Columns

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

What a loss but what a legacy.
Poems and paintings
and books galore.
The dog trots freely in the street
as my mind revisits Coney Island.
Ferlinghetti was a living landmark
and now, alas,
our City Lights briefly dim.
The Brits had Laurence of Arabia
but we had our
Laurence of Bay Area.
He was as beloved and present
as Frisco's famous fog.
So as Karl the Fog continues
to curl around the Seven Hills,
Imagine:
Ferlinghetti is not gone but,
like Karl's atmospheric caress,
still wraps the Cool Grey City
in an abiding cloak of recollections and love.
He will be mist.
Dishing MTG in DC 

This just in—an e-dispatch from the Bold Progressives Election Team: Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to block the Equality Act today that's designed to protect LGBTQ people, calling it 'disgusting, immoral, and evil.' 

So progressive Congresswoman Marie Newman (IL-03)—who has a transgender daughter and whose office is right across the hall—put up a transgender flag so Greene 'can look at it every time she opens her door.' 

Long may it wave. 

2021's Top Influencers: Their TIME Has Come 

The March 8 issue of TIME Magazine features a 67-page section honoring the world's top 100 influencers. 

As per usual in TIME's best-lists, the editors solicit reviews from well-known personalities who share something in common with the Chosen Few. NBC political data-cruncher Steve Kornacki is profiled by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred as Beth in the Netflix hit, The Queen's Gambit, is praised by chess master Garry Kasparov. Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman is rhapsodically touted by rap-happy Lin-Manuel Miranda. 

But there's another source of pleasure to be found in the current line-up of change-makers. Only 20 of the awardees are Caucasians. TIME has assembled one of the most diverse groups of individuals ever to take a shared bow. Here are a few of the "names to remember." 

Maktreyi Ramakrishnan. Koyoharu Gotouge. Izkia Siches Pastén. Telfar Clemens. Kizzmekia Corbett. Sarah Al Amiti. Olugbenga Agboola. Sohla El-Waylly. Nsé Ufot. Ranga Dias. Li Jiaqi. Chloe Zhao. Rohan Pavuluri. Rishi Sunak. Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr. Vijaya Gadde. Vanessa Nakate. Apoorva Mehta. Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Amoako Boafo. Salman Toor. Amber Ruffin. Dairon Elisondo Rojas. Jang Hye-yeong. Nadeed Ashraf. Aurélia Nguyen. Hadi Al Khatib. Shikha Gupta. Meyne Wyatt. Ijeoma Oluo. Chandra Shekhar Aazad. Julian Brave NoiseCat. 

Springtime in Berkeley: A Sight for Sore Eyes 

Forget springtime, it's summertime in Berkeley. Hummingbirds are everywhere, baby sparrows are bursting from the bushes, even some of the cherry trees that started blooming in January are already starting to drop their petals in February. 

The air is warm and clear—but apparently filled with pollen. 

A few days ago, my eyes started itching so badly I couldn't keep them open. 

So I stumbled, half-blind, into the bathroom to see if one of those small Eye Drop bottles would bring some relief. 

I popped a few drops into my right eye and—yowch!—instant mega-pain!  

I started splashing my face with cold water. Que Pasa? 

It turns out that what looked like a bottle of "Eye Drops" was actually a bottle of "Ear Drops." 

I believe the Spanish diagnosis for this condition is: "Ojos rojos." 

At least it's good to know that I've removed any and all wax from my eyeballs. 

Houston, We Have a Misquote 

April 15 will mark the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 13 moon mission—and the equipment malfunction that endangered the space capsule's safe return to Earth. The movie version memorialized astronaut Jack Swigert's call to NASA command but it also misquoted it. Swigert didn't say: "Houston, we have a problem." He actually said: "Houston, we've had a problem here." The filmmakers thought the scene would play better if Swigert's understated call was delivered in the present tense, not the past tense 

Instead of GoFundMe, How about ComeDefendMe? 

When a major humanitarian disaster—a hurricane, flood, or earthquake—claims the world's attention, organizations like the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders spring into action. 

But what happens when thousands of people in Myanmar or Hong Kong are faced with violence unleashed by armed security forces? 

Is there an IRC for the masses of people in countries around the world who risk arrest, beatings, and death for nonviolent resistance to state repression? (Amnesty International focuses on defending activists languishing in jail rather than activists dodging tear-gas and rubber bullets in the streets.) 

