Waiting for Good

I have taken myself to Walden Pond. The only tweets I hear will be from sparrows and titmouses.

I have deleted Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. For different reasons. Facebook broke my heart with its careless and cynical handling of personal data and fake news. Twitter never pretended to be anything but a jungle, but for now I’ve had enough of trying to hack my way through its tangle of hate and lies (most notably from our president).

I love social media. I was early on Facebook and Instagram. But I don’t love what they’ve become. I would like to see a paid subscription model. That would get rid of the advertising pollution and exploitation. It wouldn’t sort fake news from fact, though. Until algorithms get much better, the only way to do that would be to apply to social media the defamation rules newspapers live by: if you publish a defamatory lie, you’re liable for damages.

That would be a Good platform. I could meet my friends there and we could chat the way we do in person, without worrying that someone is trying to exploit us or is lying to us (well, no more than we all lie to one another about little personal things).

It could be a long wait for Good.

In the meantime, I’ll keep up with my friends directly and say what I have to say more broadly in essays in print or on the radio (thanks for the opportunity, KQED).

And I’ll keep writing this blog. Follow it if you're interested.

Otherwise, look for the smoke from the chimney of my cabin in the woods. There will be a sign on the door saying “Novel in Progress,” but you’ll be welcome anytime.

Walls of Worry

The stock market climbs a wall of worry, the old expression goes. That’s certainly happening now. There may still be gas in the tank of the old bull (to really mix my metaphors). It has taken us so far so fast that not many are asking to be let off at the next stop. Meanwhile, fear and greed are duking it out in the back seat like a couple of bored teenagers on an overlong family road trip.

Walls are emotionally powerful symbols. Trump has his border wall. He wants us to be afraid of all those brown people who want to rape our wives and daughters and steal our livelihoods. 

I’m scaling my own wall of worry; free-climbing, no ropes, no safety net. My wall is the midterm elections. I want to believe in the blue wave. I think we need some balance in Congress. But I’m terrified that both fear and greed are going to gang up on what used to be called American values.

For the midterms, we have the fear of the other lined up on the side of old fashioned avarice. Together, they may just beat the crap out of the weakling intellectual called liberal democracy. 

Around the world we are in a new era of the strongman. From Hungary and Poland and Turkey to Brazil and China and Russia. And now, with Trump, America. Strongmen aren’t big fans of democracy, or free press, or independent judiciaries. They’re autocrats. People install them, or tolerate them, when the aimless sloppiness of democracy isn’t getting enough done to suit them. That’s what got Trump elected.

Since his election, he has shown his true colors: he’s a racist, misogynist oligarch; a man who wants to destroy the press and pack the courts with men who will let him do whatever he wants. He has tossed aside alliances with other nations that have protected and promoted a peaceful world order for seventy years. He’s a dangerous man.

But the economy is rocking, and he’s taking credit for that. Unemployment is at a fifty-year low. Wages are rising. Businesses are prospering. This moment of undeniable economic success won’t last forever, or perhaps even much longer. We’re already late in the expansion cycle. And the latest tax cuts are pumping up the deficit. When the party stops, we’re likely to have a bad hangover.

But for now, we’re looking good economically. And immigrant bashing and isolationism, let’s face it, are more popular among a larger segment of society than we’re comfortable admitting.

Blue wave? I hope so. But the economic facts the voters are seeing are pretty supportive of Trump; and the additional facts he is making up about threats from illegal immigrants and unfair trading partners, threats that require his strong hand, are easy enough to believe.

I’m climbing my midterm wall, but I’m worried. Every time I glance down, I see we could have a very long way to fall.

Dominoes of Hearts and Minds

Technology will set us free. It will read our mammograms better that our doctors can. It will predict potential litigation outcomes with such accuracy that the adversaries will settle their differences without wasting a lot of money and time in court. It will lift us up from ignorance and poverty.

In the process, it may also enslave us.

Power is the ability to change behavior; and technology gives that power to those who control it. Those are the central themes of Jamie Suskind’s new book, Future Politics. I heard him speak yesterday at Stanford Law School. I came away tingling with anticipation, but not altogether in a good way.

Artificial intelligence is becoming more capable, and sensors and processors are increasingly woven into the fabric of society. Suskind believes this paves the way for manipulation of behavior through scrutiny and perception control. 

