Shut Up and Pitch

One fine spring day in Arcata I was branded “narc” by a band of guttermuffins who had taken over Redwood Park for a 420 celebration They taped a crude paper sign on my back—not because I was keeping notes or taking photos, but because I looked them in the eye the way anybody would who wanted to get past the grins and plaudits of greeting and really see someone. No doubt they harbored guilty consciences—it was early in the days of legalized weed and most confirmed stoners were also confirmed secret traffickers if not growers and stashers of commercial quantities, since it was Arcata.

You could have rounded up half the celebrants and called it the American Left, while the other half was composed of nomadic, preliterate, rebels hoping to preserve the conditions they had come to enjoy during their late teens throughout adulthood by growing weed, first in their bathtubs and sinks, then the great outdoors.

There wasn’t much of a right wing public presence in Arcata, but when I played in the local softball league it was obvious who owed their paycheck to the logging industry: you could tell by their opinions, which were plainly expressed in the form of roasted owl bumper stickers and Earth First We’ll Log the Other Planets Later t-shirts. There were a few well educated liberals sprinkled through the league, and some of the Arcata teams were visibly left-leaning, but the majority was plainly right wing, educated or not, and didn’t come to the ballpark expecting to debate politics.

Despite a wide gulf between the two worldviews most common in the communities clustered around Humboldt Bay, people actually found ways to get along, longhair and crewcut side by side in bars—except maybe for The Logger up in Blue Lake which is probably still unknown territory to local progressives. In fact I’m sure they are still getting along better than the American Right and Left seem to be getting along these days, and there is probably a diverse contingent contending for the local softball title this summer, rather than shooting at each other as you might believe from reading the Fake News.

How much of this heated division between Americans of the left and the right is actually Fake News? All or most would be my guess.

I have nothing against Russians or Putin but anybody who’s ever sat down to a hand of poker knows what happened here. Putin is obviously somewhere between 10 and 100 percent smarter than Trump. He saw his developing candidacy and realized what a great opportunity it was, like a runaway, rudderless barge he could light on fire and set drifting toward all our cherished freedoms and institutions. Not out of malice but the way any of us would who came upon a boulder poised at a cliff edge. Some things are impossible to resist.

Because most Americans have no critical reading or thinking skills, since they read either nothing or very little, and only in support of their beliefs, rather than to challenge and test their beliefs, it couldn’t have been easier: unleash a barrage of falsehoods, exaggerations and distortions of reality, a relentless stream of stories which could be shared to infinity on social networks by Americans with their minds made up, highly susceptible to the emotional release provided by further and more sordid confirmation of their most ridiculous beliefs, sit back, and watch the voting machines hum.

Trump owes his political career to the fact that many of his supporters still believe that Obama is a) Muslim b) Kenyan c) Socialist, so a hardworking propagandist finds it easy to convince them of just about anything.

Rather than defend against the daily proof that they elected an incompetent completely in the hands of demagogues for his political vision while he works for foreign capitalists, warlords, dictators and investors, Trump supporters continue to hold up Hillary and Obama masks painted in lurid but fading colors. Their man is on center stage. The judges are still deciding.

My belief is that since most Americans had been living in polarized communities, isolated by geography and in some cases by religion from people who look or act differently, they were ripe for Trump’s attack, aimed at their fear of outsiders and the unknown. I say most Americans with the understanding that a large minority live on the coasts in very diverse communities which are in some ways as isolated from the vast monopoly of culture and opinion that exists across state borders as foreign countries side by side but seamed by vast canyons and mountains.

Within the past four months my life has been threatened on social media by right wing partisans. These are the guys who believe in a Hitlerian vision of social control and racial purity, of armed authoritarian revolt that would sacrifice the US Constitution for martial law. They are not leftists, but their threats on my life came as they were pausing to breathe between shouts about the threat posed by leftists.

Amusingly to people who know American history, an entire literary and social movement was born out of the involuntary association of leftists, anarchists and outright liberal pacifists at a prison for conscientious objectors from the draft called in World War 2. This group of poets, artists and sensitive souls formed the core of what later became the Beat Generation, a community tolerant enough to accept as their visionary icon a conservative, football playing, hard-drinking mama’s boy instead of the gay Jewish intellectual who wanted the job.

There was no comparable literary movement on the American right, but a lot of people read Ayn Rand in college.

There is nothing to be learned from isolation. Turn off the propaganda and talk to people.

#arcata #420 #earthfirst #beatgeneration