Trumping America

"It's amazing to me. A guy with the worst spray tan in America is attacking me for putting on makeup.”  "Donald is not going to 'Make America Great.' He's going to make America orange!"

~ Marco Rubio on Donald Trump

Historically presidential election years are characterized by truths and half-truths, partisanship, accusations, a fair bit of slander and enough melodrama to fill up several seasons of daytime TV.  They’re a Machiavellian daytime soap.  It’s popular to look back longingly at elections past and glorify them for having the dignity that never was.  And so we always try to lean on that nostalgia and the pretense that each upcoming election will rediscover statesmanship.  Yeah this election has squashed any hope of decorum. This election year a process that has at least historically pretended to having dignity has all of the decorum of a rolling barrel of random trash.  And that barrel was set in motion by the antics of one Donald J. Trump.  He came onto the political scene with all of the grace and tact of an exploding gasoline truck. 

Brief Notes from a Political Dreamer

I’m a dreamer apparently.  I’ve always thought of myself as being pretty matter of fact; pragmatic to the point of being stodgy.  I guess not.  Since I’ve hitched my political wagon to one Bernard Sanders I’ve been relegated to the ranks of the starry eyed idealists; Utopians with big ideas and small chance for success.  I’ve been told by the Hillary crowd that a vote for Sanders is tantamount to a vote for the GOP.  “We like Sanders," they say in that patronizing, I'm talking to an 8 year old tone.  "He’s got good ideas but they aren’t realistic.  Hillary has a better chance of beating Trump.”

The Quadrennial Games

It’s time once again for the quadrennial party.  You know the one.  That over the top orgy of backbiting, name calling, sore losers, graceless winners, allegations of cheating, actual cheating, xenophobia, jingoism, backroom deals, payoffs, under the table money and other assorted bad behavior.  Thought I was going to write about the Summer Olympics didn’t you?  Maybe another time.  This is about the presidential elections. 

Dinner at Mom's: 2nd Course - Fried Meat, Mushrooms, Politics and a Side Order of Fear

Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say?

Can't you see the fear that I'm feeling today?

If the button is pushed, there's no running away,

There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave,

take a look around you, boy, it's bound to scare you, boy,

but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,

ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction. 

~ Eve of Destruction written by P. F. Sloan, recorded by Barry McGuire.

October 1964; probably 3 or 4 times in a month mom put fried pork chops on the menu.  Chops carried more fat back then and so it followed that they carried a hell of a lot more flavor.  Mom would put the pan drippings to good use and make a batch of cream gravy.  Nothing quite like pork chops and mashed potatoes in a bath of cream gravy.  It was the meat and potatoes diet that was starting to undergo scrutiny.  The medicos waved a bony finger at America and warned that fatty red meat, cream, butter and all that frying was going to clog the arteries and bring about a national cardiac crisis.  We were faced with the fear that our diet was killing us.

As so as we cemented our arteries, we watched the dour TV newsmen report on the upcoming presidential election. The GOP had nominated the conservative Barry Goldwater to unseat Lyndon B. Johnson who took office after JFK was assassinated.  It was the dual of initials; LBJ versus AuH2O (the chemical symbols for Gold and Water).  Johnson teetered on the Vietnamese fence by positioning himself as a pillar of war restraint who could still be tough on Communism. It might have been a hard sell against anyone but Goldwater.  The Arizona Senator's tough posture on the Commies translated to acute "hoof in mouth" disease with some propositions that scared the shit out of the electorate. His notion on dealing with Chinese supply lines in Vietnam was to clear them out with "low yield nuclear weapons."  I still recall the GOP campaign slogan touting Goldwater's conservatism, "In your heart you know he's right," being turned by the Democrats to, "In your heart you know he might" (launch a nuke) and "In your guts you know he's nuts." And so as we sat at the dinner table that forkful of dessert hung suspended as we watched with unease and then gasped at Johnson’s campaign ad; a little girl, a daisy and a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Oh yeah, we knew all about mushroom clouds.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were within my parents’ recent memories and as a kid I remember news footage of those boiling explosions. My grade school friends and I may have been too young to be concerned but we knew all about mega tonnage and we were in awe along with the rest of the world of the Soviet's gargantuan tests. I was 10 years old when Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro had their atomic pissing contest. It was the Eve of Destruction that Barry McGuire would sing about two years later.

