Tom Glenn's Blog, page 45

San Francisco Song

I grew up in Oakland, California, across the bay from San Francisco. Starting early in my childhood, I learned how to take the train across the Bay Bridge into “the city,” as we called it. I gloried in Market Street, Chinatown, the Golden Gate, the beaches, the wild Pacific Ocean too dangerous for swimming.

My regular trips to San Francisco continued until I graduated from college at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the army. I learned early on that calling the city “Frisco” infuriated the natives and that its closest rival city, Los Angeles where I was born, was an inferior town—we rarely referred to it by name, instead calling it Tinseltown or La-La Land.

So starting as a teenager, I learned to love “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” the signature song from the legendary Tony Bennett. It was written in Brooklyn, New York, in 1954. The song depicted two amateur writers from the West Coast who moved to New York but yearned to return to their hometown of San Francisco. The song still brings a lump to my throat. Here are the lyrics:

The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly grey

The glory that was Rome is of another day

I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan

I’m going home to my city by the Bay

I left my heart in San Francisco

High on a hill, it calls to me

To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars

The morning fog may chill the air, I don’t care

My love waits there in San Francisco

Above the blue and windy sea

When I come home to you, San Francisco

Your golden sun will shine for me

When I come home to you, San Francisco

Your golden sun will shine for me

Beauty Surrounding Me

I am the most fortunate man I know. I have a generous annuity, so I have no money worries. That means, among other things, that I have time to lift weights every other day for more than two hours, thereby keeping myself in the peak of health. And I can devote myself to writing. And, most important, I can afford to live in a beautiful place.

My house is in Columbia, Maryland, a city resplendent in its preserved forests and parks. The deck on the back of my house overlooks a magnificent pond surrounded by mature trees. Weather permitting, I spend as much time as possible on my deck surrounded by birds, squirrels, rabbits, and foxes living undisturbed by the humans close by.

I am an artist. My work is creating beauty through words. So I am more sensitive than most to the splendor that engulfs me. So much of my time is filled with awe.

I continue to marvel at my good fortune. I’m healthy and well-to-do and open to the magnificence all around me. What more could I ask?

The Supreme Court

As happens so often with me these days, an article published by Robert Reich on March 31 alerted me to a problem that should concern all of us: the degradation of our Supreme Court. The court has no power to enforce its findings. All it has is public trust. It depends on the Congress and the White House to carry out its decisions. What happens when the court becomes so sullied that the public no longer trusts it?

Thanks primarily to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters assisted by Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, public trust in the court is at an all-time low. For example, in a national survey by Pew Research Center before Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, only 54 percent of U.S. adults said they have a favorable opinion of the Supreme Court. Another survey conducted in January found that the share of adults with a favorable view of the court has recently declined by 15 percentage points. Other studies indicate that current views of the court are among the least positive in surveys dating back nearly four decades. Finally, in data reported by Forbes, less than 40 percent of Americans believe the U.S. Supreme Court is nonpartisan; only 37 percent think the court’s recent decisions demonstrate that it acts in a “serious and constitutionally sound manner;” a 47 percent plurality think the court is “split into parties, similar to Democrats and Republicans in Congress;” and a 72 percent majority want the Supreme Court to impose a code of ethics—while there’s one in place for federal judges in lower courts, Supreme Court justices aren’t bound by it.

These findings are merely the latest evidence of the profound damage inflicted by Trump and his Republican followers when they packed the court with second-rate jurists. Unless the administration and Congress move quickly to alter the structure of the Supreme Court—probably by increasing the number of justices so that the progressives balance out the conservatives—the damage will be profound and lasting.

It’s time for American citizens to write to the president and Congress and demand changes that will restore the court’s prestige and power.

Old Guy

More and more often lately, I find that I’m the oldest person around. People I’m dealing with are young enough to be my grandchildren or even great grandchildren. And more often than I’d like, people patronize me with barely concealed condescension—as if being old implies incompetence.

And occasionally I find younger folks lack the life experience necessary to make wise decisions. They fail to comprehend the complexity of situations or overlook factors they should consider.

All that said, most of the time, others respect me and are often impressed by my achievements. And I revere them. In fact, the older I get, the less patient I am with shallow people. I want to spend my valuable remaining time with people I can learn from.

And, as much as I hate to admit it, I am not completely devoid of feeblemindedness. My ability to deal with numbers, never very good, is weaker than ever. My hearing, damaged during combat, is getting worse. And my memory is waning.

But for all that, I am better than ever at what I care most about: thinking. Even though my brain is slowing down, my ability to cogitate continues to grow. That means that I am better able than ever to write.

I discovered at age six that I was born to write. So, despite aging—or maybe because of it—my ability to write goes on improving.

I have no complaints.

Aberdeen Proving Ground Profile

The Aberdeen Proving Ground has just published a profile on me and my time in Vietnam. You can read it at https://apgnews.com/community-news/author-and-army-veteran-served-undercover-in-vietnam/

Let me know what you think.

