spreads to keep us apart.

Bonus No. 1: MILLENNIALS/GEN-Z—ANOTHER LOST GENERATION…

Bonus No. 2: Have Progressives Given Up On Dem Establishment, Biden?

Bonus No. 3: Reed, Johnson, Legette & Brooks “Bernie, South Carolina, Black Voters.”

On Wednesday, I wrote: I’ve felt horrible enough knowing that we could have taken action to prevent global warming—we knew about the coming catastrophe in the ’60s but ignored the warnings—but now we’ve handed our progeny a financial crisis, partially driven by climate change. The kids are, definitely not, alright. So, what do we do?

I once asked my dad, who was born a few weeks before The Great Depression, what he remembered about growing up in the ’30s. “Not much,” he told me. “We did eat a lot of pancakes for supper.” Years later, while watching Smoke Signals, I remembered my dad’s comment and finally understood what he meant. Once we come out the other side of the pandemic, we may be eating a lot of pancakes because no one seems to have a plan for what happens after. Ted Rall, however, has some thoughts. In Neither Elizabeth Warren Nor Other Congressmen Have a Plan for the COVID-19 Depression, Rall ledes:

At least 16 million Americans have lost their jobs to the shutdown ordered to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. That staggering number does not include those who were unable to file due to crashing state websites overwhelmed by new claims, or by freelancers whom the government doesn’t count as unemployed when they lose their gigs. This is only going to get worse. Much worse.

Only one entity has the financial and organizational resources to mitigate the damage and forestall a total societal collapse reminiscent of the Soviet Union in 1991: the federal government.

Unfortunately, few politicians of either party have indicated that they understand the existential scale of this threat, much less internalized the fact that what they do or do not do will determine whether the United States continues as such. One exception is Elizabeth Warren. “Government action is essential to save lives and to rescue our economy,” she wrote in an April 9th op-ed in the New York Times, and she’s right.

More unfortunately still, even relatively smart leaders like Warren aren’t willing to go far enough to save themselves in the system they lead. This is terrifying. If your best and your brightest aren’t good enough, you’re finished.

The catastrophe is that we keep thinking about a really bad recession when we’re already in a depression as bad as that my father experienced. Rall drops the bomb:

Last week, when “only” 6 million new jobless claims had been filed, the unemployment rate had shot up to 13 percent. It’s higher now. Compare that to the Great Depression: people talk about 25 percent, but that was the peak in 1933. For most of the Depression, the unemployment rate averaged around 15%. We’re already there. We’re probably already higher than that. We are going higher still.

The unemployment rate is already worse than the Great Depression.

We just don’t know right now, and probably won’t know for weeks, what the unemployment rate is. And whatever number is announced, remember, minorities will suffer more.

Bonus No. 1: THIS AMERICA CAN NEVER BE PROGRESSIVE AGAIN…

Bonus No. 2: If you have a lot of time—Collector’s Edition.

Bonus No. 3: Under Cover of Covid-19, …Trump Ramps Up His War on Truth-Tellers.

Bonus No. 4: …Tim Warsinskey is a Liar and… Doesn’t Give a Shit About Cleveland.

Bonus No. 5: Progressives Decide: Dignity and Freedom, or Voting for Biden.

Bonus No. 1: Fuck right off, Bernie. (The second paragraph is perfect.)

Bonus No. 2: Team Politics Is the Great Equalizer between Republicans and Dem.

Bonus No. 3: Biden’s WEAK attempt to woo left… (Where I left this comment…)

Bonus No. 4: Japan Bombs Peal Harbor—FDR Calls Attack A Hoax.

Bonus No. 5: For those who missed the first mention, here’s Taibbi’s piece.

Yesterday I finished reading Dr. James Fung’s 2016 book: The Obesity Code—Unlocking the secrets of weight loss. I understand why the word secrets appears in the subhead, but I wish the marketing people had allowed Fung to use science instead because that is what the book is really about and the science is what makes the book so powerful.

My notes are too extensive to repeat here, but suffice to say that I’ve added Fung’s book to my list of TWENTY BOOKS THAT HAVE SHAPED MY WORLD. But none of that is what this post is about. This morning I began the next book in my reading stack: Living An Examined Life—Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey by James Hollis. I ordered the book—based on a recommendation from Oliver Burkeman—from the library just before the shut down began.

In the preface to the book, Hollis recommends reading one chapter (he describes each as a desiderata that will change your life) per day. There are 21 chapters so this is now my project for the balance of the month. He begins with The Choice Is Yours.

