Thought for the Day After Election Day, 2022

OK guys, here's the deal...

 

We had an election where the Talking Heads and the brains behind them (Ew...ww..!?) tried to convince us that forcing women to be incubators for unwanted pregnancies was not as big a deal as inflation. Turned out they were wrong but still, we should give those (not) poor pundits credit where it's due. They were unspecific about what kind of inflation women should be more worried about than full-metal, fascist speculums with body cams (??!!??). 

 

In other words, there was no "red wave", because people--predominantly women and predominantly young ones--who felt they should have more say about their bodily functions than, say, a state legislature full of local wing nuts in the pockets of billionaire oil sheiks (Hello, Montana!) showed up and spoke American. "Go to hell," they said to the bastards, and here's what I say--in American--to all the guys (and pundits) who put Choice on the back burner this election cycle cuz (just cuz....) Shame on ya. If you couldn't see how your rights are just as tanked as the rights of women over such a basic, biological, moral issue, then you deserve the neutered, technicolor Disney-fantasy-land where you never get laid that you apparently live in (Jeez, did I just write that?)

 

But it wasn't just the punditocracy and some other guys who were wrong about the apparently-mysterious ways of democracy. The Democratic Party was wrong on both their messaging and their strategy. There was an energized base after the Alito leak that I don't think will ever be matched in my lifetime. We all knew the axe was gonna fall as soon as Barrett was shoehorned into the supremes, and we all knew it was coming years before that. Why didn't 50 states have an abortion rights proposal--sponsored and promoted AND FUNDED by Democrats--on all the ballots this fall? This is Politics 101 in a functioning democracy: motivate your base with actual actions that will improve their lives and then turn them out at election time. It would have been a "two-fer", getting people to the polls who knew what fascism looks like even if they couldn't articulate it (Hello, Kansas!) and getting us as a society a long ways towards taking the microphone away from psychopaths. 

I happened to be in DC when the Alito leak hit the headlines and spent several days in front of the Supreme Court protesting. There was one, spontaneous big protest right after the leak but then I was shocked when that tapered down to anywhere from 5-50, ebbing and flowing with no apparent program, just pissed off people like myself. We should have been jamming First Street NE in front of the Supreme Court every single day but we weren't. Why? I asked around to those who were showing up regularly and seemed to be in the know for some clues, and they said the national groups were telling people NOT to show up at the Supreme Porch because they didn't want the "optics" of pros and antis shouting at each other on the news. The national pro-choice groups did organize one huge rally and 10s of thousands, possibly 100,000, showed up. Of course corporate media low-balled it and made sure they sought out the .0001 of the crowd who were wingnuts to give them "equal time". For math geeks, .0001 is 1 in 10,000 which means if 100,000 people showed up to support choice, 10 showed up to support religio-fascism, which was about right. But does the media's baked-in bias mean you don't organize in-the-streets dissent of religio-fascism until nobody can think of anything else? Of course not, and I think this is a big failure of electoral strategy for the Dems, as well as the Pro-Choice movement. The only reason I can think of that keeps them dropping our ball is cuz they're competing for the same billionaire dollars as the Repugs. They made a conscious decision to take "the quiet route" cuz of their relationship with corporate America and more to the point, corporate media. This kind of attitude is almost as infuriating to me as the trumpsters'. We needed real leadership when our actual bodies are on the line and they were AWOL. Just like the Clinton campaign in 2016, they were listening to the same bad birds who whispered in their ear "Just squeak through without rocking the donor boat." (Hello Rahm Emmanuel!!) and--need I say?--she lost to the most horrible head of state in modern times. Nice job, racehorse whisperers. I'm furious. Aren't you?

