Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Helen Chavez

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Very sorry to see that Helen Chavez died. I met her a couple times back in the 70’s. Everything is so vague, though….I lost lots of memory following a series of seizures back then and big parts of my life vanished, but I know some of us volunteers went out to Keene a couple times in my UFW days and I do remember Helen Chavez feeding us. It was a lunch with Cesar Chavez. I wish I could remember more of this. Two years as a volunteer with the United Farmworkers (1977-79) and I can barely remember any of it. I still have my hand sewn union flag. And digging through a box a couple years ago I found a folder just packed with information and notes of things I had participated in, strikes and meetings and press conferences. Lots of people’s names, too, though I couldn’t place them. Weird you work so closely with people and then they vanish from your head after a few big seizures.

My pal Darby Slick once asked me why I have never written about those days. That is why. I can’t remember them.

It’s funny but thinking back on this, I realized that we would have taken the 166 to get out there. So I had been on the 166 before, probably a couple times. Driving it two weeks ago, I assumed it was the first time. I hadn’t seen her obituary yet and the few hints of memories it brought back.

Anyway, I remember Helen Chavez as a very nice lady and a very good cook, and I remember her and Cesar holding hands.

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Lovely photo of Helen and Cesar Chavez dancing in 1978. Photo by UFW volunteer Carlos LeGerrette from the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, online at https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/

The undumpable Trump

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Why Can’t Republicans Distance Themselves From Donald Trump? Jamelle Bouie asks in his latest Slate piece. They’re Afraid, he says. Afraid of power, afraid for their careers, afraid of Donald. Which is all true. It’s a fascinating piece (as are all his articles), but I think he missed a key point about what makes them afraid. It’s Facebook. I think that something the media regularly misses (because they spend most of their time on social media with other pundits) but politicians do not miss (because they read social media from their constituents every day) is the power of Facebook to drive politics. Defying Trump can be disastrous for a Republican politician, because it could set off a tsunami–even a series of tsunamis–of incredibly angry, out of control, and crazily inaccurate Facebook posts that can severely damage a politician. When you have a tidal wave of furious Trump supporters calling Paul Ryan a RINO–he the lifelong Republican and they mostly recent converts–you can see just how dangerous a thing Facebook can be if you are on its wrong side.

The Tea Party was dangerous for Republicans, too, but it was an email phenomenon, and as such a Republican could confront it because Tea Partier’s frenzied emails would be seen by relatively few. Hundreds at most. But taking on Trump’s followers can expose you to literally hundreds of thousands of virally angry people, and there is as yet no way to safely contain that. This is anger several orders of magnitude beyond that of the Tea Party. An anger that actually crushed the Tea Party candidate, Donald Cruz. And while the media understands that the media itself has been instrumental in making Donald Trump the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, it doesn’t quite understand that it was not just the media,  not all that free television they gave him, but that television in conjunction with Facebook. The impact of an analog appearance on television would expand exponentially in the digital universe that is Facebook. Trump would be everywhere on Facebook, pro and against. He seemed to dominate it. Even progressives were overwhelmed by Trump related posts. While all his opponents were spending big money in traditional campaigns, Trump sucked up all the Republican oxygen on Facebook. Each opponent smothered and died. Trump became not only the presumptive nominee, but became the Republican Party as far as Facebook was concerned.