As kids we carried A-bombs in the backs of our minds.  We wondered if the destructive force of a nuke dropped on downtown San Francisco would carry as far south as San Mateo.  My friends and I would ride our bikes around the nearby College of San Mateo, often passing by the stairs that led down to the fallout shelter.  I seem to recall some sense of relief that we had a shelter so close, although in retrospect had the bomb been dropped when class was in session the shelter would have filled up with college students leaving the rest of us to go through the radioactive baking cycle. We knew all about the Strategic Air Command B-52s that hovered round the clock on the outskirts of Soviet air space to deliver retaliation in the event of of a Soviet launch.  We knew that fighter pilots on alert slept in the cockpits of their jets on the tarmacs.  When the sixties began we went through the bomb drills not really knowing what we were doing as we got into a tuck position under our desks.  We giggled and made faces at each other.  By the mid-sixties we probably started to question what the hell good a student desk would do in the midst of a nuclear attack.  Finally, by the end of the sixties as we entered high school we darkly joked that the tuck position was invented to be able to conveniently and easily "kiss your ass goodbye."  And yet there was this perverse fascination, an attraction to the images of nuclear blasts.  The vivid colors and the seeming grace in which the big cloud formed carried a strange and awful beauty. And then of course there was the awesome, hard to imagine power. We were transfixed, but really, who would admit to it?

Practicing to kiss your ass goodbye?

When I look back on the cold war I pause for a moment at 9/11; I recall the general fear that gripped our nation in the hours, days and weeks that followed. It makes me wonder how much fear our parents felt when they knew that destruction and death from above were just a few minutes away.  A nuclear storm could strike Oklahoma City with more destruction than a tornado and about as little warning; or a bomb could topple San Francisco as suddenly as a 7.0 earthquake.  If we kids could sense the danger of nuclear holocaust how much fear dogged our parents?  In some cases it was enough for them to build bomb shelters under the house and then be prepared to lock out the desperate folks who used to be friends and neighbors before the sky started to fall.

The images that left us in awe

In October 1963, just weeks before the election, my parents brought me with them to Washington Square in San Francisco to listen to Johnson preach peace in a stump speech.  LBJ concluded his speech by saying, “For 11 months I have tried to help us have peace in the world, and if I can have your help, if I can have your hand, if I can have your heart, if I can have your prayers, if the good Lord is willing, I will continue to try to lead this Nation and this world to peace." Johnson won the election handily but in the end it didn't work out so well; for LBJ or for America - at least not on the foreign policy front.

America sat at the dinner table that election year and was fed a diet of fear. By Goldwater, the fear of the Red Menace; by Johnson the fear of Goldwater. Not much has really changed has it? Candidates still serve up the fear diet; just in a different flavor.  Soft on Communism has become naive about terrorism. I feel fortunate that as a boy I had a connection to a different time, as my dad would relate to me the calm that FDR tried to deliver to an anxious nation; "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Fear is now a permanent ingredient in the campaign recipe. We'll never go back will we? Sad.  

Stump speeches.  I look back at LBJ in Washington Square as irretrievable nostalgia.  Presidential candidates don’t make stump speeches anymore.  They rarely come to California anymore but when they do it's with a purpose irrelevant to the election itself; Republicans know they can’t win here and Democrats know it’s in the bag.  So why would you come to the most populous state in the Union? To meet the people you hope to lead?  To deliver to the electorate your vision of hope for the nation?  Hell no. It’s to appear at a gazillion dollar a plate fundraising dinner.  They go out of their way to appear in front of friendly crowds because protest signs make bad photo ops and heckling a poor sound bite.  Politicians have lied through their teeth for ages.  In the old days you got to see them do it in person - for free, in a big city park.  Now you have to whip out the AMEX, or mortgage the homestead so you can listen to a fellow mortgage his morals at a private dinner in a rich guy's mansion.