 

So yes, we missed the bullet the other day, thanks to everyone who turned out to vote but don't forget that dodging bullets isn't our only option. IMHO, it would have been a "blue wave" if the Dems hadn't fumbled the ball with Hobbs. Again, there should have been boilerplate pro-choice initiatives, not just candidates, ready to hit the streets in all 50 states the day after the Alito leak and on the ballot Nov. 8, and there were not. As much as many of us hate to admit it, the Dem are beholden to the same billionaire bucks as the Repugs and we should be just as mad at one as the other. Time and time (and time and time) again since Reagan the Dems have chosen to ride on the backs of everyone who shows up and does the legwork for them--voters especially included--despite the obstacles placed in their way by the corporatists, both Republicans and Democrats. At the very least, Dems should acknowledge the not-rich people who are coming out to vote for them--in spite of what they're not doing for them--with action: Climate Sanity, Universal healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, expanding the Supremes, getting rid of the Electoral College and filibuster, tanking "Citizens United", but so far they have not. The Dems, thanks to all of us who pay attention and care, are still playing the electoral game that should have more consequences than they think it does when they flub it. There has to be pro-choice ballot initiatives (or the equivalent) starting up in every possible state for 2024 and there has to be the hot oil of public opinion being poured down the neck of every Democratic candidate every time they show up to a meeting or rally for the next two years to not only support these efforts but to shake their money bushes to fund them. They have not felt our non-violent/ electoral/ moral wrath at letting us down so often for so long yet. They need to or there will be no electoral game for them--or anyone--to play in the very near future. 

"If you cut off my reproductive choices, can I cut off yours?"

 

Politically-Correct Forestry

Mill Creek Canyon 18 years after the so-called "stand-replacement" fires of 2000

 

Note: I submitted the below Letter-to-the-Editor to the Bitterroot Star a couple weeks ago in response to an article they ran about a forest fire deep in the Selway-Bittterroot Wilderness that the Forest Service over-reacted to. This kind of forest mismanagement is of local significance but also of national interest. The current Bitterroot National Forest (FS) supervisor, Matt Anderson, is trying to implement a run around the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which was passed in the '70s to require federal land agencies to have meaningful public involvement in their projects. The FS has long complained about having to do Environmental Impact Statements (EIS's) on every logging project so Anderson wants to include the WHOLE Bitterroot Front, 150,000 acres, into a catch-all fuzzy-edged Environmental Assessment (EA), so the Forest can literally just cut-and-paste any massive, industry-friendly disturbance they choose within those boundaries under the rubric: "Trust us but if you don't too bad cuz we have the legal t's crossed and i's dotted so see ya later suckers....hahahaha......!) He attempted this at his old post on the Tongas in Alaska, got his (read: our) agency's ass sued over it, but it looks like it might go through this time cuz of false fire fears and wing nut local officials. I'm putting it here more so I can find it in the future than anything else.

Your Oct. 18^th article quoted Stevensville District Ranger, Steve Brown, at length about his reasoning for carrying out a logging operation at the mouth of Mill Cr. Canyon under the guise of “fuels reduction” and “forest health” and was amazed at how effortlessly he seemed to present himself as a forester just doing his job mitigating fire danger instead of an ideologue violating core wilderness principles in favor of “getting the cut out”.  

I have a long list of disappointments concerning Brown’s statements on what he thinks his job is supposed to be, which I think Mill Cr. landowners, Jim Miller and Dr. Eric Keeling, who were also quoted in the article, covered pretty well, with the proper mixture of intelligence and cynicism appropriate for such bureaucratic shenanigans. Brown’s statements and actions were full of inconsistencies and paradoxes, maybe the biggest one being the fact that the father of one of the landowners he blew off was Dr. Charles Keeling, the internationally-renowned climate scientist who was among the first to notice Climate Change and to develop the first accurate system for measuring carbon in the atmosphere still used today: the Keeling Curve. I have to admit I smiled when I read that and realized that, notwithstanding recent and vigorous efforts to kill it, irony’s not quite dead yet.