American Inequity—Again

It’s now becoming clear to me that the American wealthy have become even wealthier during the pandemic. A March 29 article by Robert Reich reports that America’s 704 billionaires have increased their wealth by $1.7 trillion since the start of the pandemic in February 2020, while most Americans have struggled just to get by. The super-wealthy have done so well because they’ve bankrolled politicians who alter statutes (such as tax laws) to give them even more wealth. And they’ve hired armies of lobbyists to keep their taxes minuscule and create huge tax loopholes.

These trends continue practices from years past. According to ProPublica, the nation’s 25 richest people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, IRS data shows. That’s a tax rate of only 3.4 percent. Ordinary Americans paid 7.8 percent or more.

The rich have been avoiding taxes for many years. For examples, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, reportedly paid no federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011. Elon Musk, the second richest, paid none in 2018. Warren Buffett, often ranking number 3, paid a tax rate of 0.1 percent between 2014 and 2018.

Now President Biden proposes to change all that. The Journal of Accountancy reports that revenue provisions in Biden’s proposed budget include what an administration fact sheet calls a new billionaire minimum income tax of 20 percent on the income of the nation’s wealthiest individuals. The budget also would increase the corporate tax rate from the current 21 percent to 28 percent and institute measures supporting the United States’ participation in a global minimum tax.

It’s not clear to me that Congress will pass the proposed bill taxing the wealthy. But some changes are almost inevitable. It looks like we will at last approach some level of equity in America.

QAnon

Since 2017, I have been hearing about something called “QAnon,” a political conspiracy theory that later transformed into political movement or cult. It all started when an anonymous person who called himself “Q” began spreading false claims that a cabal of Satanic cannibals and sexual abusers of children was operating a worldwide child sex trafficking ring that was conspiring against U.S. President Donald Trump. Among other things, QAnon accused Hillary Clinton of drinking children’s blood.

Members of the QAnon cult are all far-right extremists and avid fans of Donald Trump. They supported Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020 and waged information warfare in an attempt to influence voters. When Trump was defeated, they tried to overturn the election. Several eminent Trump associates—General Michael Flynn and two members of his legal team, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell—have promoted QAnon-derived conspiracy theories. And many of Trump’s supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were QAnon followers. Most recently, Ginni Thomas (the wife of Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas) who participated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, is reported to be a QAnon advocate. That attack exposed QAnon for what it is and led to a social media crackdown on the movement and its claims.

The actions of QAnon in support of Trump, including its attempt to overturn the 2020 election, are further evidence of the enduring damage Trump and his Republican followers have inflicted upon our nation. We need to denounce this movement and its conservative champions without reservation. American democracy is under attack. The sooner we fight back, the better.

Gray and Cold

As regular readers of this blog are aware, I spent the better part of thirteen years in Vietnam during the war and became completely acclimatized to tropical weather. Like most Americans in Southeast Asia, I wore as few clothes as possible and stayed tan year-round. During my brief trips back to “the world”—that’s what we called the U.S.—I suffered from the cooler climate, and after the fall of Saigon in April, 1975, when I returned fulltime, I found it downright inhospitable.

Despite having lived in the U.S. ever since and having travelled extensively “on business”—on missions for the U.S. government—I have never reacclimatized. No longer tan, I have, nevertheless, retained my preference for hot weather and my dislike for the cold.

For me, winters are misery. But come March, when times below freezing promise to disappear, my expectations of warm weather revive. On the occasional days when the sun is out and the temperature approaches 70 degrees, I’m all smiles. But throughout March and April, really warm weather is always in the offing, never quite arriving. Impatience, frustration, and disappointment become habitual. The gray and cold go on and on.

So here I am this morning with temperatures down to 26 degrees. I’m bundled up against the cold, relying on my gas fireplaces to stay somewhere approaching comfortable. Tolerable weather is apparently still more than a month off.

Here’s hoping I can stay civil until my heyday returns.

Trump Again

My most recently published book review, of Patrick Strickland’s The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands (Melville House, 2022), brought into focus once again the damage former president Donald Trump has done to the U.S. and even to refugees arriving here. The book details the efforts by White supremacist vigilantes at our southern border to harry those attempting to escape poverty and threats from criminals by finding safety in the U.S. Egging them on throughout his presidency and still today, Trump labelled the refugees as murderers, drug smugglers, and rapists and did his best, which, admittedly, was grossly ineffective, to halt their entry into the U.S.

It is becoming unavoidably obvious to me that we Americans will, for the foreseeable future, continue discovering previously unsuspected harm done to our country by Trump. So much presidential action, particularly on the diplomatic front, is classified, and the citizenry knows nothing of it. We are shocked by Trump’s disruption of the Supreme Court. We suffer the ongoing impairment of the U.S. Postal Service deliberately inflicted by Trump. We watched in horror as Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election by inciting the January 6 2020 attack on the on the Capitol. What other disasters still lie hidden from us?

We must gird our loins. The worst could very well be yet to come.

The Marauders Reviewed

My most recent book review is now on the internet. It’s of Patrick Strickland’s The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands (Melville House, 2022). You can read it at: https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-marauders-standing-up-to-vigilantes-in-the-american-borderlands?fbclid=IwAR3C4r_k0Mkz4DaZFUFC4l4HBeeNqbNTZp_wc3P6hRB2ZDr2OUKF5EcT3gY

Please comment and let me know what you think.