The first passage that I marked, more for a word that Hollis uses rather than the content—don’t panic, I did so in very light pencil for later erasure—is this:

We know that religions are mostly mythosocial constructs that arise out of tribal experiences that are institutionalized to preserve and to transmit and that the ontological claims of one tribe are no better, really, than the mythosocial constructs of other tribes. p. 2

As near as I can tell, the word is a construct coined by Hollis and I really like it. That passage leads into this sentence on the opposite page:

No longer does received authority—no matter how ratified by history, sanctioned by tradition—automatically govern. p. 3

And, Hollis writes…

How haunting is Carl Jung’s observation that whatever is denied within us is likely to come to us in the outer world as fate? (That thought alone keeps me at this work. p. 3)

I do think that one of the facets of this work that attracts me is that Hollis is a Jungian. While I have no great love for psychology as a whole, I have always found Jung’s works the most appealing because of his fascination with the mystical. (Another book by a Jungian—Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism by Thomas Moore is also a favorite of mine.)

As adults, we have a choice to either continue to adhere to the dogma of our childhood, regardless of any counter evidence, or to begin to form our own understanding of the world, or reality really, based upon our experiences: the choice is ours. This caught my attention on the next page:

Jung said in a letter once that life is a short pause between two great mysteries. Beware of those who offer answers. They maybe sincere, but their answers are not necessarily yours. Adaptive loyalty to what we have recieved from our environment may prove an unconscious subversion of the integrity of the soul. p. 4

Our reality, how we see the world around us and our perceptions of how the world works, is, by necessity, always in flux. I’m no great fan of Free Will. To me Free Will is a temporary construct based on ignorance. Hollis however, turns to philosophy to buttress his argument.

The argument of whether we are actually free or not goes back into the mists of the primal human imagining. But, as Jean Paul Sartre argued, we must act as if we are free, take on the “terrible” burden of choice, and be accountable. Whether free or not, we are obliged to to act as if we are free, and all systems, philosophies, moralities and juridical dicta expect accountability. p. 4

Yes, they expect accountability, but do they deserve accountability? That is a question to be considered another time. For now, I’ll except Hollis’ premise. On the same page, Hollis uses an unfamiliar, to me, phrase: the hour of the wolf. This is the time between night and dawn. The time, according to the tag line from The Hour of the Wolf,

is the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful.

Again, a very Jungian perspective. On the final page of the desideratum, Hollis writes:

If we show up, we must make choices and stop whining. In those moments, something shifts inside. We experience our life as more fully alive than it has been at any other hour. We realize that we cannot remain bound by fear, convention or adaptation. We realize that we now have, and have always had, choices. We can say yes or no, but we cannot say we have no choice in the matter. p. 6

This has always been true for me. This was the reason why I did not accept adult baptism at the time my friends did and instead set out on a 25-year journey that finally led me to my atheism. I really don’t like when people excuse their action, or inaction, by saying I had no choice when they really mean I couldn’t face the alternative.

Tomorrow, It’s Time to Grow Up.

Bonus No. 1: ‘The virus is color blind. We are not:’ Ta-Nehisi Coates on racial….

Bonus No. 2: In a pandemic, there’s no place I’d rather be than here in Appalachia.

Bonus No. 3: Hasan’s Tips To Brown Families At Home.

So, Bernie ignored my advice and folded like a secret-sauce soaked McDonald’s napkin. That leaves me no choice but to call the November election right here: Donald John Trump will be reëlected in and serve a second term make himself and those around him even more obscenely rich. I take no glee in this and I gained no solace from Bernie’s postmortem.

Millions of Americans—those who survive President Trump’s criminal mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic—will see their futures become ever bleaker as dreams of a progressive America fade even further in the distance. In this moment I have to say that—despite any belief that if you couldn’t laugh you’d have to cry—Bernie’s first post-capitulation interview did not set a happy note. Of just fuck me with a chainsaw…

And, as if the world wasn’t sad enough, we lost John Prine—10 October 1947—7 Appril2020.

Bonus No. 1: Brandi Carlile Pays Tribute To John Prine.

Bonus No. 2: And, of course, John himself…

Bonus No. 3: John Prine: 25 Essential Songs.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer (it dropped the word Cleveland during the city’s tough times in the 1960s) is not unknown for shabby treatment of its employees. Read: reporters.

Nor has it often managed to escape revelations of its crimes and misdemeanors. After all, it employs reporters. They tend to want to report. And talk.

