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California Hating by the Heroes of Populism

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She likes the free fresh wind in her hair,
Life without care
She’s broke and it’s oke
Hates California, it’s cold and it’s damp
That’s why the lady is a tramp

— “The Lady Is a Tramp”

For whatever reason, California envy has been rising lately.

Remember Rick Perry’s failed attempt to lure high tech and other of the state’s businesses (Elon Musk’s Tesla, included) to Texas in 2013 and 2014?

Did you know that a Utah state legislator has offered a bill to support California’s secession from the United States.   [Read more…]

‘America First:’ The Value of Knowing Where We’ve Been

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Tough subjects seem always to end up with Greek or Latin roots.   Alienation, bulimia, catastrophe, depression … just go through the alphabet and you’ll find them.  

In our fragile democracies, maybe we assign concepts like these, wrestled over by so many psychoanalysts, social and clinical psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, writers for large daily newspapers — even some politicians — that they’ve become contorted and distorted to the point that they are merely suggestive, symbolic, abstracted from the particular.

Many of them become the product of people who differ mightily over the causes and effects of our barely civilized mistakes; for example, the election of Donald Trump to presidency.

Historians have generally proved to be more reliable than other more scientific specialists active in the battle to explain how we wound up electing a blowhard to the nation’s highest office.  Here are two words they’ve used, righteously, to explain our mad indifference to failure: Xenophobia and isolationism.   [Read more…]

Sex and the Evangelical Republican

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The Republicans seemed always to have maintained the fiction that all of them live in one big uprighteous tent.  Donald Trump, alone above public figures, has proved that even the Republicans can’t restore credit to that myth.

It took someone as outrageous as Trump to bring down this shibboleth.  Somehow, for some reason, they survived their own fetid combination of industrial-strength exploitation of working people with imagery of their own responsible, sober natures.  All this survived until the mixture became impossibly hypocritical.

Republicans began to curdle after Ronald Reagan left his lifeguard gig in the White House. Something about his aw-shucks self rang untrue.  He made patriotic training films about war and John Wayne made Hollywood films about it.  Neither of them joined the fight; both were Republicans.   [Read more…]

I’m Not a Patriot

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I’m not a patriot. I’m just a citizen.

A citizen who pays taxes on time, and watches out for people attempting to cross busy streets by way of blinking crosswalks placed as memorials to those once killed by a sports sedan driven by someone in a hurry.

I haven’t been a patriot for a very long time. Not since Vietnam, when a leading general was caught in the crosshairs of a confusion so profound that he actually said:

In order to save the village we had to destroy it.

Who benefited from that transparent oddity?  Certainly not the general, for he unintentionally revealed the damage our patriotic vainglory does to common sense.  Long ago sense was made uncommon so that money could be made instead.   [Read more…]

Words for the Freeps on Our Fifth Anniversary

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The New York Times Could Only Take ‘One Outrage a Week From San Diego’

Many of us Freeps were born at the simultaneously best and worst of times. We came into the world during or just after World War II, which itself is probably the best war these so-called United States ever fought.

Our parents had been rescued from the Great Depression by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal thinkers, a class not afraid to be called intellectuals because they combined brains with a conscience, a combination that produced programs like Social Security and a set of banking laws that are still in operation. A Works Projects Administration built schools and government buildings (see our own County Administration Building) that established a new and more chic standard than the revivalism of Greek and Roman temples and Southern plantation aesthetics. There was a GI Bill that sent vets to universities to resume their educations.   [Read more…]

No. 45, in the Locker Room

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Believe me, we’re all Donald Trump. It’s true. He’s like us. You can take that to the bank. I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t know it’s true, about you and about me.

Let me give you a for instance.   [Read more…]

My Girlfriend’s a Robot, but I’m a Drone

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By Bob Dorn

Hi.  I’m a robot?

Are you amazed I can talk like a freshman on speed?  

