I was spitballing my estimated tax payment
for 2024 yesterday. Since it’s due today, I was actually much earlier than I
usually am about this. It’s a challenge because of the change in my earnings
status; for the past two years I’ve gone down to the wire because I couldn’t
predict what the total would be until I’d crossed the line. It should be
steadier going forward.
That doesn’t make me happy about it.
Paying taxes that are going to support a criminal regime with everyone in
office skimming off it does not sit well with me. Sometimes not being a
lawbreaker is a moral burden.
But what really got to me yesterday was
that, in the process of verifying my retirement disbursement, I came to the
beneficiaries page. And I had to remove my sister from the list.
A couple of mementos of the first real
snow we’ve had for a while in the District They Call Columbia. It's been hanging around for a week on account of the sub-freezing temperatures.
Birds on the patio (before I shoveled it
for their convenience):
Snow on a fence.
If it’s all the same to Nature, I’m ready
to forego this kind of thing for a while. Kthxbai.
Despite all the horrifying visuals coming
out of the wildfires devastating LA County, there are still things to inspire
gratitude.
First—my sister and her family in Pasadena
are safe. They were evacuated in the early hours of Wednesday, but allowed to
return later in the day. The Eaton fire is burning within blocks of their
house, so the air quality is bad, but they’re okay.
Even though there are James Woodses,
weeping on CNN about losing everything in the Palisades fire (and he later
learned his house in fact survived, but he didn’t apologize for all the
calumnies he managed to fling between tears), there were people like Steve
Guttenberg, doing what they could to help first responders get to the fire
sites. Guttenberg was interviewed by a local reporter—who did not recognize him
as the smart ass Mahoney of the Police Academy franchise (fair enough;
that reporter was probably not born until long after the sequels ran their
course)—while he was trying to move abandoned cars that were blocking streets.
Not an actor or star; just a guy trying to help out (and save people from
having their Porsches and Teslas from being bulldozed aside).
Folks all over Southern California stepped
up to the plate, donating food, clothing, toys and other supplies for the more
than 100,000 people under evacuation orders. Animal shelters sprang up throughout
the area for small to large critters displaced by the fires, and people donated
food, toys and supplies to them, as well.
Relief organizations are also out in force—including World Central Kitchen, which I’ve been proud to
support for years. By Friday, they had two meal service operations going in
Pasadena, providing sustenance to first responders and comfort to people having
the worst day of their lives. And that was just in Pasadena.
States and municipalities have sent
firefighting teams to join the efforts to tame the multiple fires, driven by
Santa Ana winds that at times have gusts topping 100mph. I want to point out in
particular teams from Canada and Mexico, who’ve been in the air and on the
ground for days, sent by their governments even as they have to bat away bullshit
blustering from the Kleptocrat about how he’s going to fuck with them to show
who’s boss when he takes over.
And, when handlers were trying to herd
their flock of ground-managing goats out of danger as the Palisades fire
approached Brentwood on Saturday, drivers—LA drivers—got out of their cars to
help when some of the goats bolted.
It seems appropriate that we end the week
with something honoring former president Jimmy Carter, who died last week at
age 100. In fact, I’m choosing something from his funeral service, held
yesterday in National Cathedral.
If any man—especially any president—can be
said to be suffused with grace, it would be Carter, who spent his entire adult
life in service and was guided at all times by the tenets of his faith. He was
an extraordinary man, whose decency is a shining beacon to the world.
So, let’s have “Amazing Grace”, performed
by Phyllis Adams, with Leila Bolden on piano, from yesterday’s service.
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist
Ann Telnaes has resigned from The Washington Post. She left last week
after her editor killed this cartoon she proposed:
The image shows Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of
Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder, CEO of Blue Origin and WaPo owner) and Sam
Altman (CEO of OpenAI) offering bags of money to the Kleptocrat (who may be a
statue, elevated on a plinth—this is actually a sketch she submitted, not a
finished cartoon). Additionally, LA Times CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong is offering a lipstick and Mickey
Mouse is prostrated at the base of the plinth.