Now, Facebook also went a long way to propelling Bernie Sanders too, but unlike the ethnically homogenous Republicans, Hillary had a firewall of Black and Hispanic voters who were not in the same Facebook universe as all those angry white progressives. Facebook dominance only works if everyone is Facebook friends with each other. But Facebook connections between blacks and whites are few, and between whites and Hispanics are few. The tsunami of pro-Bernie posts (and they were overwhelming) stopped at that racial/ethnic line. Bernie people never seemed to notice this and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon wound up a white people thing, as you could see from the faces at his rallies. As the campaign went on Bernie began picking up support across color lines from under thirty voters, but this was past the time of that first critical explosion of Berniemania. Hillary’s firewalls had held fast just about everywhere and Bernie’s campaign was on the mathematical ropes after the Southern primaries. The battle lines hardened and Bernie’s revolution never really expanded beyond his base of white progressives. It was that demographic topography of Democratic and Democratic leaning independent voters that limited Bernie Sanders’ success to mostly small states (he won eleven of the states with under thirty delegates, and two of the thirteen with over one hundred delegates), and failed at all to shake the confidence of the Democratic establishment. Only one Senator endorsed Bernie. A handful of congressmen. A few unions. He barely made a dent in the establishment at all. Voters over fifty had little use for him. Hispanics rejected him by two or even three to one. Blacks by four to one. Bernie’s Facebook world was a swirl with passionate intensity, a passion that had not been seen in American politics in generations, but it was mainly among white people under age forty who never noticed that so few outside that demographic were sharing their posts.

But among Republicans and Republican leaning independents on Facebook, there were no barriers to Trump at all. Compared to Democrats, Republicans are an endless flat plain of ideologically very similar people, differing in little but their accents, and you don’t hear accents on Facebook. The Donald’s presence just kept growing and growing, flowing like water in all directions, and it seems now to have no limits within Republican voters. There are no firewalls stopping him. There are certainly no ethnic divisions. Everybody can share everybody’s posts. And as a result, Republican politicians are much more at the mercy of outraged people on Facebook. They can’t hide, like Hillary, in all the places where white Millennials do not digitally congregate, because Trump supporters are anywhere and everywhere. And I think to a large degree this explains the fearful reticence of Republican politicians to cross Donald Trump. Even John McCain doesn’t want to cross Donald Trump. Trump could level him with one tweet, a tweet pasted onto Facebook and posted from one end of the party of Abraham Lincoln to the other. And McCain’s own Arizona Republican constituents love Donald Trump. He has to tread very carefully now. That RINO POW McCain and the Mexican judge both gotta go, someone might post, and the likes would pop up like dandelions after a spring rain.

But has Trump gone too far quintupling down on that judge? Could Trump be dumped? The media seems to think so. You can see the reporters and analysts and the scary bald GOP strategists and the lovely Nicole Wallace convincing each other of this on panel shows. You cannot be a racist presidential nominee howls an outraged Joe Scarborough. But I suspect it is far too late to dump Trump. I think that the press sees more change in Republicans than is real. I think they take the hopeful and logical and thoroughly unracist opinions of some valiant Republican politicians far too seriously. Because a poll today showed that a majority of Republicans do not think that Trump has been racist going after that judge. And it is that majority of Republicans, across that immense flat and seamless plain of Republicanism, and not the press corps and their favorite talking heads, who will be going nuts on Facebook every time faint of heart Republicans try to dump or even distance themselves from The Donald. Facebook dominates the GOP rank and file right now, and any politician who knows how to dominate both the media and Facebook will rule the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. Republican politicians are right to be afraid of crossing Donald Trump. He has too many Facebook friends.