Scrutiny is like surveillance, but more focused on learning about us to influence us than merely watching us to see that we are behaving. The more you know about someone, their likes and dislikes, the more you can influence their choices. The most obvious example is cellphone ads: because they are based on your online activity, they are better and better targeted at you.

Perception control is another way to say fake news. Not much more need be said about that. We’re awash in it now and can’t figure out how to turn off the firehose.

All that is disturbing enough, but not exactly news. 

What I hadn’t thought as much about is how thought control through technology might be used to colonize. In the old days, to take over other nations countries had to send in troops. Now they need only send in high-speed wifi and chatbots. If you’re China, for instance, a country that offers up only the news it wants you to see, it’s pretty easy to convert a country or a continent to your belief system. 

We fought the Vietnam war because we feared that if Vietnam fell to the Chinese communists, other countries in the region would follow, like so many dominoes toppling one after the other.

Now China has announced its One Belt, One Road plan to invest broadly in the underdeveloped world. Brazil. Africa. They are focused on developing natural resources and energy. And they are planning to import technology. They will control the message to those people, as authoritarians do, and those dominoes of hearts and minds will fall without a shot being fired, without a twinge of alarm from the country that sacrificed over half a million soldiers and billions of dollars to try to prevent what we thought was a similar threat a half century ago.

The domino theory of the 1960s was probably wrong-headed. Vietnam was a civil war, not a communist conquest.

This time, though, there may be more to fear.

CalIfornia Future News

Californians stopped paying federal taxes today. Not everyone, but most. The ones who still want to be part of the United States are mostly moving out.

“We just don’t feel like this is our country anymore,” said Freida Warner in Sausalito. “We’re going to start over here. Like we did in 1776. It was the same then, people from thousands of miles away telling us what to do, people who didn’t share our values. It was Britain then. It’s Washington D.C. now, but the attitudes are the same. We’re the boss, you have to do what we say. Well, you know what: No you’re not.”

The movement started a little over a year ago after a series of government decisions to cut social services, restrict voting rights, and prohibit abortions were backed up by the Supreme Court. It has gained steam as more people signed on. Today is tax day, the first day of the rebellion. The federal government has made it clear it will prosecute those who refuse to pay their taxes, but people like John Brown of Los Angeles say there are too many of them for that to be practical.

“They’re just going to have to let us go,” Mr. Brown said.

No one calls it secession, but that’s what it amounts to. Economic secession. The state government has not taken an official position on the movement.

“We’re going to do our best to keep the lights on and the water running,” said Governor Rodriguez. “We’re used to enduring hardship to gain freedom. This is nothing compared to working the fields of the Central Valley in the hot sun for little money and no respect.”

Will there be another Civil War? It seems unlikely that the federal government would choose to send in the army and become an occupying force, but no one knows.

“Whatever comes, we’re ready for it,” said Julie Newman of San Francisco. “They can have their bigoted sexist country if they want to, but we’re not going to be part of it anymore.”

An Angry Man

I was in high school when the Civil Rights movement swept through my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee in the early 1960s. 

In my memory, I was largely oblivious.

vote.gov

This is the story I tell myself when I’m feeling ashamed about that: I was a privileged country-club brat who was waited on by maids and servers and golf caddies and I didn’t even notice their plight.

This is the story I tell myself when I’m feeling a little more charitable: I didn’t really fit in at the country club. I mostly played golf with my dad, or alone. The black headwaiter, Cooper, liked me enough to sneak me sweet rolls the size of catcher’s mitts. A caddy who was close to my age, Sammy, liked me enough to relieve me of a good many quarters by making long putts into a soup can on the hard-packed dirt of the caddy yard. Pap, the white-haired, dark-skinned caddy master, liked me enough to let me fish with him at five thirty in the morning in the creek that ran through the golf course and the neighborhoods of my paper route.

The truth is somewhere, lost in memory and my slowish moral awakening. I was feral in those days. Working for spending money, going to school, sparring with my father. I knew a lot of black folks, and liked them, but somehow I didn’t understand their lives. My only excuse, I suppose, is that in those days I didn’t even understand my own.

