Hornets, Locusts, and Dust Clouds, Oh My
Murder hornets!
Godzilla Saharan dust cloud!
Biblical Argentinian locusts!
The media was getting fried as the people vilified them, uh…left and right…but geez, they didn’t help their case with that kind of headlining. Yeah, yeah, if it bleeds, it leads, we know. News outlets became increasingly tabloid with each passing quarantined day, what with the incessant internet competition for clicks. Cronkite wouldn’t be happy in this day and age.
The proliferation of online media resulted in a loss of validity for many if not all traditional sources, particularly the time-tested ritual of the six o’clock national news broadcasts. Once the corporate absorption of news reporting happens in full, reporters and anchors will simply become pawns for the state, just to keep their doors open, not unlike those schlock dystopian parodies like the talking head news people in Robocop or within the pages of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.
It’s often said that print’s dead. I remain hopeful that isn’t an accurate prognostication. In 2020, Vegas odds levied that all newspapers would be either defunct or exclusively online by 2024. True, a majority of folks find their news of the day on the web in this year of the Gregorian calendar. Speaking as a scribe auteur, I’m thinking in terms of quality-of-life and the necessary synaptic activity in our brains, it’s probably better to read a single, legitimately sourced, articulate, pen-on-paper article once a day instead of 50 doomscroll posts splashed with ad banners and malware bots on our phones. Maybe that’s just me being the old man on the porch squawking at millennial Vice bloggers to get off my lawn. Maybe.
I admit, I’m probably biased when it comes to the written word. I was always a voracious reader, quite contrary to my coming-of-age associates, who usually only read books when they were assigned them in class. Recreational reading has been a scarce hobby in America for quite some time now. It is another telltale sign of our emotional and intellectual devolution.
Concerning Vegas in 2020, it pushed hard for reopening in the dawn of the pandemic lockdowns. The mayor there said she wanted her city to be the guinea pig for the rest of the country. Funny, since it wouldn’t have been her in-town residents taking that litmus test, it’d have been the fearless or clueless tourists coming in through Harry Reid International Airport (I’ll always know it as McCarran, sorry Harry). The City of Sin never experienced a full shutdown until 2020.
It must’ve been truly apocalyptic on Las Vegas Boulevard at the height of quarantine. All those shuttered casinos, those dim marquees, the starving, unhoused multitudes underneath the strip in their perennially baked tunnel cities, out-of-work dealers and prostitutes and dancers and pit bosses, not to mention the gambling addicts suddenly forced to detox with no weaning, online gambling sites unable to deliver that real-time, in-person adrenaline rush of tinkling slots and flapping blackjack cards.
I’m an amateur poker player myself. I hit my local casino a couple times a week to play Pot Limit Omaha or Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments. I’d say I’m a fair player, perhaps a bit tight. My player strength doesn’t lie in the math or the probabilities. It resides in the observations of reading other players. Poker is an interactive proposition. It requires eye contact, proximity, discourse, and community. It’s not suited for pandemic life. Yeah, I went there. Puns are so lowbrow. Sorry. I’m a dipshit whiteboy. We edjumucate slow.
In his autobiography Life, Keith Richards says: “I’ll understand at gunpoint, on bread and water and a whip.” Bingo. More on the Stones in the future…
1,100 miles north of Sin City, Seattle became a different kind of testing ground, after intense bouts of George Floyd protests and ensuing clashes between activists and police. A segment of their local activists set up what they deemed the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, sometimes termed the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP. The downtown Seattle area squat in question was about a half dozen blocks wide and its de facto residents were former BLM protestors who ‘took over’ that section of the city when the Seattle Police Department vacated its East Precinct in an effort to deescalate the situation.
The two sides were in full adversary mode in early June of 2020, where a man drove into the protestor crowd – a horror far too trendy in the 21st century, it seems – after a series of physical conflicts involving tear gas, flash bangs, and pepper spray from the police, bottles, rocks, and fireworks from protestors. Local governance was disbanded as the protestors attempted to make a police-free zone as a sign of solidarity for anti-police brutality movements across the nation.
The new zone’s council demands to city officials included rent control, anti-gentrification measures, the abolition or defunding of the police, universal health care, and releasing prisoners who’d been convicted of marijuana offenses. Heh. Those wacky Pacific Northwest stoners. It was awesome sauce, as a hypothetical. If the whole country would’ve come along for that ride, it might’ve lasted longer than it did.
The mayor of Seattle chalked it up as a block party of sorts, a kind of pop-up Burning Man festival, and let them have at it…for a while.
They served non-GMO kiosk food, they grew veggie gardens, they offered free hand sanitizer and masks, first aid medical stations were set up, donations were collected for the unhoused and zone necessities, an outdoor cinema was offered, local bands played. The city politely continued basic services like waste removal, fire and rescue services, 911 still at the ready, even a Covid-19 testing hub established through the volunteerism of local health care providers. It was basically an on the fly, reactionary co-op.
Incidents of lawlessness started to surface, including a couple shootings in and near the zone. Eventually occupiers faded, leaving the site in the hands of a few remaining urban campers. Sustainability through resupplying and civilian support, ability to maintain longevity of passion to the cause, and garnering the backing of armed forces are frequent factors essential to long term occupation in real insurgencies.
Good intentions aside, Americans tend to run dry in their wells of fortitude. Wars have been fought and won and lost over levels of endurance. The world champs in that regard tend to be the Afghans, who know how to make a veggie garden last, metaphorically speaking, and that in some of the most arid wastelands on earth. It’s easy enough to conclude Seattle was briefly condoning the CHAZ movement as a point of unity. At any time, the powers that be could’ve sent in National Guard tanks to disperse everyone. Nevertheless, the sentiment was solid in theory if not practice.
Other cities probably wouldn’t have been as tolerant as Seattle’s more progressive authorities, especially not Los Angeles and its surrounding environs. As progressive as outsiders may think Southern California is, its civic leaders are often far too timid when it comes to radicalization of measures. Look at our ongoing unhoused issues, which given the wealth of our state ought to have been if not resolved, at least addressed in a far more incisive manner by this point. And yet, our drifting brethren numbers continue to climb, to skyrocket really. The unhoused are something we need to discuss, here in a chronicle of California circa 2020 or 2024. Prepare yourselves for the sobering reality of our sisters and brothers who’ve fallen through the cracks.
“To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless, yes, it is a thing that must be good. Whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.” - Vincent Van Gogh
*Compiled from June 16, 2020