Two encounters with hawks

Sunday as I was riding my bicycle down Highway 1 to San Luis Obispo, a hawk or a turkey vulture drifting on an air current just off to my right cast a shadow that wobbled at an angle across the shoulder right into my path. I rode right through it, and for a fraction of a second—about the time it would take light, traveling about 67 million times faster than I was pedaling, to circle the earth twice, if light traveled in a circle—that bird was the only thing between me and the sun.

Then this morning, or it might have been yesterday, I was sitting here at my sister’s desk, which affords a lovely view through a picture window of Morro Bay and the sand spit that frames it and the ocean beyond, when a hawk came swooping in under the eaves of the garage on my left about five feet off the ground, made a hard left turn around the birdbath about ten feet from the house and flew off. It came in so low and went by so fast, I couldn’t tell but thought maybe it snatched up a mouse just before it made that turn. If it did, it was the smoothest, quickest act of predation I’ve ever either witnessed or wondered whether I had. If you blinked, you missed it entirely, if in fact it happened at all. I thought I saw a rodent’s tail and various other extremities dangling from the hawk’s beak as it flew off, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I might have imagined the mouse, but the hawk was real, a blur of fluttering red and brown feathers, pumping muscles and grace. It made that hard turn look easy, and as it came out of it, it flapped its wings and for a second, through the double-paned window, you could hear them drubbing the air. Then it flew up and off, back toward the left, toward Los Osos, with a smaller bird in characteristic pursuit. Maybe it found a perch somewhere and enjoyed a leisurely snack, or congregated with its friends and gave them a good laugh describing the gawking human in the house it buzzed.

Anthony Wiener's weird role in history

What’s lost amid all the hoopla over Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey is what sparked the FBI’s decision last October about a week and a half before the election to reopen its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails—a decision for which Trump effusively praised Comey at the time and which now factors prominently in the tortured case the administration is making for his firing. That investigation, and Comey’s remarks about it, had already done serious damage to Clinton’s candidacy, as plenty of her supporters observed bitterly at the time. It was reopened, at about the worst possible time for Clinton, too late for her to recover from it, in response to the discovery on a laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Wiener (D—NY) of State Department e-mails his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, had forwarded to him, reportedly so he could copy them and deliver them to Clinton. And why was law enforcement looking at Wiener’s laptop? That was because he was suspected of “sexting” lewd pictures of parts he should have kept more private to a teenage girl.

This was not Wiener’s first brush with notoriety on that sort of account. He resigned his House seat in 2011 after revelations of just such behavior involving multiple young women—a story with which New York’s tabloid headline writers had a protracted field day. More than five years later, it seems, he was back at it in what may rank as history’s most consequential bit of recidivist sexual perversion.

Historians will have plenty to say about the Trump presidency. Every day it seems to break new ground. We’ve never had a comic opera carnival barker buffoon as president before. With any luck we’ll survive this one and never have another. The damage we’ve inflicted on ourselves and on our standing in the world may be contained. We may look back on the Trump administration and miss its farcical comic side. Certainly no administration has ever supplied better grist for comedians’ mills. But there’s nothing funny about Trump’s ambitions. To the extent he achieves them, the damage to our environment and our place as the world’s foremost champion of Western democratic values could be irreversible. Momentous historical developments are generally attributed to correspondingly momentous forces, and there clearly were such things at work in Trump’s election victory. But there’s a good case to be made that the pivot point on which the election swung was a dark corner of a disgraced former congressman’s brain.

Sweet surrender in Soledad

The other day about 2 p.m. while driving and drowsy northbound on Highway 101, I pulled off at Soledad, parked facing another car at a modest-sized shopping center, turned the engine off, put the key in my pocket, cracked the windows, cranked the seat back and went to sleep. One minute I was hurtling along at 60 or 70 mph, struggling to stay awake and in grave danger of killing myself and taking a bunch of other people with me, and the next I was carefree and happy and stock still. We think of going  to sleep as falling or sinking, but in the brief bit of consciousness I retained while undergoing that transition, it felt more like taking flight, as though my thoughts were a flock of birds, each free to wheel and soar wherever it pleased at absolutely no risk to me or anyone else. It was the opposite of risk. Having first taken the sensible precaution of stopping, I knew that by surrendering to my fatigue and letting go entirely, I was protecting myself. The contrast between the misery of driving and the relief of suddenly not driving was so sharp, it gave me a conscious sense of buoyancy even as I lost consciousness. We identify mobility with freedom, and being stationary with confinement, but on that freeway I was in a sort of prison, and in that parking lot, in park with the hand brake on and the motor off and my eyes closed, I was free. 