When I went to college, my new best friends were card-carrying C.O.R.E. members. They had been Freedom Riders that summer. That was the beginning of awareness for me. Still, it has been a long time coming.

New York Times columnist Margaret Renkl, a Nashvillian herself, says Nashville likes to tell itself that it peacefully accepted integration. Not really, she says, in her review of a photo exhibit of the time titled “We Shall Overcome.” I ordered the book. It will do me good, even all these years later, to see now what I didn’t see then.

But this is more than history. We’re at it again. And while I may have been oblivious to the plight of blacks in the South in the fifties and sixties, I understood the white Southern man very well. They weren’t all Deliverance rednecks, but there was an authoritarian entitlement about them that was generous and kind at its best and venal and brutal at its worst. That streak ran up and down the income scale. 

That’s the kind of man we are dealing with today. He’s wounded, but he’s not dead yet, and he’s dangerous. The Randy Newman song “Shame” has these lines: “My father, he was an angry man. You cross him, he made you pay.”

My father was like that. I’m not sure it’s fair to call him angry—he was as charming as they come most of the time—but he was quick to anger. When I, or anyone, crossed him, he made us pay.

That’s the man we have in the White House now. That’s many of the Republican men in Congress. I may not have understood blacks when I was eighteen, but I knew those men. I understood them. I knew them well enough to know the best thing I could do was get away from them.

So I can tell you with complete confidence, we need to get away from them now. Or, more precisely, get them away from us. They’re dangerous. If we cross them, they’ll make us pay. 

Don’t wait for the next rage attack, the one that might put not just our constitution at risk but our lives. They’re a lot of nukes in unstable hands these days, including ours.

Don’t sit around thinking someone else is going to solve the problem. It’s up to us. Thankfully, there is something we can do that is both easy and effective.

Vote.

I Know...but I Couldn't

I couldn’t do it.

I said I was going to withdraw from political discourse. I said I was going to escape into the fictional world of my novel. The good news is that I am doing the latter, but it looks like I can’t do the former. Too much at stake, I guess. Or maybe I just can’t get over believing we can think our way out of the political mess we’re in, that this time it won’t take a civil war to break our partisan fever.

I’m posting a new piece today that draws lessons from my personal history growing up in the south. For a longer perspective, Jill Laporte has a new book called These Truths: A History of the United Stares. There are staggering lessons to be learned from the brutal truths of our past. (Here is Andrew Sullivan’s excellent review in today’s New York Times.)

We need to talk about these things. We need to understand what we have done and why. We may be driven by base instincts, but can we not still reason? We have to try.

And I still want (need) to be part of that process.

So Long, for a While

I’m dashing out the door, so this is just a quick note to let you know where I’m going and when I’ll be back. So you won’t worry.

For a while now I’ve been writing a new novel, called Illusion. It’s a father/son story. Apparently, for me, there is no other story. This one is fun, in part because even though I’m a fourth to a third of the way through a first draft, I can’t see the ending clearly. And perhaps because of that, I’ve dawdled and dodged and done everything else but dig in. My characters are all sitting around a table in a mountain diner, waiting for me to re-join them. They are about to say things to one another that can only be said by people who know what happened. So I have to settle down and figure that out before they start talking.

I’m going back into Hemingway mode, as to process if not result. He wrote five hundred words every morning and fished every afternoon. I even have my own Martha Gellhorn, always itching for excitement, to take me off to new places to write in the morning and play in the afternoon.

As to when I’ll be back to this blog, I’m not sure. When I feel like it, I suppose. Not when I feel I have something to say, but when I feel like saying it. Two very different things.

This blog is called The Dad App. That’s how it started: talking about my kids, about trying to be their father. As they, and their material, drifted off into their adult lives, I wrote about my own father, and my mother. Then I started in on the kind of world I’d like for my children. Inevitably, that led to politics, a most unrewarding subject these days. 

So I’m going to leave the politics to the voters. All I have to say at this point is think about it before you pull the lever in the voting booth. Think about the world you want for your children. It’s up to you. That’s a big responsibility. Not quite as big as raising your own children, but not as different as some think. Inputs yield outputs. It’s a law of nature.

Maybe I’ll see you around. Look for the guy sitting in a green lawn chair in the Tuileries, looking serious, but not feeling it one bit.

