APRIL 30, 2021
Roaming Charges:
One Hundred Days of Platitudes
First those Oscars, then this Biden speech. Has there ever been a duller
week of network television? I feel like I should be angrier than I am, but I
find it difficult to summon up much angst about Biden’s first quarterly
returns, as meager as they are. Biden didn’t promise to do much and the few
promises he made only the most credulous (or cynical) took seriously. By now,
most of us should have learned that American politics at its most fundamental
level is immune to change. Even Trump mainly delivered only sulfurous rhetoric,
which was enough to intoxicate his flock but didn’t even cause a minor glitch
in the underlying operating system of the Republic.
Those feral raiders of the Capitol, who tried to seize control of the
building in a doomed attempt to prevent the transfer of power, were apparently
unaware that real power, the power over their lives and ours, doesn’t change in
this system. It remains securely in place, steadily accreting its dominion year
after year.
Biden doesn’t even offer rhetoric as a placebo for our despair. He settles
for a steady stream of prefabricated platitudes, not poetic enough to inspire
or edgy enough to enrage. We are being fed a low-cal political diet that no one
seems to mind or care enough about to get excited over or agitated about. We’ve
entered the doldrums.
When Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump spoke before Congress, in the early
days at least, people seemed to analyze almost every phrase they spoke (or read
off the teleprompter), if only to dispute them, to shout–in our own heads, at
least–“Liar!” “Fraud!!” “Not true!!”
That’s not the case with Biden. We feel we already know what he will say
weeks before he says it. Or we don’t care what he says. Or we can’t understand
what he’s trying to say in his own fractured way and don’t want to even try to
understand, since it will make no difference one way or the other. It’s as if
most people have come to the conclusion that Biden’s lies are all white,
inconsequential slips of his perpetually-twisted tongue.
Part of it, I suspect, is our familiarity with the man or at least his
persona, because who really knows him, probably not even Jill? Externally, at
least, it’s the same Biden we’ve all seen and heard for years, decades. But
somehow he seems less hyper, a little more relaxed. I can imagine him waking up
on his 100th day in office and saying to himself, “I’m still
alive, Jack.” And he’d be right to do so. Many (even some in his own ranks) had
written him off.
Biden doesn’t make demands on us. He doesn’t suction our attention. He doesn’t
Tweet, doesn’t give press conferences or interviews. There are few big policy
announcements and even fewer big policies. For the first 100 days, it’s mostly
been government by autopilot. It’s as though in finally obtaining the pinnacle
of power that has obsessed him for five decades, Biden realized how powerless
he actually is over the forces that really run the government, the same forces
that he spent most of his political career cultivating and enabling. It must be
psychologically liberating to be at the top of a machine that runs itself.
And yet…people are dying prematurely at the highest rate we’ve ever seen in this
country. Dying with tubes down their throats, with a cop’s knee on their
necks, dying of thirst in the Sonoran desert, alone under a frayed blanket on
city streets, dying of hunger, OD’ing on opiates manufactured by Big Pharma
just to get you hooked, dying of suicide or with a bullet to the back of their
head in their own driveway.
We are becoming more and more inured to the death that surrounds us, to the
uniquely American way of killing and dying. Is anyone else having trouble
keeping up with all of the police shootings and suffocations that have
occurred since the Chauvin verdict, which we were
assured was a game-changer, a judicial cleansing of bad apples that would soon
restore the honor and integrity of police departments across the country?
We await some new tragedy, more horrific than the last, to spark outrage,
when what’s really outrageous is what we’ve begun to tolerate as normal.
In the face of this, Biden offers new words for old disorders. And he’s
largely gotten away with it unscathed. Bad cops must be prosecuted to save the
reputations of the departments that trained them and put them out on our
streets with their missions and weapons of violence. Immigrants can no longer
be called “illegal aliens”, but will be detained, separated from their kids and
deported for their own good. Health care is a universal right available to all
who have the money to buy insurance and pay for their medications. Climate
change is an existential threat to life on earth that must be confronted with
urgency by the forces of the free market. Palestinians are entitled to a state
as long as they renounce the means to protect its borders and sovereignty.
Every American will get a $2000 survival check minus the $600 they spent months
ago as a partial payment on long overdue bills. The war in Afghanistan will come
to end by extending the occupation another five months and patrolling its skies
with drones and bombers indefinitely.