You may
recall that Bezos and Soon-Shiong nixed their respective newspapers’ intent to
endorse Kamala Harris in the presidential election. All of the corporations
have recently donated in the seven figures to the Kleptocrat’s “inauguration”;
they have clearly decided to obey in advance. It’s particularly outrageous that
two of the formerly best newspapers in the country are among the Quislings, but
that’s what happens when billionaires buy media companies as side hustles and
make editorial decisions based on what’s best for their bread-and-butter
revenues.
Telnaes explained
her reasons for leaving WaPo on her Open Windows blog. She invited
other cartoonists to riff on her rejected theme, and the early responses are pretty good. You should also take a look at her post
on why political cartoonists are a critical part of a free press, which is vital for democracy. She wrote this in 2019; it's only become more frightening in the intervening years.
As she
says, they’re the canaries in the coal mine of a democratic society. And the
canaries are coughing.
Well, we got the
snow. Here in the People’s Republic, it wasn’t bad. (My Southern California
brain is agog that I just said that; it was about four inches.) I did indeed
spend about 30 minutes shoveling my sidewalk and clearing my car in case I
needed to get out of Dodge unexpectedly. And I cleared the sidewalk for a
neighbor who is unlikely to be able to do it for herself.
(I suspect that Sunday’s yoga focus on hips and core did
not prepare my lower back for this, but it’ll work its way out.)
But mostly I spent the day watching the birds gobble up the
safflower seeds I tossed out at them, and drinking hot tea.
First Gratitude Monday of 2025. First major snow event of
2025. So I’m grateful that I’m snug in my house, with central heating that
works, with plenty of food available and a heated mattress pad.
Even though I still have to shovel the sidewalk in front of
it, I can come back inside and drink hot tea after I’m done.
Yeah, okay—I know that technically this is three days late;
“Auld Lang Syne” is for New Year’s Eve. But this rendition—by members of a
Birmingham, Ala., choir singing in a church where only a few years ago the
deacons refused to seat African Americans—has haunted me for more than four
years, and when listening and re-listening to it in the past week, it has
struck me as such a powerful avatar of hope.
I first shared it at the end of 2020,
when it felt like we’d been through hell but were turning a corner to someplace
at least less hellish, and then again last year
in my round-up of notable deaths. I keep coming back to it because it’s more
than just the words of Robert Burns; it’s the words overlaying video of
Americans who—faced with the worst of 2020—became their best. I cannot watch
this without being brought to tears, both for the possibilities for progress it
shows and for the sharp pain of what we’ve lost in the backlash to those
possibilities.
But here’s something that passed through my Bluesky feed
this week, from Indian revolutionary Chandrashekhar Azad, who added that
surname (meaning “The Free”) when he appeared before a magistrate the first
time he was arrested, at age 15, for protesting the British raj in 1921: “What
we are to face has been faced a thousand times and it has been defeated a
thousand times before; we are merely those called to now carry on a tradition.”
(Azad died in a shootout with police in Allahabad in 1931.)
This resonates deeply with me. The fight against tyranny,
against ignorance, against religious intolerance, against plutocratic greed, against
racism, misogyny, homo- and transphobia—against all the forces of fear and rage
that have manifested themselves in different garb in different times…that’s
been going on for millennia. We win battles, we plant crops, we raise children
and then we find that the enemy has regrouped, rearmed and recruited new foot
soldiers ready to launch an attack.
I confess, it’s wearying. It’s like we’re dealing with the
Lernaean Hydra: cut off one head and two more grow back. We’re never done
done.
And yet—as Azad reminds us, this is a tradition that must
be carried on, and we are the current incumbents to that tradition. As this
video shows—we are definitely up to it. Heracles eventually scotched the snake
with the help of his nephew Iolaus; he couldn’t do it alone, but working
together with a partner, he did. What we’re up against may seem like a mythic
monster, but they’re humans and they are not the undead.
