Rocksteady

Houston's own:

Sidewalk Cosmos

The morning of the eclipse, buzzards circled overhead when I left the house.  They were possibly back to finish off an opossum that they'd started in a neighbor's yard the day before, but they added a note of doom to the proceedings.  I arrived at work in an unsettled state of mind because on my commute , I had found myself alone in a car with two young men at the opposite end of the train who entertained themselves on one of the many long stops in the tunnel between stations on the stop-and-go ride in by projecting small hard balls of some kind at me with such force that they whizzed as they passed and cracked when they met a surface.  By the time we got to the next station, their boredom had become so great they had depleted their arsenal, somehow without landing a single shot.  But they'd left a mark.

The disturbing start of the day colored my mood, probably contributed to my decision to forgo a rooftop eclipse watching party sponsored by the building management even though I had gone to the trouble of procuring and bringing from home the dark protective eyewear recommended by the experts for safe viewing*.  I was concentrating on a project that was giving me some trouble and toyed with the idea of settling for what I could observe through the window which included an eclectic vista of the surrounding environs-- a neighborhood in transition-- but did not include the events involving the moon and the sun.  As the time of peak eclipse approached, I suddenly noticed that things had quieted to an unusual deadness in my corner of the building and I found myself more and more drawn to the view outside the window.  I had protective glasses.  Things were happening out there.  I went out on the street to be part of it.

The afternoon light was strange.  The atmosphere was electric. People wandered in an almost stupefied state of heightened one-ness with the sky, and at the same time dislocation from time and place.  Not everyone was preoccupied with the motion of planets, satellites and stars.  Someone in a crowd of men leaning against the side of an old liquor store was hollering what sounded like, "Hey, Grandma!" so loud and with such little effect that I started to wonder if he was talking to me.  When I reached the corner, I turned. At the edge of Chinatown, a gray-haired woman with a swollen lip walking toward me was staring at me so intently I almost walked past her, but her question to anyone who would listen surprised me.

    "Where's the eclip'?" she said.  "Where's the eclip'?"
    "'Where' is the eclipse?" I asked, trying to confirm the category of the question.
    "Where's the eclip'?"
    "In the sky," I said.
    "What's the eclip'?"
    "'What' is it?" I asked, confused by the sequence of her line of questioning.
    "What is it?"
     "The moon is passing right in front of the sun.  It's blocking it."
Her eyes widened.  The journalist in her knew what came next. "When is that going to happen?"
     "It's happening right now.  It will be at peak in about 5 minutes.  Don't look at it!" I said. "Not without these."
      I took out my protective glasses and held them toward her.
     She was suddenly no longer interested in eclipses.
     "You're handsome," she said.
     'She's already blind,' I thought.
     "Listen," she said.  "I just moved out of a shelter after 9 years.  I'm in a place with my grandkids now.  I don't know how we're going to make it."
     My face must have registered the disappointment I was feeling at suddenly finding myself in the middle of a pitch, because the talk became more emotional.  I don't know what I was expecting.  I was thrown off balance by events in the heavens.
     "I go to church. I know the lord will help me.  I'm a good woman. I kicked the drugs.  But it's hard.  I can't even afford toilet paper for my grandkids.  They use newspaper to wipe themselves.  I can't buy a loaf of bread."
      I had already made up my mind I was going to break my usual rule and give her money.  I started for my wallet.
     "This morning, I sold my body for money," she said.   She looked to be in her early 60s at least.
     "Will $5 help?" I asked.
     "Make it $6," she said.
      She watched closely as I peeled the 2 bills from my wallet.
      "One more." she said.
      I obliged.  Blame it on celestial events.
      "God bless you," she said and went on her way.

A few more steps down the sidewalk I found an unoccupied expanse of wall.  When I left my office I wasn't sure I'd even find a comfort level for wearing space goggles in public, but the sun-drenched vacancy beckoned to me.  I positioned myself out of the flow of traffic, and turned toward the main attraction in the sky.  The transaction just conducted was fresh on my mind.  I had to admire the up-to-the-minute topicality of the hook. But the story she told me... These were the kind of vivid details that make or break a pitch.  I tried to imagine the desperation that would make me say such things to a stranger on the street, true or not.  But was it desperation? Or was it practice?  Did it matter?  I donned my glasses and looked up at the sun. It was within a minute of peak eclipse.  There in the eerily darkened afternoon sky was the moon, leaving just a thin crescent of penumbra uncovered.  I could hear someone loudly asking a companion, "What's he looking at?"  A gentleman wearing a tie and a short sleeved shirt asked me directly in softly accented English how he could see the eclipse.  I handed him my glasses.  A few minutes after peak eclipse, I made my way back to my office through Chinatown pausing only to document the occasion with a photograph of the celestial events playing out in the pinhole dapples of light from a tree on the sidewalk bricks in front of an old synagogue.

When I got back to work, people were already starting to filter back down to their desks from the rooftop.  A few blocks away, with protective sunglasses still in his hand, a celebrity dumbass was pointing and staring at the sun.

