Chicken Little reprised...The Ladies...My Office for a day

 

        My journalist's "fire horse" instinct is irrepressible. We'll sort through some thoughts and analysis of the "sky is falling" syndrome, but first we're sharing recent work of my favorite artist.

        When she is not doing ceramics or gardening she keeps busy making a variety of cards. My favorites are "Lana's Ladies."

    

        It's fascinating and entertaining to watch the population grow. Each Lady is a personality unto herself. She is begun as a water color, then Lana accessorizes.

          The process is an art unto itself. As you can see they are a combination of elements, pieces gathered from assorted sources. She uses old greeting cards, packaging material, advertising flyers, remnants of art projects, the inside of tea boxes, paper product and anything that brings a texture, color or can be imagined as something one of her Ladies would wear.

      When she was an art student at Ball State she often said artists are the first recyclers.

        

        Do you know this feeling? Do you need a break?

I do? Political burn out. So I moved my study for the day. Good reception, note pad, gentle breeze, lulling surf, peace and quiet.

        A simple nervine for all of us is to cut back on the volume of political junk we let into our lives. Attention is necessary, to what is important, but there’s a lot to be filtered out. Media hype for example.

    

        Media was up to a froth of dire projections and a near hysterical certainty by election day. I wish they would back off the addiction to polls. Are they more interested in predicting outcome than reporting? 

        Political journalism has been "game" obsessed since Teddy White's The Making of the President 1960, the book that made  inside politics the major thrust of coverage. This year was desperate in trying to read the tea leaves.

        Predictive reporting is ephemera. 

        Common sense held as voters drew the line on crazy. MAGA is too crazy, Trump is not to be trusted, and voters cared more about freedom and individual choice than inflation.           

        No plan of their own, MAGA Republicans failed in their attempt to put economic disruption on Biden. Informed voters understand the impact of Putin's war, its global economic fall out, and the rampant price gouging.

        Predicting a "red wave," the media misread voters.

        

        Trump is damaged goods. He's losing backers and media pimps. He has challengers, and investigations and legal battles. The GOP is in for a wild ride.

        House Republicans will be a clown car in a train wreck while on the way to the gong show. Kevin McCarthy is nakedly ambitious. It will be a side show watching a coward without virtue try to manage the asylum. Hunter Biden will be the new Benghazi. Someone should pass out Ken Starr stickers to the loud and proud.

        There is a closing note from this old scribe. The media will not do it, but Joe Biden should get a lot of credit for why and how the red wave became a light mist. He drew the line. He made the case for democracy, against authoritarians, election deniers and fascists. He pointed out the risk of falling for crazy. His mid term performance went against the historic trend, and the polls. Joe Biden knows the American voter and he has a longer view than anyone else. Sometimes the old reliable is the best bet.

        See you down the trail.

    

American Twilight

         A couple of things are pretty certain. The US would not be ruptured were it not for social media and the propaganda networks. Truth, even reliable facts, are hard to find there. Millions have been radicalized and brain washed. MAGA nation, a septic tank of deceit, hate, and lunacy, stirred by con men, is evidentiary case in point-the nation is broken.

technology in the vines

            Most of us are addicted by the brain wiring gadgetry and satisfaction of our screens. All drugs have cost and side effects; the technologies of convenience and communication are destroying civil society.

            These ideas may sound heretical coming from a media/journalism lifer and a first amendment absolutist. The adherence to the canons of old have been dashed, as has almost every tradition, and norm. Once, when newspapers, radio and television were the agents of information, people worked, played and lived harmoniously, often oblivious to political differences. Even in heated campaign years, folks could back opposing candidates and parties and still play golf, go to church, live next door and even be friends. If you were not white, however, your narrative was largely ignored or it was ghettoized. On a lot of things, we had our heads in the sand.

            Mostly people avoided talking about politics and religion in any general social context. They were personal matters, left for discussion with like-minded thinkers and souls.

            Partisan media, and the unhinged platforms where anything is said, despite lack of veracity or civility, bludgeons us with cultural wedges and sledgehammers of sheer ignorance and loud stupidity. We live with the brainwashed. Even the brainwashed get to vote.

      Will a woman’s right to choose, and a defense of democracy produce more votes than personal interests in short term economies, or the ginned-up concern about “crime” and a “stolen election?” Will a wave of reaction to the reversal of Roe generate a voting block? 18-34 year olds are telling pollsters they are worried about the threat to our form of government and almost despondent over climate issues. Will they vote and by what margins? Will the polls be mistaken, again? Do people tell the truth to pollsters?

        We tend to be reactive, perhaps too much so now.

There's been a recent spate of depravity, cruelty and barbarism by brutes like Putin and Republicans who did not speak out against the attack on the Speaker's husband, or who joked about it.  Maybe that will spark some reaction of decency and humanity. 

