Denial

Somewhere in the Mohave Desert, Calif., June 8, 2017—Sometimes a traveler can find the Truth lurking about in the most unlikely places. The Truth these days has become more and more of a subjective commodity—an elusive eel darting about unnoticed in the miasma of public opinion and murky agendas that are slowly but surely asphyxiating our Democracy. Though Truth is known to have a Stentorian voice, it is downed out these days by the din and clatter of a badly divided nation, forcing those of us who are interested in seeking the Truth to withdraw into isolated and quiet spaces, which is why I am guiding my vehicle into the wilderness along crumbling stretches of asphalt that harken back to the glory days of the American Dream.

Denial lies at the center of our crossroads

As I hit the road, the "Big News" of the day was that former FBI Director James Comey was concerned that our President, Donald J. Trump, is some kind of Serial Liar who may or may not be trying to hide his presidential campaign's, and maybe even his administration's, ties to Russian hacking of our last presidential election. In the wake of Comey's three-hour, deadpan testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, news organizations assembled panels to determine who had more credibility: Our Orange-Haired, Daddy Warbucks of a Commander-in-Chief, or the towering well-spoken Boy-Scout of a man who had served tirelessly as our nation's Top Cop for almost four years before being fired for "creating a distraction" about possible Russian Collusion by key players of the Warbucks Administration.

It's too bad that Comey's words were boiled down to mere platitudes that could be argued back and forth by pundits and focus groups on the evening news shows, because the real story is being largely ignored: Russia directly interfered with out Democracy—an act of Cyber-warfare, a virtual assassination attempt fought with weapons and tactics that are mostly unfamiliar to our mostly uneducated masses. The former FBI Director tried to spell it out for the panel, saying there was "no fuzz" around the issue, but most members of the panel were more interested in protecting or propping up their own political positions about whether our President was obstructing justice.

Out in America, opinions about the hearing seemed to coincide with whatever side of the political spectrum a person's ideologies happened to reside on. Chit-chat over red Enchiladas in Gallup, New Mexico, revealed a distrust of government in general, and our president in particular, tempered by a great reverence for Democracy and a love for our Republic. In Needles, California, a young fellow and an old timer at a gas station argued in the shade of an awning, presenting and defending the predictable "liberal" versus "conservative" sides of the argument. On this sweltering day there was more heat than light in their conversation, though both heartily agreed that "all politicians are crooks" and that our nation is in deep trouble and probably on the brink of collapse. In Twentynine Palms, California, sun-faded and wind-ravaged Trump/Pence campaign signs were displayed proudly above ramshackle encampments at the edge of the desert and the edges of society.

Our nation pines for a return to the days of "Happy Motoring"

It's clear that most people know there's something desperately wrong with our nation right now, but most seem hesitant to vocalize what that "something" really is. The polarization of America seems complete now. Both sides have squared off, and neither side seems interested in compromise or giving an inch. On one side, Donald Trump has become the perfect symbol for everything that is wrong or unjust about our nation; on the other, Donald Trump represents the hope that White Skin, money, and the home-court advantage will restore honor and dignity to a nation that seems to be moving from the big leagues to the bush leagues. Despite the differences between both points of view, each side does seem to be noticing the increasing irrelevance of the Little Guy.

Our nation sits at a crossroads like the one I came across deep in the Mojave Desert. Every signpost and set of directions has been ravaged and vandalized, yet one graffiti artist managed to provide a glimpse of The Truth—that we remain in terrible denial as a nation. While wealthy Oligarchs sitting a continent apart parse out our nation for sale to the highest bidders for their own enrichment, a divided rabble hurls words and punches toward one another in an ineffectual display of rage that can only get worse as the summer wears on.

It was 108 degrees at that crossroads, and it is only going to get hotter. It can only be a matter of time until something ignites, which is why the desert isn't a bad place to be right now.

See you on down the road....