And ironically, some fifty years after we were being told that our diet was about as healthy as a glass of hemlock, the stigma has been removed from red meat, starches and heavy cream.  Meat and potatoes have been repackaged as the healthy, salutary paleo-diet.  I suppose that if the diet experts ever tire of analyzing what we eat they can turn to politics.  They seem to be pretty good at flip-flopping and scaring the shit out of the public.
"Wife, we need to get off those damned grains and legumes.  They're killing us.  Whip me up a chicken fried steak with a an order of cream gravy and do it on the double quick"

Mr. Romney's Indigence Envy

Here is another of those posts I really had no intention of getting into - I just hate doing politics.  Let’s just say, “The devil made me do it.”  In this case the devil is Facebook. 

In a moment of weakness (not really) I felt compelled to share a commentary about Mitt Romney and his income tax finagling.  The point of the commentary being Romney fudged his returns so that he paid MORE in taxes than he actually had to.  In 2011 he donated over 4 million dollars to charity but claimed only 2 million.  Why?  Because by taking the full deduction he would have paid less than the 13% he claims is the lowest that he’s ever paid.  The commentary went on to describe the many and varied Romney tax avoidance strategies including Cayman Island tax havens and a $77,000 deduction for Ann Romney’s Olympic horse.  My comment on the op-ed was, well, a little caustic towards Mr. Romney. 

Working For a Living II: Labor's Day

The story's always the same

Seven hundred tons of metal a day

Now sir you tell me the world's changed

Once I made you rich enough

Rich enough to forget my name

From “Youngstown”  Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
From “Solidarity Forever”  Lyrics by Ralph Chaplin

Maybe this year we should call it Labor's Day; own it.  Maybe those of us who are the worker bees should claim it back.  Look to the roots of what the holiday should be about. At one time it celebrated the worker; the worker who fought hard for fair treatment and a fair wage in exchange for the sweat on his brow.  We’ve regressed.  Now it’s just another day off.  How poetic it would be if only the workers got the day off and the CEOs and their high level brethren had to do, just for one day, what the minions do every day and do it thanklessly.  I dare say the first thing that would happen is that they would fuck it up horribly ( Because, "Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel would turn.").

It Wasn't Their Money

     There was no Fourth of July parade in Hercules this year.  The annual Hercules fireworks display was dark.  A month ago the annual Hercules Multicultural Fair was canceled for the first time in what; twenty years?  The swim center has cut back on hours of operation.  I’m wondering if there will be annual haunted house and Christmas Tree lighting.  These are just the cuts to fun and games.

     There have been some much more serious cuts in our little community.  The number of police officers has been cut from 30 to 26.  The Chief of Police, Fred Deltorchio, a quality fellow who has done a marvelous job and who I’ve chatted with on bike rides and at the local gym has moved up his retirement date.  He’s fed up. Said Deltorchio about the current state of affairs, "I put together a really good team. They are a great group of professionals... who are in it to serve the city.  It's hard for me to go back and undo it."  In April, the city pink slipped 25 employees in what was described as the first round of layoffs that could involve as much as 40 percent of the city’s workforce.

     How did we get here? Sounds just like the typical symptoms of our recent/current global economic meltdown.  But it isn’t quite that way at all. No, this was the handy work of folks who were either knaves or bunglers or bungling knaves.  It’s the story of folks who milked the city coffers dry through a combination of bad planning, their own greed and the greed of others and a total disregard of their fiduciary responsibilities.

     Hercules started out as a company town for an explosives company and by the 1970s had evolved into a bedroom community.  When my family moved to Hercules in 1990 it was still that; a bedroom community with no real downtown, serviced by a couple of malls. The town has grown since we moved in, adding businesses, restaurants and a number of housing developments, some fairly tony. 