Image courtesy Google & WallpaperUP

The word smiths in the White House

It used to be, in the good old days, which were neither old at the time nor entirely good, that political phraseology had some staying power. The 1960s gave us some expressions great only in that they contained the word, such as the Great Society and the Great Silent Majority; some decidedly ungreat ones such as Vietnamization and Burn, baby, burn; and some completely ridiculous ones courtesy of Spiro Agnew, including radiclibs and nattering nabobs of negativism; and most of them, even some of Agnew’s, stuck around long enough to gain some popular traction. You could use them in casual conversation and people would know what you were talking about.

          The George W. Bush era brought us a fresh batch of concepts du jour, including compassionate conservative, boots on the ground, and the American Dialectic Society’s 2002 so-called Word (singular) of the Year, weapons of mass destruction. Boots on the ground fell out of common parlance not long after the expiration of the six-month time limit the Bush administration initially set on their remaining on the ground in Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction fell out of favor too, discredited as the most egregious of the false pretenses under which we invaded Iraq. You don’t hear compassionate conservative used much anymore either. Compassion seems to have fallen out of favor among conservatives, or at least among a sizable percentage of people who purport to be conservative. Cruelty, or at best indifference to suffering, seems more the order of the day in the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

But if you can fault Trump and his supporters for lactating too little the milk of human kindness, you cannot accuse them of fostering too little catch-phrase formation. Trump and his manic freak show of a presidency are generating new phrases or highlighting previously seldom-seen older ones at a stunning clip. Before he ever ran for president, he inspired The Donald. His campaign introduced us to Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary, the wall, fake news, extreme vetting and tweet storm; grabbed our attention with Grab ’em by the pussy and focused it on the white working class (a group including, or more or less corresponding to, people previously more often designated as rural whites, evangelicals, the Great Silent Majority, hardhats or Reagan Democrats); and marshaled a bunch of robust imperatives, some new, some retreads from bygone contests, including Make America Great Again, Build the Wall, Lock ’er up! and Drain the Swamp, this last an old expression but with a new hashtag short form of DTS. His election instantly brought forth Not my president; and somewhere along the line we’ve gotten alt-right and, more predictably, Trumpian, Trumpist and the Party of Trump.

This has all been verbally fecund enough. But since Trump took office, the terms and outlandish remarks have been popping up and going viral so fast, to quote Trump himself, “your head will spin.” Or perhaps yours has already begun to. In just its first three months his presidency has given us alternative facts, the lying media, its German counterpart, Lügenpresse, and its analog, the press as the opposition party; the deconstruction of the administrative state; the de-operationalizing of the National Security Council; Tweeter in Chief, incidental intelligence, unmasking and deep state; highlighted NAFTA, the emolument clause, filibuster, judicial review, the Congressional Review Act and sanctuary and resurrected the nuclear option, all amid a swirl of collusion, recusal, preposterous allegations, Russian links, early-morning tweet storms, war crimes, terror attacks, congressional probes, sex scandals, a missile strike, gratuitous antagonizing of allies, comically adversarial press conferences, West Wing power struggles and Kellyanne Conway hawking Ivanka Trump’s clothing line on Fox & friends.

How long the verbiage tossed up amid all this mayhem sticks around will no doubt vary from phrase to phrase, but the sheer volume of political terms being coined, recoined, highlighted or inspired by Donald Trump probably dooms many of them to brief currency. Some of them seem to have faded already. The so-called deep state may pop back up from the depths, but it seems already, after a week or so of notoriety, to have sunk back into the conspiratorial ooze from which it emerged a month or so ago.

Those of us still around ten or twenty years from now may still remember some or all of the many novel terms and concepts and stunning quotes the Trump presidency will have generated by the time it runs its course, but how many of them will seem as quaint then, and suffer as much neglect, as radiclib or, say, from a slightly later era, the Moral Majority, does now?

In any case, Donald Trump’s astounding flaws and limited vocabulary notwithstanding, in sheer volume he and his entourage figure to enrich, or at least enlarge, our political lexicon more than any previous administration. Their political circus features an etymological sideshow as creative as the action under the Big Top is destructive. They’re both fascinating. If we’re lucky, we’ll emerge, feeling grimy and vulgar but alive, from the collapsing Big Top one day and look back on it, lying limp and deflated amid a bed of verbal debris, and wonder, “Did any of that make sense?”

In honor of baseball...

...some doggerel I wrote while driving a taxi cab in San Francisco twenty-plus years ago. Or actually, while sitting in my cab between fares:

The Answer

Is it better to dress up in feathers,

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Or to clam oneself up in a shell?

Or to play the showboat in a fancy fur coat?

How is a creature to tell?

Might one to do better to dress all in wool?

Could millions of sheep all be wrong?

Or maybe in frills and porcupine quills.

Maybe they’ve had it right all along.