Island Bounty

December 25, 2016, WAIKALOA, HAWAI'I—If you are a coffee lover, the Big Island of Hawai'i is a great place. Just a few miles down the coast from where we are staying, there are terrific coffee farms that grow 100 percent Kona coffee. When we picked up our rental car, Jeffrey the agent told us to buy local as much as possible to support the local economy.

We eat an enormous amount of food, said one person.

"Oh, and don't go to Starbucks," he said as we exited the building. "There's so much good local coffee that there's no need to go to Starbucks."

Nevertheless, yesterday, as I went to the market to get some local eggs for breakfast, the Starbucks was jam packed with people eating muffins and drinking huge silos of coffee or people gripping Venti Frappacinos. The price of two of those drinks would have bought nearly a half a pound of fine Kona coffee at the market that was just a stone's throw away.

"Drink local coffee," I said to a quartet of handsome dudes dressed in mainland fashions that they had obviously painstakingly selected for their honeymoons on the island.

"How rude!" one of the Style Boys retorted.

And perhaps it was, so I went home and pondered the matter over another cup of delicious Kona coffee as we prepared eggs and island potatoes. 

The locals sniffed out Captain Cook, decided he was

not a God, so they bludgeoned him to death near

here. This is the true price of fear.

For the gaggle of gay men, the coffee advice dispensed to them by an aging fat man with a sunburn who was wearing an ensemble from Kohl's probably made about as much sense to them as the story of Kamehameha I's rise to power that was written in the Hawaiian language on a plaque at the nearby Pu’ukohala Heiau National Historic Park did to me. Although there are only 13 letters in the Hawaiian language, they are all still very confusing—at least to English speakers.

What was not confusing is how, no matter where you go, mankind seems to build political and social structures that end up with the ordinary doing all the work and paying all the taxes so that the rich and privileged can continue to maintain the lifestyles to which they are accustomed without lifting a finger. Thirteen letters or not, that was the bottom line of the Kamehameha story. It's no wonder the term "Big Kahuna" remains in the English and Hawaiian lexicons nearly 300 years after the Beefy King's rise to power. Kamehameha was named king after he hefted a giant stone, fulfilling a prophesy that bamboozled the superstitious commoners into accepting "unification" that eventually turned them into slaves for the wealthy and powerful. We've seen the same thing today with the appointment of Donald J. Trump as our new leader. He pulled off a miracle, and now the ordinary rabble will march through fire against their own better judgment, working against their own best interests, for at least the next four years.

Big-Island breakfast

As we drove down the coast, I wondered whether President Obama, ensconced for Christmas with his family on a nearby island, was having a similar revelation.

The sight of a whale spout in the brilliant blue waters just off the coast shook me from my stuporous thoughts, so we pulled over and prepared to hike down to the shore—which was about a mile away downhill over unsteady lava-strewn terrain. Just as we departed, a vehicle full of young Hawaiian hooligans—all drinking Carling Black Label at 11 a.m.—made me reconsider our idea. 

"You've got quite a journey ahead of you, Brah," the driver said.

I walked up to the passenger side window. The young woman's eyes were nearly closed, the side effect of morning beers and an intense seaside Wake-'n-bake session, most likely. The couple in the back of the 4x4 vehicle giggled at me. How rude, I thought to myself. The occupants eyed our rental car as I looked on the ground at the patches of broken window glass from previously parked vehicles.

"Yeah, I've never seen whales before," I said. "About how far is it to the shoreline?"

"About half an hour, Brah."

"Good to know. Mele Kalikimaka!"

The sushi rocks at Sushi Rock!

They watched us walk toward the beach in their rear-view mirror. After they got on the road, we turned around and went back to our car.

"They'll be back just after we're out of sight and our car will be ruined," I said to Caroline, motioning to the shattered and pillaged vehicle that had been abandoned at the edge of the road below us. Broken glass, tires, and various remnants of fabric and plastic lay haphazardly next to the useless hulk. We made the decision to find a better spot for whale watching. 

Sure enough, about five minutes down the road, we saw the gray SUV and its occupants heading back down main highway toward where we had been.