Bernie Sanders and the very last primary of 2016

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Bernie said in Santa Monica tonight that he will continue the fight for every last delegate. Yet the one remaining contest is the primary next week in Washington DC, and if demographic trends continue as they have in every other single race with comparable demographics, Bernie Sanders will get creamed. It could be 80-20 for Hillary. It is a guaranteed complete humiliation, yet he is making his last big push there, even calling for an army of volunteers and maximum effort. Today’s results were bad enough, but by announcing it is his last stand, he is bringing all the Washington and campaign press corps’ attention on his final disastrous defeat in the nation’s capitol next Tuesday, a contest that otherwise would have been a small item in the news. It’ll just make his campaign look like a failure. At least he won two of the six states tonight, but he cannot win anything in the Washington D.C. primary. And what is after that, the Super Delegates? Being blown out of the water in the last nine contests is a way to impress the Super Delegates? Because in a four day span Bernie Sanders lost the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, New Jersey, South Dakota, New Mexico, and California primaries. Next week, add Washington D.C. to that list. In the three biggest of those, the ones with most of the delegates–Puerto Rico, New Jersey and California–Bernie was crushed. Three Hillary landslides. She expanded her delegate lead by hundreds, and in a four day span Hillary Clinton increased her popular vote total over Bernie Sanders by about 800,000 votes. Bernie Sanders won the Montana primary and the North Dakota caucuses. That is it. Fighting for delegates this late in the game is not doing him any good. Indeed, it’s weakening him. He was a much bigger candidate just a week ago, making demands, promising an upset in California, getting more press than Hillary. He’s not so big now. He’ll be even less big after next Tuesday.

The Donald speaks

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The Donald giving a victory speech. Strangely subdued. Emasculated even. He sounds more like the guy in that Volkwagen Passat commercial driving his daughter to school than a raving fascist demagogue. Sad.

Wait..now he is picking up. Accusing Hillary of taking hundreds of millions of rubles in bribes from Putin while secretary of state. China too. Zillions of dollars. Shaking ’em down. Bill and Hillary using the State Department to make huge amounts of money at the expense of the American people. He promises a major speech next week. I wonder if he will have documentation, or just use Joe McCarthy’s list of communists in the State Department.

I knew it, one fifth of Bernie voters will say, he has my vote.

Also, Hillary has caused the mass migration of people from the middle east to America and Europe. From the entire world maybe, perhaps even that Mexican judge, it was all rather vague. Other bad things too, but I was too startled by the realization that Hillary was the change agent in 21st century human migration patterns. Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.

No PPP! an audience member yells. Yeah, no PPP Trumps says.

I have no idea what PPP means.

Then Trump says you mean no PP.

The audience snickers. I am still bewildered.

Maybe it was another penis joke.

Voting

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Overheard two Bernie voters this morning saying that they figured that voting for Bernie Sanders was a waste of a vote, and had been for a couple weeks. Neither were sure if they could get the time to vote today. It doesn’t seem worth it, they agreed. I disagreed. Voting for Bernie would not be a waste of time, I said, and if they supported Bernie they should get out and vote for him. Every vote he gets is important, I said, and I’m saying this as a Hillary supporter. They left fired up, determined to vote.

As long as Hillary wins or loses the California primary by more than a single vote, I am off the hook.
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The 2015 Los Angeles city primary election versus my washing machine.

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[From 2015. We got about a hundred times more calls in the city council and especially that school board primary in 2015 than in the presidential primary in 2016. Makes you wonder just how much power the school board has. Perhaps it is limitless and invisible, like that of Robert Moses when he ruled the world, or New York City anyway, leveling whole neighborhoods in a way only Curtis LeMay has ever dreamed of. Urban developing them back to the stone age. But I digress. Besides, only our neighborhood councils have that power.]  

