Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Blue Wave

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Thrilled to see we won the House in a blue wave, despite James Carville. Did better than I thought in Senate, and way better with governors. Can’t wait to see state house results. I thought Nelson would and Gillum might win, sad, thought Kemp’s suppression would work, it did (decisively), and thought Beto would lose by 6 percent at least, maybe even ten. The Dems are back in the Midwest, Texas Mexican-Americans are finally voting like California Mexican-Americans (it’ll be azul in a decade) and they are a force in Arizona and Colorado, and I think it was Indians who nearly elected a Democrat governor in South Dakota. There are a hundred women in the House, millennials voted in vast herds, California is bluer then fuck, and while a Nazi was the only surviving Republican in Iowa’s congressional delegation, a Democrat won in Oklahoma and Kansas isn’t Kansas anymore.

Basically we kicked Trump’s ass from here to the Florida state line. That squishing you hear is the worm, turning.

Anger

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I’m discovering that my not being angry about some things makes angry people angrier. Sometimes really angry, and I feel a twinge of anger in response about something I’m not even angry about. I’m learning to not say anything about anything I’m not angry about and focus only on things that really piss me off, like this.

The Fall of Men

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My wife comes in with the mail. You got a new New York Review of Books she says, handing it to me. Thank god, a distraction. Facebook is a minefield and Twitter a massacre. Rachel Maddow just said penis a second time in five minutes on MSNBC. Film of Trump being a pig and Cosby being led to prison and more talk of Kavanaugh’s virginity. I switch off the TV and pick up the magazine. THE FALL OF MEN the cover said. Sigh. I put it down and flip on the radio. Joni Mitchell. Oh no. I never liked Joni Mitchell, but never felt guilty about it before. I turn off the radio and I switch on an old movie channel. Stella! yells Brando.

Brent Kavanaugh saying he was a virgin on Fox News in front of God and everybody

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Having been a virgin once myself, I feel compelled to point out that there is nothing in any of the accusations against Brent Kavanaugh that would have terminated his own status as a virgin. He humiliated himself on national television for no reason at all. Kavanaugh still could be guilty of sexual assault, but now Trump thinks he’s a sissy. Oh the irony.

Cheer up and vote

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Saw a post about how democracy and civil rights have not changed much in the 250 years of American history. That it remains much as it stood when the country began. I replied with this:

If you say the country hasn’t changed very much you’re saying that all the progress thus far has been for naught. It’s changed vastly and for the better, it just can be even better. I remember back when I worked for the UFW we were delivering food to an impoverished farm workers camp on a ranch outside Santa Paula. It wasn’t the worst such camp I’d seen but this one was engaged in a strike and was being threatened with mass evictions. We did a helluva lot of work supporting that cause. A couple years ago I was telling Fyl that story as we drove down the 126 and noticed we’d missed our turn and needed to go back. I pulled into a driveway and I realized that this was the site of that wretched encampment but now I was looking at a rows of clean, modern farm workers housing that I didn’t even know was there. No filthy outhouses. No raw sewage in open ditches. No kids playing in dirt. This was the direct result of the big effort the UFW to get the filthy old camp replaced by decent housing. Don’t tell me a couple centuries of civil rights struggles have gotten us nowhere.

And let me add this now, that I think we get carried away by the unreality of virtual reality into not seeing what has really been done and why we have to keep doing more. We’re all keyboard warriors here and keyboard warriors’ fingers tire quickly. But civil rights and democracy are real world things that impact real people, even us. They require much more than our fired up fingers. They require commitment and not just our opinion. We are winning and have been winning, it’s just that the struggle is a never ending one.

So cheer up and vote.

Memes

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The George Bush chimp meme set off the meme wars, if only because he was president when Facebook took off in a big way. As soon as Obama was elected the Right–especially the Tea Party–went nuts with their own vicious memes. And now with Trump we return the favor. And it’ll keep happening because each side holds the other side to rules that they themselves do not abide by. Which is nothing new, the pamphlets and newspapers in the 18th and 19th century were incredibly offensive and insulting and just as low brow as anything you see on your iPhone today. And both sides back then raged the same way we are all raging now, mortally offended by what the other side posts and finding all sorts of excuses for posting their own. Calls for censorship abounded, like they abound now, though the First Amendment prevented that for the most part. Now, though, with Facebook and Twitter essentially privatizing communication in ways that Ronald Reagan never imagined, wholesale censorship is possible in social media because the internet is somehow not considered to exist in the same heady constitutional air as the airwaves. Funny seeing the conservative stance on the internet suddenly condemned by outraged conservatives bewildered by the First Amendment. And funny too watching progressives defend social media as privately owned and free from those First Amendment restrictions. Meanwhile memes are fading, replaced by furious bursts of words. Not particularly intelligent words, necessarily, but words nonetheless. We’re getting oddly literate in the Age of Trump, even as Trump himself can barely tweet a coherent sentence.

Rainbow

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chuck-mannings-rainbowMy saxophonist pal Chuck Manning took this shot last year from the JPL parking lot. I had thought it was some NASA publicity stunt. But no, it was real, and someone called ICE who found a couple leprechauns at its end, impounded their gold, seized their pot and deported them back to Ireland.

Get off our lawns

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By 2040 seventy percent of Americans will live in fifteen states, which means that the population of the thirty five least populated states will have a super majority of seventy seats in the Senate. So a political party that has most of the senators from those thirty five states combined with a few of the larger states could have a lock on the Senate and prevent the other party from passing any legislation at all, even if the other party had a majority in the House and the presidency. It could also block all supreme Court appointments, cabinet picks, and treaties.

I imagine there will be a renewed interest in John C. Calhoun’s doctrines of the concurrent majority and nullification. They might even put his statue back up.

And then there’s this: by 2060 (I’ll be a spry 103, repeating myself on Geezerbook) one of every four American voters will be over 65. That’s not one of every four registered voters, or one of every four people of voting age, but one of every four people who actually vote. Over seventy per cent of people over 65 vote. The number of voters drops by age. Under thirties vote about 40-45 per cent of the time. This was true when people over 65 now were in their twenties as well (though they won’t admit it now. They were clean and respectful too.) Which means that if this voting trend continues as it always has, combined with the continuing decline in the birth rate (there has never been this few children as a proportion of the population as now) and increase in lifespan (people live an election cycle longer now than they did forty years ago) by 2060 about one out of every three voters will be over sixty. A virtual gerontocracy. Lawns will be kept off of by law.

To tie these paragraphs together, the states where the proportion of the population over 65 is growing and that under thirty is shrinking are almost all (if not all) among the 35 least populated. And I once looked at a map that showed the counties where the population was aging in red and those where the population was growing younger in blue. Then I looked at a map of the counties in the 2016 election, Trump’s in red, Hillary’s in blue. It was remarkable how similarly the colors were distributed on both maps. The older the county’s residents, the more likely Trump won it’s vote. But is this an age thing, or a generational thing? I’ll never know.

(Apologies for the lack of links to sources but I’m a dumb guy on a smart phone. When I get back on the computer I will add sources.)