Perhaps we should take our sartorial clues

From the fish in the sea who wear scales,

Or the penguins, perhaps, who take showers and naps

And go swimming in black tie and tails.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Or perhaps one should carry a shell on one’s back,

But if so, what sort of a shell—

The curlicue kind or a tough turtle rind?

How is a creature to tell?

Maybe the practical tactical tack,

The safe and sensible course to pursue,

Is to dress head to tail in a coat all of mail

As the armadillos do.

Image courtesy Clipart

But I shudder to think of the weight of such clothes.

What a terrible burden to bear!

Better flee if need be, or cry “Please spare me,”

And find something lighter to wear.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Now snakes have a curious custom in dress,

One I blush just a bit to disclose:

Attire of which they have tired they ditch,

And crawl about in their underclothes!

Well, it’s all very well for a snake in the grass

To slither about in its drawers,

But what other beast from a yak to a yeast

Would be caught dead in its shorts out of doors?

Photo courtesy the Baltimore Orioles

What we need is a beast of impeccable taste

To follow in matters sartorial.

Hmmm, let’s see…a flounder? A flea?

Wait! I’ve got it! The glorious Baltimore Oriole!

O, what a hit that foul makes as he takes

With his mates to the field to play ball,

In his cleats and his glove, with his cap on above,

The dashingest player of all!

O, what a figure he cuts as he trots

Round the bases and prances toward home!

The sultan of style! Beyond all denial,

League leader in looks and aplomb!

And O, the proud picture he makes as he doffs

His cap to the boisterous throng!

How splendid his plumage, his posture and groomage!

How loud the applause and how long!

Photo courtesy National Geographic

Three cheers for that Chesapeake champion!

God bless that brave Baltimore bird!

O say can’t you see not to dress to a T

Just as he does would just be absurd?

That’s it, then—that bird is the answer.

There’s no finer model to find.

It’s just indisputable: his uniform’s suitable

For any and all creaturekind.

So hear me, I call on all creatures,

In the sea, on the land, in the sky:

Toss off your old trappings, your weary old wrappings—

A new day in fashion is nigh!

Go hire a tailor or sew it yourself.

Beg, borrow or steal or make payment.

Do what you must, just get yourself trussed

Up in Baltimore Orioles raiment.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Then see as you step in your cleats from the door

What a spring has sprung up in your stride,

What esteem you receive, what awe you perceive

In the youngsters who flock to your side.

Just see as you stride through the door where you work

What respect you collect from your peers,

How tender the smile your boss smiles while

You acknowledge your coworkers’ cheers.

And see as you come back full circle to home

What a hero you are in your house,

How warmly you’re greeted, hugged, high-fived and feted

By your kids and your dog and your spouse.

And after all that if you’re still doubtful whether

In Orioles leggings to dwell,

Just dwell on the riches you’ve reaped in those britches—

That’s how a creature can tell.

(c)

Photo courtesy the Baltimore Orioles

A breathtaking new take on the air we breathe

The federal Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 and amended in 1977 and 1990, grants one state and one state only, that being California, the right to formulate vehicular emissions standards stricter than those of the EPA. That privilege is owing to a distinction California would rather not have, that of having, in the Los Angeles basin and the San Joaquin Valley, some of the nation’s dirtiest air. Other states are free to adopt California’s standards if they wish to, and thirteen—Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, plus the District of Columbia—have done so. Together, the California-standard bloc accounts for about forty percent of the US auto market. This segment being far too big for auto manufacturers to ignore, the California standards have in large part effectively displaced the EPA’s standards and comprise one of the major factors behind California’s widely recognized leadership in the battle against global warming.

But that leadership, or at least the legal anomaly that underpins it, is in danger. The Trump administration not surprisingly takes a dim view of California’s stricter-than-federal tailpipe emissions standards. It will come as no great surprise if the EPA under Scott Pruitt seeks to revoke the exemption that allows California to impose them.

Anyone old enough to have breathed the air in Los Angeles in the 1960s, or to have tried to make out anything more than a block and a half or so away through it, and in a position to repeat either exercise today, can attest to the degree that air quality has improved there over the last 47 years. In fact air quality over that span has improved significantly nationwide. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone—the first two being the main toxins in acid rain, the third a critical component of smog—have fallen by 71, 46 and 25 percent respectively since 1980. That group credits the Clean Air Act with preventing more than 400 thousand premature deaths and hundreds of millions of respiratory and cardiovascular disease episodes.

The EPA itself notes that over the 45 years following the passage of the Clean Air Act, national aggregate emissions of six common pollutants—particles, ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide­—fell by an average of 70 percent even as the nation’s gross domestic product more than doubled. We pretty much all breathe cleaner air today, and we should all of us, of whatever political stripe, be happy about that.