America, Love it or Leave it.

I’m reading a book about the rise of Nazi Germany, and it’s making me mad. I’m sad about what Hitler and his henchmen did to Jews and gypsies and anyone who opposed them, but I’m mad that it’s happening again. Right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Vienna is rioting, Hitler said. I have to go in to restore order. The Austrians implore me.

Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the World Trade towers collapsed, Trump said, as part of his justification for his Muslim immigration ban. We need to get those people out of here, that was his message.

Hitler burned books and imprisoned anyone who wrote the truth about what he was doing. Trump has done a pretty good job of turning many of us against the liberal media, those purveyors of FAKE NEWS. Or, as the rest of us know it: the truth.

Hitler only wanted Poland, he told the appeasers. Trump has lied about his intentions on so many fronts, it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s one that’s going to hurt a lot of people: he promised to keep healthcare protections for pre-existing conditions; now his justice department is saying they are unconstitutional.

When I was growing up in the South, it seemed like a particularly patriotic area. Big signs along the highways proclaimed our love of our country and our culture: “Impeach Earl Warren” (the author of the Supreme Court’s school-desegregation decision, a clearly un-American point of view in the south in 1954). “America, Love it or Leave it” nicely summed up a widely held sentiment.

So, I did.

Or at least I left the part of the country that I thought was still uniquely in the thrall of Jim Crow’s inability to accept the outcome of the Civil War.

I went to L.A. It was not long after the Watts Riots. Ronald Reagan was the governor. I should have realized that racism and xenophobia weren’t confined to the South, but I was young and naive and idealistic. 

Now I know. 

I never thought Trump would be elected. I thought we were better than that. So did Jon Stewart. We were both wrong.

Jon Stewart said he quit The Daily Show because he was tired of being so angry. He said watching Fox News to get material for his show was like being a “turd miner.” He said he hoped he didn’t get “turd-lung disease.”

I wish he’d hung in there. Maybe he could have kept us sane and grounded enough to not fall under Trump’s charismatic spell. I doubt it, though. Only people who already agreed with him watched his show. That and those who wanted sound bites to mock him.

Well, I’m with Jon now. I’m angry. And, like him, I’m tired of being angry, but (no offense intended to Jon, who did yeoman’s work for 15 years) I’m determined not to quit. We’ve all seen what happened when the good people of Germany stopped resisting. That’s all it takes for the cancer of hatred to spread. 

We are our body-politic’s immune system. We are weakened now, but we are not wiped out. We need to fight. We need to attack. If we don’t, our way of life will die. Just as it did in Nazi Germany. Just as it did in Fascist Italy and Spain. Just as it does whenever good people look the other way until it is too late.

Time to Go From the Land of Mow and Blow

As if from a dream, I’ve just awakened to the fact that gardeners have captured my neighborhood. They are an occupying force of pickup trucks, mowers and leaf blowers. Don’t get me wrong, I like gardeners. Most in our area are friendly and conscientious, and they make the yards look beautiful. Lately, though, those beautiful yards are starting to look like plots in a peaceful cemetery.

Time to go. Not to escape the leaf blowers, but to run from my own mortality.

We moved to the suburbs for the kids. Safe streets for biking, good schools, lots of soccer fields, even a children’s theatre where they could be the stars of the show. Our neighborhood was great for them. They thrived. They left.

It turns out I can only stand so much pastoral tranquility. The kids kept the place hopping, but now all the silent beauty is a little depressing. I need some buzz.

There are plenty of places I visit that are buzzy. But mainly they’re far from friends and parents. I’m over thinking I can jet off to some exotic place and do my own thing and when I come back everything will be the same. So I have to find some nearby buzz. San Francisco, I think.

I don’t want to trade sidewalks bordered with flowers for ones blooming with the tents of homeless men and women, but that seems to be the trade I have to make. 

The problem with great cities is the same thing that gives them energy: a diverse population swarming in a frenzy of activity, all kinds of activity, solid and sordid, beautiful and vile, inspiring and disheartening. I love the inspiring parts, not so much the disheartening ones.