After quite literally hundreds of phone calls, a tree’s worth of political mailings and a dozen people knocking at our door to remind me, I forgot to vote. I actually meant to vote. I told all those people at the door I would vote. In fact, I told them I’d vote for whoever it was they were knocking on my door for. They leave faster that way, with no messy arguing or hurt feelings. I even gave some of the thirstier among them bottles of water. I’m a civic minded kind of guy as far as hydration goes. I couldn’t tell you who they were canvassing for though. I probably put their brochures right into the recycle bin. Indeed, I can only name one candidate and that’s only because his name is on a sign the landlady stuck in the lawn. O’Grady or O’Brady. Something Irish. I always vote Irish, as long as they’re Democrat. My grandfather Nelligan taught me that. Other than that I had no idea who I was going to vote for. All the candidates began to look alike in the mailings, earnest and respectable and community minded. Half of them seemed to have taught my children history and civics, not that I had any children, and all of them wanted to be my friend. The phone calls didn’t help any, either, all these robot calls from celebrities I have never heard of. It’s more effective if I know who they are. Wayne Gretzky I wouldn’t have deleted. Or Betty White. Or Tom La Bonge himself, who I’ve been voting for forever. People I’d pay attention to in real life. Otherwise I don’t even bother to listen. Maybe the first fifty or so robot calls I did, thought I began to get irritated. But when I found myself talking back to a state senator I’d never heard of I figured it was time to remove myself from that part of the political debate. Alas, in my haste I was also hanging up on real people. One guy must have called us half a dozen times. I never did pick up. I began to feel sorry for him. Imagine what that does to one’s sense of self-worth. Throwing your heart and soul into somebody else being elected to the school board. That’s how life is for some people. Looking for celebrity in all the wrong places. Meaning like shadows on a wall. Your existence reduced to a voice the rest of us won’t listen to. Weird and existential and disturbing, though perhaps only in Silver Lake. And there’s still a half dozen messages blinking at me now, they must have come in early last night. Of course, at the time I was fixing the washing machine. I don’t know if you’ve ever fixed a washing machine, but the frames are huge and cumbersome and have to be moved around and struggled with, and they make these really cool metallic booming tympani noises every time you move them. The whole neighborhood knows you are fixing a washing machine. (Dryers are a much quieter repair. I just fixed ours a week ago in eerie silence.) Anyway, for a couple hours there I had a beautiful cacophony of metallic washing machine booms going on (you’re scaring the birds, my wife said), and then there was the test washing and the adjustments and the clean up and the ice cold beer and the Kings were winning and I managed to get lost around the end of the fifth century in a vast history of the middle ages and by the time I came out again it was well past eight o’clock and the polls were closed. Oh well. Now when they road diet my driveway, I will have no one to blame but myself.

Abuse and Cruelty

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So Kaley in the Humane Society commercials I have seen a zillion times says I should become a member to end abuse and cruelty in the world. Help us end abuse and cruelty in the world, she says. That is quite a to do list. 1) End abuse. 2) End cruelty. Apparently the Humane Society has taken on a greater scope of responsibilities than before. Or maybe abuse and cruelty are things that only happen to puppies and kitties. ISIS hates kittens. Boko Haram kicked my dog.
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Fear and loathing in the 43rd State Assembly District

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So this contest for the 43rd State Assembly District here in our neck of Los Angeles has gotten so twisted that now the mailers for the two liberal Democrats–we get a couple each everyday–are now accusing the other of being Republican. I opened up the mail box today and their campaign mailings spilled out, most of them downright nasty. The hit piece by the PAC supporting Democrat Laura Friedman against Democrat Ardy Kassakhian is quite subtle–pictures of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and the caption “Ardy Kassakhian’s Republican Party”, on an American flag backdrop. The hit piece on Democrat Laura Friedman by the PAC supporting Ardy Kassakhian says “The Right Wing Problem! Right-wing Billionaires are spending millions of dollars to elect Laura Friedman….”

There have been dozens of these mailings, some positive, mostly negative, and virtually all are paid for by the California Charter School Association (for Friedman) or the California Teachers Association (for Kassakhian). Friedman’s campaign got a head start with the nastiness, I remember, and it took a week or so before the Kassakhian campaign hit back. Since then both sides PAC’s have been going at it with abandon and seemingly limitless funds, and the election is still a week off. This has gone on for several election cycles now, a brutal charter school vs public education war in Silver Lake, where most people don’t even have children.

People have come knocking on our door as well, very nice people, I always tell them we are voting for whoever it is they are working for and they hand me a button and leave. I have yet to wear the buttons, though, they clash with my wardrobe and sense of self-worth.

The robocalls I just hang up on. In fact I just hung up on one now.

I will not like their Facebook pages.