But in keeping with his pervasive amorality and with long-established Republican tradition, Donald Trump has set out to degrade our environmental safeguards in the name of jobs. Republicans tend to follow this course no matter how much the environmental costs outweigh the economic benefits. It’s also typical of them to champion states’ rights—except when they see fit not to, which is generally to say, when they’re the ones wielding federal power. Thus the decision in 2000 by a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees to deny Florida the right to conduct a recount of presidential ballots. Thus the passage at the behest of President George W. Bush (with plenty of Democratic support) of a nationwide student-testing regimen under the No Child Left Behind law. Thus, nowadays, the Trump administration’s policies on marijuana, sanctuary, abortion and mileage mandates.

There are arguments of varying degrees of cogency to be made for imposing a uniform nationwide set of mileage standards. Complying with California’s—the state’s Air Resources Board just voted unanimously to require new cars to average 54.5 mpg by 2025—will cost automakers money, more than a thousand dollars per car by some estimates, and those costs will of course get passed on to consumers. But those transferred costs will be defrayed if not completely offset by what consumers save on gas.

A more compelling advantage to uniform nationwide mileage standards might be that of sparing motorists the threat of prosecution in driving across the border from a state with lower standards to one with higher ones. But there’s also an obvious reason why California has been granted the right to formulate its own standards—we have more air pollution than anyone else. Air pollution kills people. Residents of any state have the right to take reasonable measures to protect their own lives, and to scale those measures to the local dangers they face. California's air pollution comes largely from car and truck exhaust. It makes perfect sense that California would want to impose controls on that exhaust stricter than those in states where smog poses less of a risk.   

Fifty years ago, visitors to Hollywood were often hard-pressed in broad daylight, or daylight as broad as it got, to see that neighborhood’s iconic namesake sign on the hillside overlooking the movie studios. These days visibility in Los Angeles is much improved. If Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt have their way, the Hollywood sign and much of the rest of the country may be headed back toward smog-blanketed obscurity, and people will suffer respiratory and cardiovascular ailments in greater numbers than otherwise, and some of them will die sooner. States’ rights is a matter of principle. Air quality is a matter of life and death. In the matter of emissions standards, the Trump administration seems set on violating both of them. For some of us that violation could prove fatal.

Trump, the improv president

One thing you have to say for Donald Trump—he’s spontaneous. He’s a far cry from the standard carefully scripted politician. You often hear from his supporters that “he tells it like it is.” Well, no, actually, he hardly ever tells it like it is. He almost invariably tells it like it isn’t. But he does it in a refreshingly carefree, spontaneous, unrehearsed sort of way, often on Twitter, and he mixes his messages with such wild randomness, accusing Barack Obama of tapping his phones one tweet and mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Apprentice ratings the next, it’s pretty obvious you’re getting the raw, uncensored version of what’s going on in his astonishingly childish mind. That uncalculated, spontaneous “Here I am, what you see is what you get, take me or leave me” quality, in such sharp contrast to the standard politician’s prepackaging on such predictable display with Hillary Clinton, accounts for much of the charm he worked on the people who voted for him. It’s refreshing and entertaining and dangerous.

What we see and what we have gotten with Donald Trump is a grown man with the emotions of a ten-year-old, the interests of a bored housewife and the moral compass of a carnival barker. This is a man who took to Twitter eight times over the span of a month in 2012 to weigh in on the subject of Kristin Stewart’s love life. There’s an almost endearingly unpretentious quality to that behavior. It shows that in one sense at least he is in fact a man of the people. He doesn’t just feed the common low-brow American obsession with the personal foibles of celebrities, he shares it. Lots of us have flipped through People or Us at the dentist’s office and glanced at the gossip, but who actually goes to the trouble of tweeting about it? What a regular irregular guy.

Part of the problem with Donald Trump’s spontaneity is that he is now in a position to initiate a nuclear war. That is not something that should be done spontaneously. Trump is still the featured attraction on a reality show. Only now the reality is that a profoundly disturbed, emotionally retarded egomaniac is the most powerful person on the planet and capable of destroying it. His presidency is a freak show. It’s a thrill-a-minute roller coaster ride. It’s funny and dramatic and great entertainment unless perhaps you’re a member of a minority group fearing for your life amid the racist hatred his ascent has unleashed in our country, or a child of undocumented immigrants fearing deportation, or perhaps a rancher in Kansas whose cattle just got incinerated in a giant wildfire while the climate denier you voted for was busy trying to gut the EPA.

Just exactly what price the rest of us pay to watch Trump’s tour de farce as a President Geek figuratively biting off the heads of live chickens remains to be seen. For now, for most of us, it seems like a morbidly fascinating comic horror show, and forty years from now those of us who last that long may look back on it fondly for its sheer entertainment value. But the power of the presidency is no joke. Putting it in the hands of a spontaneous buffoon may prove to have been the opening act of a solemn and in retrospect depressingly predictable tragedy.