So, the operating code has been upgraded, given a fresh name, to run the
same flawed program, yielding the familiar economic, environmental and moral
results. No one really feels good about it. No one really feels much of
anything at all. And that’s exactly the way Biden wants it. Gore Vidal’s
politics of amnesia has been supplanted by the politics of anesthesia.
It’s only been 100 days and the country already seems numb, insensate to
the widening fractures beneath its feet. In a land without outrage, you can get
away with almost anything.
+++
+ With more than 618,000 migrants expelled at the border under the
merciless enforcement of Title 42 of the Public Health Safety Act, Vox ran a
fairly important story this week which they titled “Biden is Quietly Enforcing One of Trump’s Most Anti-Immigrant
Policies.” Of course, this travesty is only happening “quietly”
because the liberals aren’t raising hell about it they way they did under
Trump…
+ Biden’s wide-tauted economic plan largely ignores the even meager
expansions to the US health care system he promised during the campaign.
Because if there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, it’s that the
political class can tolerate a lot of sickness and dying, as long as they’re
not the ones getting sick or dying…
+ The trouble with Biden summarized in one headline: “Biden Has More Respect for Liz Cheney Than Republicans Do…”
+ Is it too early to start the John Kerry deathwatch? He has apparently
made one of the fatal political transgressions in Washington: letting slip what
he really thinks of Israel. Apparently, Kerry, Biden’s patrician emissary on all matters
relating to climate and energy, told the Iranian ambassador that Israel had
struck against Iranian positions in Syria more than 200 times. This would
hardly qualify as breaking news to the Iranians. So, who leaked it to
Republicans in the Senate? Israel, most likely, who has always believed that
Kerry is soft on Iran.
+ Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan rushed to make amends, assuring his Israeli
counterpart, Meir Ben-Shabbat, that the US was ready to
work with Israel to counter “the growing threat of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
and Precision Guided Missiles produced by Iran and provided to its proxies in
the Middle East Region.”
+ The Biden administration offered proof of the seriousness of its pledge
by firing at Iranian navy boats in the
Persian Gulf a few hours after Sullivan’s make-up session with Ben-Shabbat.
+ Sen. John Barrasso: “President Biden has
turned over the keys to the White House to the far, far left wing of his party.
These are the people who are for big government programs and socialism.”
+ What Pentagon spending bill has Barrasso ever voted against?
+ For Mike Pence entering the White House was like checking into the Bates
Motel. He didn’t realize it then, and apparently still doesn’t, but Mother knows.
Yes, she does.
+ How many innocent people did the crackpot doctor from South Africa, who
testified for Derek Chauvin put away? We might soon find out.
+ This week’s award for the use of the passive voice in police reports goes
to the Alameda Police Department in describing the suffocation of Mario
Gonzalez, after police officers penned him to the ground for 5 minutes for being drunk in a park,
the day before the Chauvin verdict was announced: “An initial police report
from Alameda, south of Oakland, said that “a physical altercation ensued” when
officers tried to detain Mr. Gonzalez and that “at that time, the man had a medical
emergency.””
+ Chauvin juror: “It felt like every day was a funeral.” Given
the rate of police killings in America, it’s more like three funerals a day.
+ Virginia’s Jail Review Committee is urging the state to shut down the
shutdown the Hampton Roads Regional Jail where at
least 53 people have died since 2008, including Jamycheal Mitchell, a
mentally-disabled 24 year-old man jailed for stealing snacks from a local
7-Eleven.
+ The CEO of Emergent, the vaccine maker whose lab mishaps spoiled millions
of doses of the J&J COVID vaccine, sold $10 million stock shortly before
news of the screw-up became public. He should be sentenced to 5-years as a
laboratory animal for testing experimental drugs…
+ Statnews (which is on my daily must-read list) has published a pretty
good summary of the COVID knowns and unknowns.
+ On April 23, Tom Shimabukuro of the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force
reported that as of April 21 there have been a total of 15 confirmed cases of a blood clotting
condition among nearly eight million doses administered of the J&J vaccine.
All of the reported cases were in women. The highest risk appears to be among
women ages 30 to 39, among whom the rate was 11.8 per million–although it could
well turn out that women are the most likely to report their symptoms.
+ It now seems inevitable that the one person in the US who will go down
with a more fatally incompetent record on COVID than Trump is Andrew Cuomo.
+ If your student loan debt has been canceled, please raise your hand….