Could the world's nongovernmental organizations play a role in expanding the global response to these situations by establishing direct contacts with local activists and journalists to provide first-person accounts how nonviolence can become a powerful tool in the defense of democracy and civil rights? 

Purportedly "democracy loving" nations should be compelled to punish repressive regimes with painful economic sanctions. (On February 10, President Biden imposed sanctions on Myanmar's military after it staged a coup following a major electoral defeat.) 

Unfortunately, instead of using its economic "big stick" to extend democracy, the US has a long history of imposing harsh economic sanctions to stage punishing "regime change" attacks on non-allied countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.  

In addition to providing publicity, would it be acceptable for peace organizations and human rights advocates to offer direct financial support? Instead of a GoFundMe page, a global "GoDefendMe" fund could provide aid for people at risk for acts of nonviolent resistance. Does such an option exist? If not, should it? 

The Book of Washington's Favorite Dictators 

David Swanson, the executive director of World BEYOND War, is an astonishingly prolific author. He has been in the habit of writing a book-a-year for the past decade-plus. How does he do it? He typically asks WBW for a week or two "vacation time." Next thing you know: another book. Here's a partial list of Swanson's tomes. Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (2009), War Is a Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2011), Tube World (2012), War No More: The Case for Abolition (2013), Killing Is No Way of Life (2014), Global Security System: An Alternative to War (2015), War Is Never Just (2016), Curing Exceptionalism (2018), Leaving World War II Behind (2020). 

In his spare time, Swanson writes critical essays on peace and war, serves as campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org and hosts Talk World Radio. He also blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org and is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and was awarded the US Peace Memorial Foundation's 2018 Peace Prize. 

Here's Swanson's Top 20 List of Washington's Favorite Despots: 

• King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain • His Majesty Paduka Seri Baginda Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Muizzaddin Waddaulah of Brunei • President Abdel Fattah el Sisi of Egypt • President Paul Kagame of Rwanda • King of Saudi Arabia Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, President Salva Kiir Mayardit of South Sudan • President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan • Prime Minister Prayut Chanocha of Thailand • Arkadag Hero of Turkmenistan The Peoples Horse Breeder President Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan • President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda, Shiekh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan Crown Prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates • President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea • King Mswati III of Eswatini formerly Swaziland, President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon • Abdullah bin Hussein bin Talal bin Abdullah Abdullah II of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan • President Kassym Jomart Kemeluly Tokayev of Kazakhstan • His Majesty the King Mohammed the Sixth Commander of the Faithful May God Grant Him Victory of Morocco • Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said of Oman • President and Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Uzbekistan Shavkat Miromonovich Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan. 

(Hopefully, Rep. Illhan Omar will re-introduced her proposed legislation to halt US arms sales to foreign dictators—H.R. 5880, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act.) Meanwhile, here's an interview with Swanson providing details and insight on his Top 20 Lists of Downright Evil Leaders. 

Voter Suppression: It's GOP Policy 

The Sierra Club is organizing to protect more than our trees, mountains and streams, these days. The Bay Area-based Club is lobbying hard to protect our public elections. According to the Club's Executive Director Mike Brune: "For decades we've been watching mounting attacks on voting rights. But we've never seen anything like this." In state after state, the Grand Oil Party has been quietly putting laws in place to restrict access to the polls or completely deny the right to vote. Brune is alarmed that, at last count, "there were over 165 voter suppression laws on the table!" involving everything from gerrymandering and race-based poll-purging, to voter-ID laws, reducing the number of polling stations, and banning absentee ballots 

These rub-out-the-vote shenanigans usually take place in the shadows but they took center stage on January 6 when, as The Nation reported: "147 Republican lawmakers voted to straight-up overturn the results because Black people had overcome the white supremacy baked into the Electoral College." 

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, state legislatures have come up with three times as many restrict-the-vote bills as were proposed before the 2020 elections. The BCJ reports: “Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020)." 

In Senator Josh Hawley’s Missouri, nine voter suppression bills were in the docket while Georgia had introduced 11 bills designed to re-Red the state after Georgia's voters went Blue with the election of two Democrat Senators. 

Of course, one of the biggest steps toward introducing a real, functioning democracy in the US would be to abolish (or circumvent) the Electoral College. While Joe Biden won the popular vote with a 7-million-plus margin, he only captured the Electoral College with a margin of 43,000 votes in three critical states. 