I have come to believe that the majority of people (includeing our President) do not understand the function of reporting. Therefore, of the reporter’s state of mind. At least the good ones.

Everyone who knows what has been going in Cleveland with its daily newspaper knows what I’m going to write about.

After chopping 22 reporters—all union—and four nonunion, from its payroll the newspaper boss couldn’t wait a week before he struck another blow. This one to the few remaining Plain Dealer people. The management had already separated the staff by isolating the Cleveland.com staff from the PD staff.

This second quick blow could be attributed to Chris Quinn. Quinn is listed daily as Editor, Advance Ohio/Cleveland.com. But he’s the top guy. If he didn’t make the decision, he allowed it.

In this time of pandemic, these decisions are not just shabby but purposely cruel.

This, I believe, has to do with the future of a newspaper here.

It sort of leaves the newspaper itself one step from a permanent garbage pail. Not published four days a week. Not published one day a week. Not published as a paper at all.

That appears to be the strategy.

Produce a product that won’t be missed.

Indignities have befallen PD reporters before. Likely heading that list was a 1982 decision that should be near the top of any list of journalistic malpractice

The newspaper RETRACTED an investigative effort by Walt Bogdanich, now an investigative reporter for the New York Times. Elite city lawyers here had given thumbs up for the reporting. So the PD published.

Bogdanich’s expose reported that Teamster boss Jackie Presser was a government informer.

That’s pretty startling news. And it got backlash. From Teamsters.

It didn’t take long for the other, more pliable lawyers to come in play for the PD and Newhouse retreat.

The Plain Dealer, after publishing the expose, went from one of the city’s establishment firms, Baker-Hostetler, to get a more Teamster-friendly and politically connected law firms, headed by John Climaco. It’s called fixing the result.

That Sunday afternoon, after the retraction appeared, the deep distrust of the PD management was revealed by editorial employees picketing the newspaper.

I wrote at that time: “PD reporters acted sharply because of their trust of reporter Walt Bogdanich… and general mistrust of the editors.”

Some things hardly ever change.

Bogdanich said he had tape recordings of government officials revealing that Presser was an informant. The editors declined to listen to the tapes.

Now, in a move that can only be read as a tactic to make Plain Dealer side reporters writhe in disgust, managers have decided the remaining reporters can no longer report on Cleveland or Cuyahoga County matters. Their normal digs.

They have been demoted to the outer counties—Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina and Portage.

They MUST not report on Cleveland and county matters.

A slap in the face. A kick in the ass.

It is reminiscent of when PD reporters were assigned to review the Glenville riots. They did the job. Then they were told their work wouldn’t be published. Reason: They were unqualified to reach the conclusion they had. Soon after the New York Times sent a team for a similar postmortum. The Times reporters came to the same conclusions as the PD reporters had. The Times plastered the story over its front page.

The same can be said of reporters the PD now is dissing—Rachel Dissell, John Caniglia, John Petkovic, Michelle Jarboe, Laura DeMarco and Patrick O’Donnell.

They have done stellar work. So what?

This is a business. Get it.

How can any editor dismiss that kind of talent and send them essentially to the bench instead of working them in the main lineup of news coverage?

Only a power-hungry editor willing to do the work of the Newhouses no matter the cost to the newspaper or the community would follow those orders.

Chris Quinn apparently has qualified. More and more you hear from PD and former PD people of his power moves.

I could go on with similar malfeasance at the PD. Frankly, I’m tired of it and happy that the Cleveland Scene and Sam Allard have expended the effort to highlight these matters. The latest from Allard is worth reading and saving:

Just to prove this PD hasn’t lost its touch here is a Look Back over 25 years of media malfeasances.

For decades economists and other social scientists have lamented the end of the general hope felt by parents in America that there children would have better lives than they themselves had known. That was the American dream. The 20th century’s Lost Generation, a literary movement lived in the roaring 20’s in the 21st century, the only roaring may be anger.

My nieces and nephews, as well as my former students, are spread across two generations: Millennials and Generation Z. My generation, the Baby Boomers, will be reviled. I’ve felt horrible enough knowing that we could have taken action to prevent global warming—we knew about the coming catastrophe in the ’60s but ignored the warnings—but now we’ve handed our progeny a financial crisis, partially driven by climate change. The kids are, definitely not, alright.

Bonus No. 1: We were excited… But of course there were the possums.

Bonus No. 2: Supreme Court Blocks Extended Voting… Forces Voters Out To The Polls.

Bonus No. 3: Crisis Management (White House style).