     But there had always been bigger plans; maybe plans that were bigger than we needed. The city council spent money wooing Wal-Mart and then when public opposition to the predatory giant was successful it spent more money making it go away.  There were plans for a transit center with a rail station, a ferry terminal and a transit village.  Construction began on a project called Sycamore North, a downtown that would house restaurants and retail.  At this writing, the project consists of unfinished buildings cloaked only in their bare wooden shells, a main street that goes through the project is closed, with traffic detouring through a residential area and the well that waters the whole thing has all but run dry.  It is possible that for the foreseeable future we will have a skeletal downtown.  Another project, a complex of six sports fields went too far beyond the mere contemplation phase.  For two years beginning in 2008 the city shelled out 30,000 dollars a month to a company called Big League Dreams for what was described as“project evaluation” and “conceptualization,” which sounds like a flowery way to say, consulting fees.  In 2010, the city scrapped the whole project. Big League Dreams has refused to refund a 450,000 dollar licensing fee and the city has sunk 2 million dollars into what turned out to be a big league hallucination.  And then there is Market Hall. Market Hall was built on the site of an abandoned Park and Ride on one of the area’s main streets.  It was conceived of as a temporary retail site before yet another project called New Town Center was to be built there; a "placeholder" as the developer called it.  From the start an amateur like me looked at it and said, “Huh?”  Market Hall housed a handful of uninspiring retail shops each about the size of my living room that included a plant store, a clothing outlet and a toy store which sold toys for plenty more than you would pay at the local Target.  There was a stage where local entertainers put on shows before audiences of phantoms, and a bocce ball court.  A bocce ball court?  That’s right, bocce. They might just as well have put in a polo field. Food was provided by food trucks most of which bailed out after a couple of months of desultory trade.  One truck which served Mexican food stuck it out to the bitter end albeit with a spotty schedule.  The only business that gutted out a regular schedule was the coffee house which served excellent coffee, superior to the swill dispensed by the nearby Starbucks and with much better, friendlier service.  From the start, Market Hall looked like a junky little trading post with no hall and very little market.  Now after being open for 11 months it is a closed and deserted, junky little trading post and all that’s missing are the tumbling tumbleweeds, the creaking signs and the jingling of a bridle swinging in the wind that characterize your typical ghost town.  The developer, Red Barn, billed the city for everything from property management at 30,000 dollars per month to trips to Vegas for corporate executives.  The Planning Commission consistently sounded alarms against less than promising projects like these but the klaxons went unheeded.  If projects were food the council's eyes were bigger than their stomachs and much, much bigger than the city's wallet. 

     Amidst all of the big plans for the future everything else seemed to be an unfinished symphony. We have poop bag dispensers along the recreation path that are now nothing more than modern art as the city has ceased to refill them.  A pleasant path through one of the new developments is bereft of poop bag dispensers.  But that doesn’t matter because there are no trash cans to throw the non-existent poop bags into.  The city put up it’s one and only dog park, an attractive yard that I took my dog to once and vowed never to go back to.  Why? Because it has no turf.  In the summer your dog comes home dusty and ready for a bath and after a winter rain the place is a muddy quagmire.  Locals go to the parks in neighboring Pinole.

     Who would do this?  There were the greedy and dishonest.  One of the chief gang members, a city manager named Nelson Oliva was the owner of a company doing a healthy business with the city. To avoid any apparent conflict of interest he “suspended” his activities with his company, NEO and put his then just out of her teens daughter in charge.  Her work experience prior to being a CEO was waiting tables at a local pub (talk about your skyrocketing career path).  This arrangement apparently made it alright for NEO to continue doing business with the city, even benefiting from no bid contracts.  In the meantime, Oliva, while still under contract with Hercules and in apparent violation of that contract, traveled to Lompoc to market a 350,000 dollar deal between NEO and that city.  This is just a taste of Oliva’s slippery dealings.  There was former mayor Ed Balico who’s own company profited from housing developments that the mayor pushed for and voted in favor of.