We were hungry and anxious to celebrate Caroline's birthday, so we stopped in Hawi for some sushi and a cool drink. The Sushi Rock restaurant was fantastic in every way, and one of the waitresses wore a Santa hat with a faux leopard-skin fringe. Mele Kalikimaka, indeed! We ate a chef's choice sushi special, which meant they shoveled a mystery array of delicious rolls our way—44 pieces in all. It was the perfect choice for Caroline's special day.

We made our way north toward the end of the road. After visiting Pololu beach—a big hike that attracts many to the parking lot high above the valley, but not nearly as many to the stony black beach below—we headed back south for dinner. We had stocked up on tons of local comestibles at the farmer's market in Kona a day earlier, so each of our meals have been fresh feasts. A papaya, passion fruit and local lime makes for a lovely breakfast, and stir-fry is easy and plentiful here. In between we snack on nuts, local breads, and island-distilled spirits. Not only is this place a paradise for the eyes, but for the stomach as well.

The black beach at Pololu, near the northern tip
of the Big Island

Some while back when we first visited the Big Island, a friend of ours remarked that we "eat an enormous amount of food." It's a true statement. We always have, and even though I'm a big person, I will never match Kamehameha's stature, but I'll never turn into a sumo wrestler type, like the 12-year-old kid we saw sucking on a popsicle by the Kawaihae Harbor, where we watched the setting sun and the last spouting whale of the day. 

With so much great local fish and fruit on this island, it's hard to imagine how a place like the Macaroni Grill and other chain restaurants survive here. But then I think back to the encounter at Starbucks, the history of Kamehameha I, and our recent election of Donald Trump. People throughout the ages hate chaos. They like a sure bet. Why gamble on a home-made cup of coffee or one prepared at a local coffee shack when you can be sure that a cup of Starbucks will taste the same no matter where you are on the planet? Why gamble on continuing socio-economic uncertainty when a larger-than-life demigod can assign you a known place in society, even if that place is endlessly toiling in service of the Elites and the powerful?

Fear is a huge motivator, and it stops us in our tracks. It's better to erase the unknowns from life than it is to find out firsthand whether the guy in the gray SUV was coming back to smash your windows and steal your beach towels or whether, fueled by a little early Christmas Spirit and the goodwill buzz of some kind Kona gold bud, he was checking to make sure that no other hooligans were disrupting the vacation of a couple of tourists from the mainland, isn't it?

Merry Christmas, and we'll see you on down the road!

A panorama of Pololu beach near low tide.

A nod to the Greatest Generation

LOS ALAMOS, NM, Nov. 11, 2016—Three days after America made the fateful decision to elect "billionaire" celebrity Donald Trump as its 45th President, we hit the road in an attempt to locate something honest in the midst of the farce that had swept over our nation. Just eight short years after President Barrack Obama had promised "Hope" and "Change," which he then duly delivered in the form of a vast transfer of federal wealth to billionaires and bankers at the expense of working-class Americans, Donald Trump pursed his lips and squinted his beady eyes into the Television cameras and promised to make America great once again. The people bought it hook, line, and sinker, even as the Clinton crowd insisted that the abhorrent yellow-haired Reality-TV star stood no real chance of being elected.

Now, in the aftermath, watery eyed Clinton supporters staggered despondently to and fro—shell-shocked, blind, and numb from the crushing concussion of unexpected defeat—as Trump allies gloated with smug satisfaction over the Electorate's unambiguous confirmation that America as we know it had not changed and offered no hope to the majority of its citizens. Abject despair juxtaposed against a chorus of demonic glee had transformed social media, the airwaves, and the streets of some of our nation's largest cities into a disorienting noisy Hell of sensory overload. It was definitely time to unplug and escape, and the crumbling back roads of Southern New Mexico seemed an appropriate place of refuge. The buzz of our tires on long straight stretches of asphalt was enough to temporarily drown out the irreconcilable din of the raging Right and Left, and within hours of our departure we felt ourselves shaking off some of the horror of the 2016 Election.