Nothing I can do about the snail mail, though. I pry the obnoxiously oversized pieces from our mailbox and put them right in the recycle bin. More show up the next day. And since I voted by mail a week ago, every one of these items sent to our address is just a waste of a perfectly good tree. They will have no impact on the race one way or the other as far as this household is concerned. Of course, as Kassakhian and Friedman will emerge from next week’s primary as the two leading contenders for the seat, we get to go through the same thing all over again come the fall. Same two candidates, same two PACS, same nasty smear campaigns by the California Charter School Association and California Teachers Association. And while this torrent of postal abuse is unlikely to affect my vote at all,  it might leave me pretty sick of teachers by November.

Some of my best friends are Nazi stooges, and don’t even know it.

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(2014)

I’m seeing a lot about the Zionist media lately, coming from progressives. There’s a list making the rounds I’ve seen a few times in the past week that purports to show the Jews that control the media. It’s cherry picked, of course, running the gamut from people running movie studios to newscasters to CEOs of television networks to the guy who writes Talk of the Town in the New Yorker. The point of the list, as I’m seeing it lately, is to prove that the media is pro-Israel. Zionist. I’m not here to discuss the media’s stance on the war in Gaza one way or the other, but I just want to point out the source of that list. Next time you see it, copy and paste a couple of the lines into google. The exact same list–some of the exact same wording, in fact–will come up again and again, dozens of times, and nearly every single site will be a Nazi hate site. Aryan Nations. Storm Front. Even worse. Whoever it was that originally sourced that list for Anti-Zionist purposes found it on a Nazi website. There are sites that have all sorts of lists like that full of Jews broken down by industry and activity. Jewish actors, Jewish athletes, Jewish movie stars, Jewish intellectuals. Alongside Holocaust denials, white power oaths and pictures of Hitler. Some advocate extermination. Most use more colorful terms than Zionist.

See for yourself at www.Aryan-nation.org/zog/index.htm and look for Jewish Media. Believe it or not this is one of the milder sites.

Being opposed to Israeli policy is one thing, supporting Palestinian rights is one thing, being anti-war is one thing. Pictures of dead children are heartbreaking. People are upset. I’m upset. But please don’t fall into the trap of repeating Nazi propaganda when forwarding information around. Good revolutionaries that they are, the neo-Nazis have become masters at getting their message everywhere. The real irony is that people here on Facebook who are rightfully outraged at Christian Identity movements in this country or fascists in Kiev or watching Russian Nazis beat up gays and brown skinned immigrants in Moscow (as smiling police watch)…. These people post and share propaganda from those very same groups on their own Facebook page. You change a few appellations and drop the Holocaust denials and pictures of Hitler and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and many an outraged Progressive has no idea he has just shared anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda with all his Facebook friends.

White supremacism is growing. It’s thoroughly infiltrated the crazier fringe of the Tea Party movement, and you can see it all over the comments on Yahoo News.  Very disturbing stuff. Constant references to Jews this and Jews that and the Jews running the media. Holocaust denial is bigger than ever, expanding beyond its Hitler apologist roots. But some of that thinking is beginning to creep into the left as well. I was wondering how it was that Tea Party members–most of them ardent supporters of Israel–did not see the 21st century Nazis in their own midst. Then I began to see Nazi propaganda like this cherry picked Jews in Media list showing up on a lot of Progressive posts, and I realized how it works. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, people figure. There’s something about Facebook, like the comment sections on news websites, that inhibits logical thinking. It’s too impulsive, maybe, too quick. A medium not designed for a little research and introspection. Hell, Wikipedia is a couple keystrokes away but on Facebook Wikipedia might as well be in another room. Too far to go. Too many posts to read. Too many quizzes. What classic rock band are you?

Always look before posting. Sure it just takes a minute or two. Hate groups are out there, everywhere, like cancer cells. It’s too easy to spread their propaganda for them. You can’t hate them when they’re in Kiev or Moscow or Idaho but do their work for them on Facebook.

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