I think it’s more than the obvious ugliness, the trash and heroine needles, that bothers me. It’s the lost lives that force themselves on me, into me. I can’t just see them and ignore them. I have to try to understand why. I have to try to solve it. Ask my children: I can’t resist trying to solve everyone’s problems.

Big city solutions aren’t simple, of course. People do what they do, and in our society, by and large, we let them, as long as what they’re doing isn’t hurting anyone. 

This is where homelessness gets so tough. People have a right to be homeless. This means, by implication, that they have a right to sleep on a park bench, under a freeway overpass, perhaps in a sidewalk tent outside a local shop or restaurant.

California is home to one-fourth of the nation’s homeless. There are many more now than in the past. It’s apparent that we don’t know how to handle them. Are they our neighbors, who, were we in a small country town, we would try to help back on their feet, maybe even put up in a spare bedroom? Or are they dangerous people—mentally ill, addicted—whom we are afraid of and would like to see go somewhere else, anywhere else?

We try, I think. We build shelters and roll out busses outfitted with showers. But the numbers keep getting worse. The anecdotes keep getting worse. On both sides.

My kids have been gone for years now. My feeling of personal identification with the potted plants that surround me has been growing for years: “Get out of there before the soil takes you.” 

So why have I put it off? The city is expensive, sure, but I think if I’m honest with myself I’ve drug my feet because I don’t know if I have it in me to take on its problems. If I live there, I won’t be able to look away from the homeless. Not their blight, not their tormented lives, not the hopelessness of it all. I know I’ll have to try to help, if only in small ways. That’s what neighbors do for one another. I hope I’m up to it.

Mother Sun

I missed my mother’s last Mother’s Day. That was ten years ago. I still feel badly about that, but not just that. She had just gone off to live near my brother. He was looking after her, visiting her often in a nursing home. When she lived near me, as she did for almost all of her last fifteen years, I helped her move along life’s inevitable path, from living happily alone to having someone come in a few days a week to wondering why when they came into her little room in the nursing home the caregivers talked among themselves as if she were not there.

I did my best, that’s what I tell myself. I left the daily care to others, but I kept her affairs ship-shape and went to doctor’s appointments with her and made sure she was getting good care and visited her often and brought her over for Sunday brunches and walked and then wheeled her though the park or drove her around in my little convertible with the top down. I drove a little too fast, just so she could remember what it was like. She wore a straw hat and a long scarf that fluttered in the wind like the tail of a kite.

I shopped for her and left supplies in her kitchen and bathroom, but I didn’t take on much of her personal care. No baths. No helping hand getting to the toilet. I thought she would prefer the privacy of a caregiver. Or maybe I just knew I would.

When I think of her now, I think sometimes of those moments of lost intimacy and wonder if it would have made her happier if I had bathed her the way she bathed me when I was a child. I wonder if she wanted the touch of my hand on her shoulders, the warm water from the washcloth in my own hand. 

There is one thing I didn't do that I’m sure now I should have: sing to her.

She sang to me when I was a child. She had a lovely voice. She sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “Bye, Bye Blackbird.” Other songs too, but those are the two I remember best. Once, late in her life I asked her to sing Bye Bye Blackbird the way she used to sing it to me, and I recorded it. I listen to it now and then when I want to remember her gentle sweetness.

I sang to my first girlfriends as we drove down a million country roads. I sang to Meg at our wedding, spontaneously, joyfully, perhaps drunkenly. I sang to my children almost every night. I don’t know why I didn’t sing to my mother. Maybe, even when I was trying to be the adult and take care of her, I was still the child, the one to be sung to.

A song I sang to my youngest sons at bedtime would have been perfect for her as she lay in those last beds. I could have run my fingers over her forearm as she closed her eyes and listened. I could have touched her cheek as she drifted off to sleep. I could have switched off the light and slipped out of her room, knowing that she felt the warmth of that song as I did, knowing that she knew it was the way I felt about her.

The last lines of that song, “The Rose,” are,

“When the night has been too lonely

And the road has been too long

And you think that love is only

For the lucky and the strong

Just remember in the winter

Far beneath the bitter snows

Lies the seed that with the sun’s love

In the spring becomes the rose.”

I was that seed. She was the sun.

Going Home

I’ve been in Europe for two months now. In two weeks and two days, I’m going home. I’m not looking forward to it.