+ So much for the Great Exodus: It turns out that more Manhattanites moved to Brooklyn during the pandemic
than to Florida…
+ Who will mourn the end of the “Op-Ed“, in the NYT at least? (The real
question is whether the Times every really printed “op-eds” to begin with.)
+ Biden is nominating the Pentagon’s former chief weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, to serve as secretary of
the Air Force, which is, of course, what the Air Force is all about. An F-35 in
every garage!
+ Meanwhile, Michael Brown, the man Biden tapped to become the next
weapons’ buyer for the Pentagon, is now under investigation by the Department of Defense’s
Inspector General amid allegations that he circumventing
federal hiring regulations during his tenure at the Defense Innovation
Unit, a Silicon Valley-based agency established in 2015 under the Obama
administration to accelerate the importation of innovations from the corporate
tech sector into DOD.
+ Ted Cruz on Trevor Noah: “I remember when the Daily Show
was truly funny.” Let me guess, Ted. When it was white?
+ Tutar’s Revenge: Feds raid Rudy’s apartment and the world’s
most famous butt-dialer’s phone suddenly goes dead…
+ Linfield College (its pretensions to “university” status are dubious) has
always been a blight on the great city of McMinnville, Oregon. But the firing of a tenured professor for raising
credible allegations of sexual misconduct and antisemitism on campus is really
noxious behavior from the administrators of this rinky-dink institution.
+ Looks like Mother Superior jumped the gun again, as German police rolled
out in response to a bomb threat only to find a sex toy.
+ The population of the US isn’t declining. The rate of growth is. So why are people
freaking out? If you want the rate of growth to increase, just open the
borders.
+ Paris (agreement) is burning…
+ With reports that the axis of the Earth has shifted as a result
of melting glacial ice, we may have to revise Karl Jaspers’ Axial Theory of
History.
+ Maybe Noam will write it: “You can’t overestimate, we have
maybe a decade or two, that’s it, in which we can decide to get the heating of
the environment under control. If we don’t do it, we’re finished. It’s not that
everybody’s going to die the next year, but we’ll be on a course that is
irreversible.”
+ A study of narwhal tusks suggests that the increasing levels of mercury
in their system isn’t a result of fish consumption but to climate change and the loss of sea ice.
+ The end of coal in the EU by 2030? (Don’t
count on it.)
+ The water privatizers at Nestle’s are awful and their corporate
assets should be seized into the public trust, but when will the State have the
guts to go after the real water hogs in
drought-stricken California, the Westlands and Imperial irrigation districts?
+ An ingredient formulation (the exact chemical content of which remains
undisclosed) in Roundup killed 96% of tested bees within 24
hours.
+ Two wolves were illegally gunned down from a helicopter in
Montana’s Big Hole Valley last week. Their killers barely got a slap on the
wrist…
+ Politically, Montana is going in reverse and will soon pass Idaho as the
most reactionary state in the West. The state senate is now moving forward with
a bill ordering the investigation of environmental groups, who now
play the scapegoat role of ANTIFA for right-wingers in the Big Sky State.
+ I understand that a rapid transition to plant-based foods is a matter of
ecological (if not physiological) urgency, but do we really want to continue to
eat foods that “taste like meat” rather than moving away from
the idea of “meat” altogether?
+ Marine scientists have found what they believe to be as many as 25,000
barrels containing DDT that were dumped off the Southern California coast near
Catalina Island, where a massive underwater toxic waste site dating back to
World War II has long been suspected. This is also where the late Hollywood
reporter Charles Higham told me that the outtakes from many films were dumped
by the studios, including the lost footage from Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons
and John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage…
+ As the John Huston character says in Peter Viertel’s thinly veiled novel
about the chaos surrounding the filming of “The African Queen,” White Hunter, Black Heart:
“It’s not a crime to kill an elephant. It’s bigger than all that. It’s a sin to
kill an elephant. Do you understand? lt’s
a sin. It’s the only sin that you can buy a license and go out and commit.
That’s why l want to do it before l do anything else in this world.” (I don’t
think Mrs. LaPierre gave the moral implications of the life she was blasting
into oblivion even that much thought. As for Wayne, who ineptly shot a
different elephant three times before his two
guides finally brought it down, if the widowed cow elephant had trampled him, I
doubt she could have found the body parts (so microscopic they likely are)
she’d want to raise with her trunk as sign of victory.)
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