One cure would be for a majority of states to join The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would award all electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the overall popular vote. Many states have already signed onto the Popular Vote compact, which needs only 74 more state electoral votes to come into effect. Meanwhile, the League of Women Voters is also campaigning to expose and challenge state-level voter suppression laws and the American Civil Liberties Union is laboring to protect the ballot-box from vote-suppressing partisan manipulations. 

Nuclear-powered Nuclear Weapons? 

Here's something new to worry about: Russia's newest "super weapons." In addition to inventing hypersonic nuclear-armed missiles that can dance around in the sky to avoid interception, Russian scientists have also created nuclear weapons powered by nuclear engines. The Burevestnik cruise missile relies on a nuclear engine to deliver its nuclear blow. And then there's the Poseidon, an atomic-powered undersea weapon twice the size of a US Trident missile. As an article in Forbes put it, the Poseidon is "a weapon worthy of a Bond villain." 

With "virtually unlimited range and high autonomy" the Poseidon—unlike a traditional shoot-and-sink weapons—can lurk in the ocean for months, quietly awaiting a signal to strike. It can even be programmed to chose its own targets (that's the "autonomy" part of the weapon's profile). 

According to Forbes, the Pentagon has described this weapon as "an intercontinental, nuclear-armed, undersea autonomous torpedo." Or you could think of it as a sea-based atomic drone. 

One problem. Where there's an accident, these weapons can release clouds of deadly radioisotopes. It's already happened at least once. In 2019, five Rosatom employees were killed in an accidental radioactive blast while trying to recover a Burevestnik missile lost in the waters off Archangel. 

So what happens if any of these nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed weapons were to stray too close to a continental boundary. What are the rules—if any—to prevent, say, a US Navy destroyer from launching a conventional torpedo at a Burevestnik "nukepedo" cruising in contested waters? 

Wouldn't this run the risk of causing (A) a significant release of radioactive debris into the ocean and/or (B) a full-blown atomic detonation? 

Ban These Bombs 

But why should we be forced to think about such weapons at all? The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) recently became world law when it was ratified on January 22, 2021. (Thank you, Honduras!) 

Unfortunately, the countries that currently maintain nuclear stockpiles—the US, Russia, China, United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea—have refused to ratify the TPNW. 

So what countries are on the side of international law? The current 86 signatories include a number of countries that US foreign policy has in its crosshairs. Among them: Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Palestine. And, even though it has not yet signed or ratified the TPNW, Iran participated in negotiating the treaty at the United Nations and has voted in favor of its adoption. 

With Nukes Now Illegal Can We Refuse to Pay for Them? 

Here's a question for the legal community. Can US taxpayers now cite the TPNW and refuse to pay the portion of their taxes that would otherwise go to financing the maintenance and expansion of the Pentagon's now-illegal arsenal of atomic weapons? 

Under FY 2021 budget, the US plans to spend nearly $20 billion a year on its nuclear arsenal—about six percent of total Pentagon spending. 

The National Priorities Project notes that, while the average taxpayer works 63 days a year to fund total military spending, only 13 of those days labor actually supports the troops. The Pentagon hands over half of that workday money to corporate contractors. So the average taxpayer winds up working two days to support Boeing and four days to enrich Lockheed Martin. 

The NPP estimates the average taxpayer pays around $100 to support the Pentagon's nuclear programs. With the TPNW now legally in force in 54 countries, the average war-resisting taxpayer may now have extra legal standing for refusing to pay the cost for world-ending nuclear weapons. 

San Francisco-based peace activists David and Jan Hartsough routinely send the following statement tucked inside their Tax Day envelope: 

We are Quakers and cannot in conscience contribute in any way to the killing of our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. Fifty-four percent of our tax dollars go for wars and preparations for wars. Together with our IRS Form, we are sending a check for 46% of what we owe made out to the Dept. of Health and Human Services. We ask that you designate all those funds for health and education and human well-being —and NONE for war and killing. 

The other 54%, which goes for war and killing. We are contributing to organizations working for peace and justice and programs meeting human and environmental needs in the US and around the world.”  

Founders Sing Is Looking for Collaborators  

Want to conspire with one of the country's leading practitioners of political satire? If so, here's your chance. Founders Sing is looking for ideas, suggestions, complaints . . . and fresh targets. 

My proposal: A duet with gun-slinging solons Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. I picture them singing a new version of the "Jet Song," from West Side Story. The new version would go: "When you're reject, you're reject all the way, from your first trigger-click to your last ricochet."