There are good friends at home I’ve missed. (Hi, dear ones; you know who you are; see you soon). And even though we talk and text often, I feel a little disconnected from my children; you know, like I couldn’t rush out on the playground and save them from a bully, even though they are all adults now.

And my roses. I’ll be happy to see them blooming. Mother’s Day roses, Meg and I call them, because they always bloom then. They, like Meg, bring unearned beauty to my life.

Okay, I haven’t watched tv this entire trip, so I need to catch up on a few shows, especially Game of Thrones.

The rest of it…meh.

Europe is always like a tonic for me. I see the world as a bigger place. I see Europe’s triumphs and troubles, and I see its history, which is both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring because—well, just look around at the art and culture—and depressing because even these noble souls are not that much better at learning from the tragic mistakes of their past than those of us in our very young nation.

I can see Europe from afar. Objectively, I think. Coming here is like a study in civilization. Old walled cities, old cathedrals, modern high-speed trains, street-corner food markets, labor strikes, and yes, migrant crises.

But I can’t see America objectively. I am blinded by my hopes; and lately, we have been dashing them. There’s no other way to put it.

After the civil-rights movement, I thought we would continue to be less prejudiced and offer more opportunity to all. It coincided with post-WW II economic prosperity, and I assumed that if Jim Crow was dead, everyone, black and white, would be able to take part in the American Dream. For me, that dream wasn’t of a welfare state, it was of upward mobility achieved through hard work.

Now, years later, I’m having to face the fact that Martin Luther King did not kill old Jim Crow, he only wounded him. The legacies of slavery and segregation run far deeper than I realized. Blacks do not have equal opportunity with whites. There is still a lot of work to do to achieve that. Not only for blacks, but for Hispanics and our other growing minorities as well.

But instead of building on the work of MLK, we seem to have entered a backlash phase of tearing it down. There are many signs of this, but new restrictive voter ID laws are the most blatant and strike at the most essential freedom of democracy: the right to vote.

Not long after the civil-rights movement, we almost passed the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which said women had to be treated as equals. Not only did we fall short of codifying what should be a bedrock principle of how we live together, but we have been backsliding ever since. Abortion rights have never been on shakier ground, not since Roe was decided. Planned Parenthood is broadly under attack, even though it helps prevent many many more abortions than it performs. We just elected a president who has no respect for women. Not just those who want abortions, all of them. “Grab them by the pussy,” he says.

That’s the part I’ve been trying to understand. How did he get elected? There have always been men like Trump. I’ve known dozens. I’ve gotten up and left many a lunch table to avoid having to listen to their racist and misogynist jokes. I see now that I should have done more than excuse myself; I should have called them out. But at those tables everyone was laughing. I thought it was just them, a small minority of fat cats. I see now I was wrong.

I suppose I’ve answered my own question. Trump got elected because a lot of people agree with his darkest urges, his racism and misogyny. Sure, some of them may have felt left behind economically and hoped he would bring back their coal mines and steel mills. But that wasn’t the driving force behind his support. It was fear that the world is changing, that the old order of white male supremacy is crumbling. The very thing that gave me hope when I was a young man—a broadening of opportunity for minorities—struck fear into the hearts of enough voters to put Trump over the top. They weren’t the only reason he won—there were plenty who just wanted tax cuts for the rich and an end to Obamacare—but they were the deciding factor.

I live in California, which is putting up a spirited defense to the worst of Trump’s policies on climate change, the environment, healthcare and immigration. But California can’t do it alone. And Trump is doing all he can to undermine my state’s efforts to continue to protect our habitat and our vulnerable residents.

Being on another continent gives me emotional distance and historical perspective. But they are just a palliative, like morphine for a cancer patient. They are not a cure. And now I must wade back into the melee. I want to fight for what I feel is right, but it is discouraging to have to start at the bottom again on issues I thought were well and finally decided. It’s like a game of chutes and ladders, when you hit one of those places that sends you back to the beginning.

There’s nothing to do but stay in the game, keep rolling the dice. But I do wish those trap doors weren’t there. And I do hope the people who put them there, those who voted for Trump and revanchist politicians like him, will find something more humane to do than cheering when someone tumbles down the chute to the bottom below them.