In the Good Old Days before Cell Phones

Thank you for being part of The Greatest Generation, Dad.

In an era of endless instantaneous complaining, we sometimes forget that not long ago Americans made great sacrifices on behalf of their nation. This generation of people, dubbed by one prominent former Newsman and historian as "The Greatest Generation," looked outside of themselves toward the possibility of a Greater Good. These people built modern infrastructure, and made discoveries that would lead to the Space Age, plastics, high-speed computers, modern warfare, and the cell phone. Some became rich in the process. Others helped defend America and the rest of the world from tyranny and fascism on the battlefields of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

My father was one of the latter. He marched through Europe, killing Nazis and liberating Jews from the death camps that had been erected by their captors. He told me once that he had slowly slid a bayonet into the eye of an arrogant Nazi SS officer who would not provide answers to questions after being captured. He told me other stories about combat that made that episode seem tame by comparison. Clearly his experiences in World War II had left deep scars upon his psyche, but he didn't wear those scars on his sleeve and he preferred not to talk about the war. I was able to coax stories out of him only once. He told me his tales on two conditions: That I sit and listen to them until he was finished telling them; and that I never again ask him about the war afterward. A long, difficult day ensued, but in the end I felt I had a much greater understanding of my father, and certainly I had a lot more respect for him. 

Upon his return to the United States after the war, he took up a fight against ignorance, serving as a science teacher for junior high school students. He never asked for credit for serving his nation, and none was ever given to him. He died poor but happy just four days after his 79th birthday. His largely anonymous passing occurred in a nondescript rural community that had been carved into the unforgiving hardscrabble landscape of southeastern New Mexico. Few were present for his burial; no one referred to him as a hero. Though my father was not a gentle or necessarily refined person, he deplored racism and injustice. The war had shown him the price of those things firsthand. He revered self-reliance, ingenuity, and ethics. The war had shown him—more than any scripture or sermon—that Evil did exist; the fair-haired, well-heeled SS officers he encountered confirmed that the Devil is not always ugly. He hated bullies and he loved the truth, even if the unvarnished recitation of it caused discomfort to those who would try to twist it to their own advantage.

Inconvenient Truth

I had not visited my father's grave since he was buried 13 years ago. As I knelt before his headstone on this Veteran's Day, I realized that I had never thanked him for his national service and for the role he had played in helping me become an honorable, successful member of American society. I was surprised by the flood of tears that these thoughts unleashed in me, and I was slightly embarrassed to find myself as a grown man weeping before my father's ghost in a deserted cemetery in Lovington, NM. For here I was, standing in front of a legend who spent the tail end of his teenage years and the beginning of his adulthood slogging through blood and guts among strangers in a foreign land. Unlike members of today's generation, my father had been awarded no "Safe Space" to spare him from the daily "Trigger Events" he witnessed on the battlefield; he voiced no disappointment or resentment that his rations did not include a gluten-free option; he harbored no grudge that the vast majority of his dead comrades did not receive a "participation medal" for their sacrifice; and the gender or sexual preferences of his Brothers-in-Arms were much less a topic of conversation than the trueness of their aim or their ability to field strip and clean a malfunctioning rifle while being fired upon by the enemy.

Unlike my father, I am fat and soft and have had the luxury of living a life in which I've never had to go off to battle to fight for our current Way of Life. My father had wanted it that way. He told me during that very long day of unpleasant storytelling that he had fought with the hope that I or my own children would never have to do what he did. The idea of a nation being led by a Trump or a Clinton is far less important than the idea of having a nation worth fighting for in the first place. While many rage on Social Media or in the streets between mealtimes protesting that their particular brand did or did not win the popular vote on November 8, 2016, corporate fascists continue to invade every corner of our Democracy, ensuring that the wishes of the tiniest minority of the Wealthiest Americans trumps the Will of the People. As my father taught me long ago, Evil really does exist, and I guess if he were still alive today, he'd be telling me that the guy with the yellow hair or the woman with the pantsuit are not the ones we should be fighting against.

Thank you for your service, Dad.