Whew. That was weird.

So. 

Breathe.

Donald Trump's reign of stupidity will end in January, cooler heads have prevailed.

There's going to be SO MUCH NOISE between now and then – fights over elections, foreign influence, fake news, propaganda – it's going to get nuts. Since nobody is asking for it, here is my opinion: 

All of that is in the past. All of the protests and marches – those become celebrations. Don't protest the past, influence policy for the immediate future. Say their names, then describe the proposed policy that could have saved their lives. Defund the police, then fund the proposed program that frees the police to do police work, and keeps them out of fragile situations that require specialists.

In the background, through the noise, look for the shy, quiet republicans speaking rationally. Those who gave us Trump identify as RED, so let's look for the purple thinkers among them, and establish a counter-argument to the monikers "Never-Trumper" and "RINO - Republican in name only". Those which the RED thinkers identify as RINO's – those are their rational thinkers, and we need to be able to walk toward the middle of the road to talk with them there. Those on the fringe should be left there, in the past, as we move forward, toward a less partisan future. 

This is NOT to say let's all put on a happy face and let bygones be bygones. The majority of "republicans in suits" who are irredeemable assholes who need a serious de-programming, and sometimes jailtime. This is also not to say that it is now our job to re-educate those who believe that Hillary ran a child-prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor, or JFK Jr. is secretly running things from behind a curtain. Don't befriend a proudboy or listen to someone's defense of "Q". We don't have time for any of that crap.

We need to let government be government until January, let pundits do their punditry, and focus on next spring. What do you want your first day in April to look like? Personally, I'd like to be rejoining my masked friends for the first time after a mandatory nationwide 60-day lockdown, when we watched the "New Cases" plummet for the first time in a year. I'd like to have a roof over my head, which was preserved through the lockdown by the first-ever "Citizen Bailout" – where everybody got $10,000 to keep themselves afloat through the very-effective lockdown. I'd like to see different uniforms on my streets, folks trained to be able to care for folks dealing with "issues" in public. I'd like to know the plan to re-establish normalcy.

One way to get there is to look for the normalcy on the other side, and highlight it. Saying "Trump/Barr/Rudy is an asshole, here's yet another reason to think so" over and over gets us nowhere – they're all in the past. A republican speaking logically about covid, or women, or racism – we need to listen for those voices and amplify them. We already know what we think, and we think we know what they think, but let's look for the outliers. I'm sure we can find some.

I think that might be the only way to avert civil war. Republicans need to talk other republicans down, and we need to identify a path to do that. If someone says, "That guy's a RINO," say "No, he's really CONSERVATIVE. He's a republican." Let's point out the fork in the road, clearly: "Those trumpers WERE assholes, glad that's IN THE PAST and we can just have a normal CONSERVATIVE party again."

It's worth a try. 

D.

The Long Blog – big thoughts, small ideas

I was on Twitter, reading of the Oregon rightists who are drunk on Q Koolaid, raving about the Antifa terrorists who have been arrested by their local sheriff for starting all the Oregon wildfires. All made-up bullshit that people, who think they're patriots, are willing to die for.

I went to my profile, to change my screen name to something anti-fascist, when I realized that I was about to establish a portion of my identity as AGAINST something. That's always been my main beef with the GOP – they exist only to be against things. Abortion, immigration, equality in ANY way, conservation - which is BIZARRE, considering they're supposedly the conservative party. Anyway, I think it's hollow to only be against something, and I couldn't think of a positive way to say antifascist.

  

I don't want to be that guy. So I've decided to purposely, forcefully change my perspective, and I'm inviting you to read my mind. 2020 is the most surreal thing I've ever seen – more than I could possibly imagine, and I'm a surrealist. So – as a surrealist living in a surreality, I should be in my element, right? This should be my sweet spot. My whole career is making stuff up, imagining a thing and then making it, so what's stopping me?

The insane politics that have invaded every aspect of life - I'm done with it. I will vote the moment I receive my ballot, nothing will affect that decision. I'll await my ballot and can ignore the vitriol. BUT: I can't live in denial, many things are horrible, so I'll make them better.

Going forward, I'm turning disgust into positive action items before it hardens into hate. It's very easy for me to type here that I hate the GOP, the NRA, the KKK – but I hate that. It shouldn't be that easy to hate. So now that hate is disgust, and like other disgusting things, I will step around them rather than attack them hatefully. But you also need to clean up disgusting things after you've avoided them, you can't leave them lying around.

So, to defeat the obsolete GOP, I'm going to seek out unregistered folks, and help them learn to want to vote. I believe the Democratic party has better ideas than the others, and I think people want life to be generally good. I believe there are more good people than bad, so if we can outnumber them ASTRONOMICALLY, we may survive to celebrate some day together in 2022. With high fives and hugs and such. I will work in positivity toward that day.

Covid rendered me nonessential in the business world. It will be temporary, but it slammed the brakes on my involvement in downtown retail. If you look at a map, my studio is under the N in Los Angeles. Smack dab in the middle of things, which was a fun adventure until covid. My immediate neighbors were homeless and millionaires and everyone in between, and most of my traffic was tourism. Tourism stopped, mask etiquette became a thing, and my wife was diagnosed with cancer. Quarantine suits my condition. 