        There’s a lot of doomsaying about a predicted election of election deniers. 

     Having reported my first election in 1968, I’ve watched as party power rises and falls and as issues come and go. I learned to trust what we used to call the common sense of the American electorate. But that was when people read newspapers and watched responsible television news and listed to authoritative radio news. That was before talk radio, social media, and propaganda networks. It was a time when people could and would think for themselves. That was before politics of division, a time when some things were considered sacred, even as democracy was taken for granted.  

 

        We'll see if common sense is resilient?

    See you down the trail. 

Witches Paddle

         In the nine years since the first Witches Paddle in Morro Bay, the idea has spread up and down the California coast.

        Against the wind and tide some 300 witches and a few friends and family paddled again, for charity.

        Witches hats have a tough time in the wind. 

        There are likely a few muscle tired witches ready for a witches brew, or a California vintage.

See you down the trail.
 

The History of the Future

        We'll share a few moments here on the idea of drought, a drought of spirit and intellect as well as the obvious, depicted here in California's Lake Isabella in Kern County.

        I've been watching Lake Isabella disappear since we became Californians in 2007. These photos were taken recently.

        The stonework in the left of the frame above is the dam.

        There is no recreation in a lake where water levels have dropped to expose the ghost trees that once filled the valley before they were covered. This is an agricultural area too. Similar scenes are visible all over the west.

        We know this, right? It's a global issue. Even if droughts break, it will take years to return to "normal," an idea that is itself probably non-existent. Climate change, for whatever reason, is just that, change!

       From the view of someone who was there to cover the first Earth Day and who has chronicled the ensuing decades, we are not ready for what is coming at us.

        To the northeast of Lake Isabella is a perfect example.

        The great Owens Valley, the deepest in the US, sits at 4-thousand feet rimmed to the east by the Sierra Nevada, west of the White and Inyo Mountains at the western edge of the great basin.

        This vast wilderness is a poster of the moral and ethical drought that can destroy humankind.

        The California Water Wars are legendary, told well in the book and documentary series Cadillac Desert, fictionalized in the film Chinatown, and subject of litigation and battles that go on.

         That island, the remnant of a volcano, sits in the middle of a lake that remains at the middle of the public awareness of theft, deception, chicanery and shortsightedness perpetuated by Los Angeles officials. It began in the late 19th century and to this day LA exists becasue of the water theft.

        Mono Lake, subject of some of the most complex litigation in history, is the largest lake that remains in what once was an Owens Valley flowing with rivers, tributaries, small lakes until LA movers and shakers, destroyed them to feed a real estate boom that led to city of LA we know today. 

        It is a city still dependent on other people's water and those waters like those that feed Phoenix, and so much Southern California, and Arizona, are disappearing.

        Drought should change how we live, but golf courses remain green, builders continue to develop, swimming pools are filled, mindless irrigation continues. When the last drop is used, civilization in those places face a darkness where the drought of spirit, morality and ethics will rise up and create a force that will savage life and society.

        After years of wrangling, Mono Lake is beginning to rise and LA has learned to deal with it. While that may seem to be  good news, LA has instead begun to draw water from subsurface sources in the Owens Valley. 

        Owens Lake is a dry lake bed, as are others. Still the modernity of life in a big city is sucking water from aquifers in a parched area.

        In the early 1900's modern life began the theft. The Paiute tribe and other first citizens had relied on the water for centuries. Settlers had also begun a thriving agriculture that used the accessible water.

        There is no thriving agriculture today. The Paiute and other tribes have watched their paradise be stolen.

        LA is not the only place where this drought of conscience has blinded us to the consequence of our actions. It's a global problem.

        Documentary maker Gabriela Cowperthwaite who produced the expose Blackfish is out with a new investigation that is profoundly shaking up those who have seen it. 

        Based on the seven years of work by Nate Halverson of the Center for Investigative Reporting, it relates how commercial and national interests are buying land with water and food resources around the planet, essentially gaining control. As one analyst wrote "... it is a race against the clock to control food and water..." as climate continues to change humanity. 

       What permits, and what feeds such a sinister effort? A drought of morality and ethics.

       I've tried to avoid head on political analysis for a while. I'm sick of returning to the topic, depressed by the unnecessary division in the US, and anguished about the blatant ignorance and stupidity that is rampant. I've said most of what can be said.

       While we may be appalled and angered by the story of the Owens Valley, and the continued blindness of places like LA, the drought of conscience is apparent in too many places. One place is in the logic of a Republican party that will tolerate a candidate like Herschel Walker, or field candidates who deny the election and who continue to behave as cowards and ethical cripples. 

        We are a people at risk, all of us on this planet. Most of us have a capacity to act. We should.

       See you down the trail.