Dozens of eclipses

~~~~~~~~~~
* Why didn't I think to put them on when I was being used for target practice on the train?

Beach Reading

Some recent and backlogged titles for your delectation while soaking up surf and rays:

Racism & Felony Disenfranchisement: An Intertwined History by Erin Kelly at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.   Like they say, if voting really mattered, they wouldn't let you do it.

Hungary’s transit zones are prisons where pregnant women are handcuffed and children go hungry by András Földes, an important and rare English language post at Hungary's Index.hu.  When it comes to how to treat those seeking refuge, Hungary's Viktor Orbán and his ruling party Fidesz drink from the same trough as their American counterparts.

In the Year of #BlackGirlMagic, Marion Jones Is Missing by Dave Zirin at The Nation.  The rest of the story.

Setting the Bar

Whatever else you want to say about it, the Trump era has so far been an eye-opening experience. Not just because of the fear of what could happen if you stop looking.   Before Trump assumed the office, no self-respecting leftist with strong anarchist leanings would want to defend "the majesty" of the presidency, but in the age of Trump, that's a rather moot point because the majesty has been thoroughly pissed out of existence by Trump and his cohort.  It's as though the occupant in chief has broken the 4th wall of the political reality spectacle. Not just with the superfluous trappings that go with the territory of occupying the "dump" on Pennsylvania Avenue, but especially with the turning of the meat-grinder that is the political process.  The upheaval of the old spectacle itself is not the problem; it's the spectacle that's replacing it.

We thought we knew the drill, exemplified by the run-up to the Iraq War: to simulate the process of establishing reason for pursuit of policy that is the hallmark of good democracy, the white house concocts "evidence" and rationalizations for it ; useful idiots from the expert class and punditry are persuaded to be persuaded by the rationalizations; with a critical mass of the right centrist "realists" parroting the experts, the media will obediently hop into the lap. We knew it was fucked up when we saw it,  but we never fully appreciated how "professional-grade" it all was.  That's all out the window now.  Any pretense of going through the formality of planning or forethought about the national agenda is abandoned. Any impulse to concede that a sizable majority of the country is owed at least the respect of an attempt at persuasion if not consultation for policy that's likely to affect the entire country if not the world is shunted aside.  There may be cooler heads than Trump's in his inner circle but given the haphazard path of the "agenda" so far, those heads do not appear to prevail. We know there are pathologies in Trump's character that account for the devaluation of competence (not least of which is pathological incompetence itself), but it's stunning to see them in action.

Nothing has changed my conviction that this could be a short presidency, but experience has tempered the details a bit of how the end of it could come about.  An operating theory of mine before the inauguration was that the pressures to compromise that come with leading the executive branch in the current political climate could have Trump resigning in a fit of "who needs this shit", if not leaving the office for good on a stretcher before all was said and done.  But experience has shown that Trump doesn't compromise.  This is a quality that we admire in those with an informed and inspired crystal clear vision of how things should be (unlike Trump's predecessor, say, who in spite of many virtues seemed to compromise to a fault practically out of the gate even with his mandate for innovation.)  The paragons of this "no compromise" quality take the complexities of a situation and use their gifts to craft elegant simplicities from them.  There is no evidence that Trump is capable of such a thing.  No doubt the workings of his mind such as they are necessarily require the input to be as simple as possible, but the output is always hopelessly mangled.  

Don't think we haven't noticed the poor quality of this man's intellect and character.  I do know Trump defenders who have lost patience with complaints about the competence of the executive.  He was elected precisely because he's not your typical politician, the argument goes.  "Just give him time like we gave Obama."  Except of course, Obama didn't get time.  The tea party was already in fully corporate funded bloom by this time in Obama's first term motivated to my memory by some rather unhinged over-reaction from a disappointingly sizable faction of my generational and demographic cohort. This is not about revenge. Truthfully time was less than kind to my own assessment of Obama's effectiveness before all was said done for quite opposite reasons from the Tea party's.  But the degree of incompetence, bad behavior, dishonesty and capacity for outright criminality of the current president, all apparent before the election has only become more blatantly obvious since the inauguration.  This is not about ideology.  This is about the evidence of one's eyes and ears.   

Furthermore, there's a great disingenuousness in the most fervent Trump supporter's entreaty to give Trump a chance.  Taken to a logical conclusion, this pretends to assume that not only is it possible for anyone honestly paying close attention to become a Trump supporter, but that unity is even a goal.  In truth, if my kind were to suddenly be on board with Trump's program, something would be wrong. He would  no longer be the turd in the punch bowl that brings so much delight to so many of his admirers. If there were reason to believe that Trump had in fact actually become competent enough to be trusted by the likes of me, there would still remain for me the stench and residue of the turd in the punch that he has been to date to deal with.  Turd drinking takes a special kind of palate.

The media certainly thrive on the perception of chaos in public affairs.  To them the extreme is money in the bank.  This is why they could not help themselves from making the previous election entirely about Donald Trump and at best are not blameless in our current predicament.  So they have had a hand in making the shape we're in.  But the media are trained to portray the circus in Washington regardless of its lunacy as evidence of the continuity of American democratic institutions.  The owners have a vested interest in coloring their product in this light.  This is why the media will be the last to see the damage the vandals in the white house are doing.  The devolution will not be televised. It is already underway.