I've sublet my studio to become a temporary extension of my studio neighbor - win win - and I'm considering what it might be next. I love things like Meow Wolf, and I've enjoyed having my shop downtown – enjoyed watching others enjoy my work, the conversations and interactions. I'm thinking of using my space for smaller, more specific interactions, and opening it up more to others. I could even dress it for influencers, and leave it for them to promote me over the ethers, without the chagrin of being there watching them pose. With me and my mess out of the way, it can be a teaching space, a performance space, a reading room. 

I never intended to be a shopkeeper. Vera found the building a decade+ ago and my studio was up in the building, first on the 9th floor, then 8, then 4. I thought my 4th floor studio would be mine until I retired. I hung my work on the mezzanine every ArtWalk, we had lines out the door, described in the press as "the epicenter of ArtWalk." Then the bookstore moved in. They made an empty room, a room I'd previously used to assemble big projects, into a globally-known phenomenon. When they expanded onto the mezzanine – my mezzanine – they only rented half.

The owner of the building came to talk to me, we've become friends during my time there. He realized the impact dividing the mezzanine had on our ArtWalk traffic, so he wanted to divide the remaining mezzanine into individual studios, and asked me to talk to a handful of people – those in the building who had been exhibiting recently/currently. We built out 5 studios, and the front room became our collective gallery. Then the tourists coming to see this cool store slowly turned each of our studios into retail shops, to varying degrees.

Anyway, I drew it up. I taped out the walls on the floor and then they were built and acquaintances who would become friends moved in and I've always felt responsible for it. This is our ninth year. Now I've been forced into nonessentiality by covid, and my friends will keep it going without me. It's bittersweet, and it opens up possibilities. When frivolous retail and tourism return, I think I want to approach it differently.

I abhor influencers, yet I love making experiential art. The bookstore grew up as Instagram became a thing, and my shop and my work in the store became a background that influencers felt entitled to fuck with. Now I'm looking at new ways to do things. How can I interact with folks, distanced, from home? I think art, and especially CRAFT, is better in person. I make dimensional, tangible things, so I'm challenged to make those pertinent in a virtual world, and present them in real life, in a drive-by fashion. I like a challenge, but I'm a ruminator. I won't be the first to crack the code, but I'll find a way that works.

The virtual world doesn't suit me. Social media is quickly swelling negative, the positives becoming like a "but her emails" weak-ass excuse to stay there. Facebook enables rampant, viral explosions of conspiracy, YouTube provides undeniable proof for every wacked-out theory. So I'll bend these tools to my will, become more of a producer than consumer. Post an interesting picture, tell a story, interact through dialogue on my OWN page, stop reading the rants of others. I have developed an allergy to social media, it makes me break out in a rash and gives me fits of tourette's. So I will treat it like poison ivy along a path I like to walk, and tread quickly and lightly.

I'm also incredibly pissed off at America. I grew up as a patriot. All my family's birthdays are in July, so the 4th was our big patriotic birthday holiday. I sang the anthem at ball games, flew the flag on flag holidays. Now that flag brings revulsion, because of who has been waving it. I lost my patriotism when Hillary Clinton's popular vote win was denied by the system.

But California has a flag, and it even has a bear on it. America doesn't have a bear. So I embrace my Californianess and turn my back on America. America wants conspiracy theories and whiteness, and I'm done with it. California is loosening its bonds with America, so I'll look for ways to support that effort, to help my existence be less federal-dependent. 

Yet, America is horrible to some of my friends. I need to do what I can to protect them from its trend towards harm. I will embrace this need to protect, rather than hate America's need to harm, and it will be the driving force to get me to register voters, as that's not something I want to do, but it's necessary.

So that's my new reality, strangely less surreal than actual reality. I'll accept the things I cannot change, but I'm perceiving them through my own filter to bolster personal sanity. We'll see how this one reads in six months. If you made it this far, either you're really bored or we're on the same page. Join me in surreality.

What rightists are thinking during coronavirus.

Published September 11th, 2020.

I've been doing some thinking lately and came to my seldom-published blog to write my thoughts. Before I start, I want to publish this collection of MAGA tweets from April 5th, 2020. I closed my business 3 weeks before I collected these, obviously with a specific thing on my mind. They became a draft, now a time capsule. It sat here, unpublished, and was what was onscreen when I logged on.

To those who remember living in the previous century, imagine our current events in that context:

A beauty pageant host/real estate developer is nominated by one of our two political parties. He's a rude, self-aggrandizing old white man, who swears the current president is a Kenyan Muslim. Despite earning 3,000,000 fewer votes than his opponent, the electoral college installs him as president.

His actions are immediately suspect. He lies constantly, and then lies about those lies, even in the face of indisputable facts. This installed leader installs proto-lobbyists in his cabinet – people plucked from the boardrooms of the industries their new office governs. Regulations are immediately removed, foreign influencers pay to stay in his hotels. He is investigated by our trusted agencies, and he publicly demeans these agencies who keep us safe. Journalists investigate, and he brands them fake. Democrats call for accountability, he brands them as angry.