     There were the gullible like the city council members who approved no bid contracts and expensive projects with little or no discussion or public input. There were the enablers such as the city attorney who turned a blind eye to the entire nefarious goings on.  There were the ass coverers in the city council that gave a new city manager his walking papers ostensibly for insubordination but more likely because he had uncovered and was ready to make public the shady shenanigans of the past. There were those who fed themselves from the public trough like the property manager who allegedly helped himself to 73,000 dollars from a city trust fund but was circumspect enough not to drain it completely dry.  He did after all leave 39 cents.

     Where are the knaves and fools today?  Two council members were recalled in last June’s election.  Balico, with an impending recall petition dangling over his head resigned for “family reasons”.  Oliva no longer works for the city but collected a generous severance package.  The city attorney resigned as well and those remaining council members who never saw a project or met a consultant they didn’t like, failed in their reelection bids.  While there are rumblings of criminal and civil proceeding against these folks they will probably just live with their shame.  They probably shop in neighboring communities these days and no longer frequent the local watering holes.  Instead of a legacy of community service they are loathed by the citizens of that community.  I suppose the various consultants, attorneys, managers and other suits spent their recent Fourth of July weekend sipping umbrella drinks on a cruise ship or gambling in Vegas; all paid for by the generous citizens of Hercules.

     What does all of this have to do with anyone who doesn’t live in Hercules?  Nothing more than the story of Bell, California which was bilked on what can only be described as an artistic level by its “caretakers.”  These are object lessons to everyone whether they live in Bonanza Town, Colorado, population 14, or New York City.  There are people who go into politics for all of the right reasons, do their level best and even make mistakes but in the final analysis take their responsibilities seriously and care about the citizens that elected them.  And then there are those who go into public office with every intention of lining their own pockets or are completely clueless, with no idea of, or concern for, their fiduciary responsibilities.

     I know many people, too many, who characterize themselves as politically inactive; actually taking pride in their apathy.  They look down their noses at politics for its dirtiness and corruption, feeling that they are above it all, not deigning to soil themselves.  I know others who take part only to the point of going to the polls with as much knowledge of the candidates and issues as they have of, oh, astrophysics. In a free country that’s all fine and dandy but it does rather run counter to that whole silly notion of an enlightened electorate. 

     There are those who say, “Oh my vote doesn’t really count.”  To that argument I need only point to the failed reelection bids of incompetent Hercules council members and the subsequent recall of two other scoundrels.  In these elections the votes counted loudly and without those vociferous votes we might still be stuck with the crooked and the clueless.

     Every year I pay property taxes and about 1100 dollars of that goes to Hercules.  This doesn’t include any other fees and taxes that I pay throughout the year.  I’m giving a fair chunk of hard earned coin of the realm to a bunch of strangers and trusting that they are going to take good care of it.  Taxes and fees are something we are all compelled to pay.  It doesn’t have anything to do with parties or ideologies. If you gave 10 Benjamins to someone to spend on your behalf I’m pretty sure you would make certain it was spent with your best interests in mind or at the very least not spent on a cockeyed scheme that was approved with nothing more than a casual wave of the hand.  As my wife put it, “It wasn’t their money.” I understand that when it comes to national and state budgets it is difficult to figure out just what is going on in such a massive money pot. But at the local level with smaller budgets and more visible projects it is easier to spot the accounting sleight of hand.

     One of the casualties of our internet, gotta have the information now society, is journalism.  There is a dearth of true investigative journalism, the kind of work that exposed a sitting President, Richard Nixon, as a blackguard and common criminal.  Investigative journalism isn’t cost effective these days.  It takes time to follow the trails and develop the story, and newspapers with dwindling circulations and ad revenues find themselves with little patience for a long story to pan out.  And so with a fourth estate that has to compete with sensationalism, dumbing down, raging ideologies and stories that are hustled to the public because speed counts over vetting, who is left to protect our interests?  The answer is in your mirror.