More to point: Brown used a wildfire deep in the wilderness that posed no danger to people’s ill-placed houses in the woods to invoke the worn-out, anti-wilderness boogie-man of “fires roaring out of the canyon” to carry out a logging operation using firefighting funds. I have lived through many intense fire seasons here, I’ve been evacuated, helped with evacuations and actually have firefighting experience. I watched both the Mill and Kootenai Canyon fires from our home on the west side, read the Inciweb reports and the weather reports accessible to anyone with a laptop(!) and I was not only not worried about it “roaring out of the canyon” but was wondering what the h… the Forest Service was doing running helicopters up there in the wilderness at thousands of dollars a trip! Wilderness fires are far cheaper and more beneficial to the environment than non-wilderness fires precisely because they aren’t supposed to be “fought”. Everyone who knows anything about wildland fire knows (whether they publicly admit it or not) that $10,000 bucket drops in steep mountain canyons far from any structures is not only not a serious firefighting effort, it’s a political air show. “A big bank in the sky that opens up and showers money.” To put a finer point on it, wasteful air shows in wilderness areas is the “politically-correct” thing to do in our current, facts-optional times, but are not based on any provable forest management techniques. To sharpen that point to where it actually might sting: a district ranger who authorizes them in a designated wilderness area is demonstrating either his profound ignorance of wilderness laws and ethics or his inexplicable disregard for them. When one considers that tens of thousands of acres within Brown’s district are within designated wilderness that includes much of the most pristine headwaters of our Bitterroot River and is also some of the most prized wildlands in the country for its own sake and that his job is actually to promote wilderness values rather than degrade and ignore them, his statements and behavior are jarring. 

Even on Brown’s own terms, an actual “shaded fuel break” as a firefighting technique is supposed to be a couple hundred feet in width, not the size and shape of the logging project shelved by his district in 2014. His assertion that his only choices were to log the mouth of the canyon to protect the public from a fire not threatening them or to wait for the evil fire to advance multiple miles in wet weather and then punch an ugly dozer line in and  “kill all the trees” in a backfire is just plain fearmongering, and clumsy fearmongering at that. His absolute silence about Climate Change being the real driver in today’s fire behavior speaks volumes about his perspective. Logging mature trees to “save the forest” while ignoring the fact that those are the trees that actually have the best chance of survival after a fire (and did survive above Bass Creek campground notwithstanding his inexplicable statement to the contrary!) and that logging them for the sole and obvious purpose of feeding short-term profits to mills while eliminating what’s left of those real heroes of carbon-storage has been standard fare for foresters since the ‘90s. But to wink and nod at wilderness detractors and “golden-days” logging proponents by claiming he’s merely trying to take the forests back to the way native people used to manage it is just plain insulting to those of us who’ve felt the brunt of such winks and nods. 

In the past I have often told folks who complain about the Forest Service “letting fires roar out of the canyon” that they have nothing to complain about. Given the complexities these bigger and bigger conflagrations present to firefighters due to defending homes in the foothills built on the assumption that tax-funded fire suppression will be provided when politicians panic, along the Forest Service’s own reputation for muddle-headed bureaucracy, on-the-ground firefighters do an amazing job at protecting the public’s life and property year to year. If district rangers like Brown would pay more attention to science than politics and leave the fire-resistant, carbon-sequestering mature trees alone (the very ones the mills want) rather than create next decade’s weed patches and scraggle-forests by using fire as an excuse to “get the cut out”, they could extend their amazing job by decades. It’s too bad that “politically-correct forestry” like Brown’s undermines public confidence, and adds to their confusion.

Finally,  I understand that some of my language in this LTE is charged, but I have a long, informed connection with these mountains and canyons and this latest violation of trust comes on the heels of BNF’s proposed Bitterroot Front Project which could give the BNF the green light to turn our Bitterroot faces right up to their peaks into a hundred thousand acre “shaded fuel break”. Again, by his own terms, a “shaded fuels break” by definition has to be “retreated” every 10 years in order to be “effective”. Will Brown promise us any such multi-decades treatment even on this relatively-tiny logging project of his? Of course not, and so I can’t help but look at this Mill Cr. chop-job as a sort of pilot program for the whole forest and feel well within bounds to opine: Really, who does he think he’s kidding?

Thought for the Day

Ok readers...

...C'mon. Quit the BS. You know who you are. ...

Here's our thought for the day before the election where fascism is on the ballot and all the Talking Heads, who are getting paid more money per minute than you ever dreamed of getting for your house or first-born son, are predicting a win for fascism: 

If you can't laugh at your predicament, your predicament is too predictable.

Your welcome.