The investigation is completed and summarized, and submitted to the Attorney General of the United States, who then ignores the summaries and provides his own brief opinion, which ignores principal findings. 

Records are subpoenaed, witnesses are subpoenaed, and the administration does not comply. The presidency has gone rogue.

You hear all this on the radio, and on the nightly news. It comes up in conversation at work, and when you're out with friends. As a patriotic American, how do you stop it? Your country has been hijacked, a puppet is president – do you put a sign in your yard? Do you fly to Washington and stop by the hardware store on your way to the White House, to pick up a pitchfork & torch?

[I ask this in a past context because social media is not helping us find a solution. When modern conveniences fail, I immediately wonder how this thing was handled beforehand. Nixon cheated within the context of a more-functional government – he did not think to divide the country so completely as Trump has done. Our leaders have chosen party over country, which means this pseudo-coup will continue. How do we fix this?]

Fauxmerican

I remember Sarah Palin talking about "Real America." Real America thinks this, Real America wants that. I remember thinking, "there's no Real America. There's only America."

Then Donald was elected as president of Real America, and millions of Real Americans cheered. I realized then that the ideal of the United States of America, which I've held since I was a child, was wrong. I had completely misunderstood my country.

This morning, a journalist from my hometown local paper, The Los Angeles Times, was barred from today's White House press briefing, along with others. The "paper of record" for my lifetime as an Angeleno is fake. So-called judges are fake. My America is fake. My patriotism is fake. As a Californian, Real America's president considers me the enemy. I'm the Coastal Elite. I'm an intellectual.

The president of Real America goaded his followers to beat those who spoke out against him. He goaded them into chanting things like Build the Wall! Drain the Swamp! Lock her up! He fueled their nationalism, their racism, their jingoism, all in the name of making Real America great again. Real Americans believed he could resurrect industries which progress has set aside.

Real America is a corporate profit machine fueled by the blood, sweat and tears of gullible masses of Real Americans. People angry at progress, angrily selected a billionaire to rule over them while he removes regulations and hands our future to corporations on a gold platter.

But if I'm not a Real American, what am I? I'm not fake – I walk and talk, people have seen me and interacted with me. I'm real. So I guess it's the American part that's different. America has disappeared under the shadow of Real America. I get glimpses of her, like when the Army refuses a request for tanks at the Inaugural parade, or when park rangers tweet out global warming stats when their government account is silenced, or when scientists protest in the streets.

I hang onto those moments. They alone give me hope for our nation's future.

The Protesting Patriot.

A Watchful Eye

From Heather Richardson, professor of History at Boston College:

"...There is an important non-partisan point to make today.

What Bannon is doing, most dramatically with last night's ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries-- is creating what is known as a "shock event." Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order.

When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies. As society reels and tempers run high, those responsible for the shock event perform a sleight of hand to achieve their real goal, a goal they know to be hugely unpopular, but from which everyone has been distracted as they fight over the initial event. There is no longer concerted opposition to the real goal; opposition divides along the partisan lines established by the shock event.

Last night's Executive Order has all the hallmarks of a shock event. It was not reviewed by any governmental agencies or lawyers before it was released, and counterterrorism experts insist they did not ask for it. People charged with enforcing it got no instructions about how to do so. Courts immediately have declared parts of it unconstitutional, but border police in some airports are refusing to stop enforcing it. Predictably, chaos has followed and tempers are hot.

My point today is this: unless you are the person setting it up, it is in no one's interest to play the shock event game. It is designed explicitly to divide people who might otherwise come together so they cannot stand against something its authors think they won't like.
I don't know what Bannon is up to-- although I have some guesses-- but because I know Bannon's ideas well, I am positive that there is not a single person whom I consider a friend on either side of the aisle-- and my friends range pretty widely-- who will benefit from whatever it is.

If the shock event strategy works, though, many of you will blame each other, rather than Bannon, for the fallout. And the country will have been tricked into accepting their real goal.

But because shock events destabilize a society, they can also be used positively. We do not have to respond along old fault lines. We could just as easily reorganize into a different pattern that threatens the people who sparked the event.

A successful shock event depends on speed and chaos because it requires knee-jerk reactions so that people divide along established lines. This, for example, is how Confederate leaders railroaded the initial southern states out of the Union.

If people realize they are being played, though, they can reach across old lines and reorganize to challenge the leaders who are pulling the strings. This was Lincoln's strategy when he joined together Whigs, Democrats, Free-Soilers, anti-Nebraska voters, and nativists into the new Republican Party to stand against the Slave Power.

Five years before, such a coalition would have been unimaginable. Members of those groups agreed on very little other than that they wanted all Americans to have equal economic opportunity. Once they began to work together to promote a fair economic system, though, they found much common ground. They ended up rededicating the nation to a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Confederate leaders and Lincoln both knew about the political potential of a shock event. As we are in the midst of one, it seems worth noting that Lincoln seemed to have the better idea about how to use it."