Don’t be.  It’s all just zeroes and ones, yeses and nos, exes and minuses that can account for the way I so humanly can flick my long blonde hair over my earpiece, or, in the case of my boyfriend, yell Wahoo!!! when there’s a story about the Chargers pledging $1 million for a new stadium on the waterfront.   [Read more…]

Women’s March San Diego: Somewhere Near Sanity

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At 9:30 the No. 7 bus driver stopped for us even though he’d lighted the “Out of Service” banner. He told us with a smile “room for two more.” Passengers were butt to butt and belly to belly. A woman said she loved my hat: I’d cut out the letter N and O, for NO, and taped them to the red baseball cap I hadn’t been wearing lately out of fear I’d be considered a TrumpLump.

By the time we’d arrived at Broadway at the 12th Ave. Transit Center crowds on foot were already heading toward the Civic Center. Cars and buses could only inch along beleaguered Broadway. So we jumped off the bus at 4th Ave. and headed north to B St.

We went over chains at parking lots, and squeezed through 5-inch gaps between walls and fence posts in order to get closer to the main crowd — we were probably 200 or 300 feet from the speakers’ stand. We couldn’t see them, so it’s impossible to say how far away we were from the center. Looking south on 2nd Ave. we could see the crowd on Broadway couldn’t move.   [Read more…]

Connections Have Gaps

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By Bob Dorn

Some six weeks ago I had my first grand mal seizure. In its aftermath I’ve read only enough about the brain’s temporal lobe, and its neurons and mitochondria to be able to say epilepsy remains a bit of a mystery.

Mystery’s not a word doctors like to combine with illness. After all, there are causes and effects. Modest physicians will go so far as to say we don’t know enough to name the cause and the mechanism that delivers the startling effects of these convulsive explosions.

I went to black immediately after some fascinating warning signs (about which, later). I knew nothing once I was down on the living room floor, gurgling and grimacing, my whole body stiffening. “A man will do that” I joked from the hospital bed, inspiring a laugh from my beloved wife, who’d witnessed the horror from its start.   [Read more…]

Air Politics (Or Is It Just Gas?)

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Because America fell to a fascist coup d’etat only a few weeks ago it’s not too early to talk about how it happened.

First and above all others, the Democratic Party was a necessary player in this debacle. Loyalists will be outraged seeing that in print. After all, they’ll say, we need now more than ever to grow more united, to bond again as Democrats because… stronger together. But that mother-loving phrase failed, didn’t it? It was empty of substance, like so many others the Dems put up. No one bought it.

It’s almost pathetic to watch the defeated party grope for explanations having to do with the decrepit Electoral College and Republican gerrymandering, the FBI’s Comey striking a blow at the last minute, the Russians hacking into party emails and releasing excerpts of conversations that revealed—Gasp!—cynicism equaling that portrayed in any House of Cards episode.   [Read more…]

I’ll Have the Apocalypse Burger, with a Bullet on the Side

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The Democratic Party, not the Republicans, died Tuesday night. It took with it to the grave a functional middle class.

From now on smart people will have to find some new ways to avoid the hoi polloi, the downward bound still clinging to their weekend Harleys and storing their AK 47’s in whatever closet they can afford to rent. We’ve watched our tepid and bland Democrats — the Susan Davis’s and Scott Peters — clapping and wiggling their asses to the tunes of corporate advisers for so long that we’ve failed to notice they look and sound just like Republicans.

They just wouldn’t go away, would they? They kept cloning themselves, and droning the same songs of the party of Jefferson. They were forced by political law to live in their districts but we didn’t know where they were, and we knew it wouldn’t be in their local offices. How many pieces of our minds were we unable to give them?

Who’d a thunk the Dems would die first?   [Read more…]

Anti-Bobism Will Be The Death of this Country

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What’s wrong with Bob?

It’s a question I ask myself almost every day, usually after reading the news.

For the last 100 years* it’s been the third most popular name in America (if you’re including Robert), yet we’ve had no President Bobs. Not one.

We’ve had six James’s (the most popular name in the U.S.) and five Johns (the second most popular) elected president even though there’ve only been 50, 717 more Johns than Roberts born in this country over those 100 years. Bobs are solidly in third place in this country but we haven’t sent a single Bob to the White House.   [Read more…]

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