The Life in My Years

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio”

“Four dead in Ohio” were the first words that came to mind when I heard that Donald Trump, on the evening of June 7th, had federalized 2,000 California National Guard soldiers in response to protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles.

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The match was struck on June 6th at a Home Depot in Los Angeles where Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers were conducting arrests of day laborers (As stated in a previous post, the Trump regime has veered away from the promise of going after murderers, drug dealers and rapists of white women, and is going after the low hanging fruit in order to satisfy the quotas set by Stephen Miller, America’s ferret faced head of U.S. Gestapo tactics). In response to the DHS action, up to one thousand protesters gathered at the scene.

Tempers flared during the day. A man was seen physically trying to block a federal law enforcement van which did not stop. The man fell down and by some chance intervention of the fates, was not run over. By nightfall, chunks of concrete were being thrown at federal law enforcement. By that point, LAPD and the California Highway Patrol were trying to keep the peace (to the credit of the CHP, it put out a statement saying that their mission was only peacekeeping and it was not assisting ICE in the arresting of immigrants).

By 8:30, the LAPD had issued a tactical alert.

On the 7th, arrests of undocumented immigrants continued as did the protests, with more violence erupting.

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On the 7th, as events in Los Angeles were unfolding, Cora and I were at a large, peaceful, and very loud, protest in Walnut Creek. We got home and I remained disconnected from media and the news. After a quiet afternoon during which I sat in the backyard and read, we watched a movie. We had no idea of what was happening 400 miles to the south.

While we watched the movie, I heard my phone in another room blowing up with messages. “Fuck it. If it’s really important, they’ll call.”

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After the movie, Cora went to bed. It was ten o’clock when I read the messages on my phone. They were from the chat group of a local Indivisible chapter of which I’m a member. Our chapter had been asked to be a signatory to two letters condemning the federalization of the National Guard.

This is when I learned that Trump had shattered any chance for a quick return to peace on the L.A. streets.

Federalization meant that command of the guard had been removed from the state government and passed on to federal authorities. It isn’t an uncommon thing for the Guard to be federalized. Usually when that happens, the soldiers are deployed to conduct operations in foreign countries. But this is the Donald Trump version of America, and the usual has become the unusual. And while Donald Trump may look upon California as a hostile foreign country, it is still a state of the Union.

According to former DHS official and national security expert Juliette Kayyem, Trump’s order was “quite extreme, given the circumstances.” Kayyem explained, “The National Guard traditionally and by Constitution reports to the governor. They are needed as sort of an additional asset that a governor can use to support local and state entities.” Kayyem continued, “They (the National Guard) work in tandem with state and local so there’s rules of engagement, (and) understanding of what the mission is. What Trump did yesterday is not typical . . . even though there was unrest, that’s why police departments exist. When a president federalizes the National Guard under Title X . . . he puts them under his authority to be deployed without knowledge of the rules of engagement are, what the mission is, how are they going to work with locals, and, does have the risk of heightening tensions rather than deescalating, and in law enforcement you want to deescalate the tensions, arrest those who have committed crimes, permit First Amendment protest, which is allowed and not escalate it as Donald Trump did.”

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Sleep didn’t come easily on Saturday night. “Ohio”, a song from my long ago past, was playing in my head. It was on

repeat,

and

repeat,

and

repeat.

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“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio”

Richard Nixon was the president on May 4, 1970.

It only took thirteen seconds.

Thirteen tragic seconds at 12:24 p.m. at Kent State University in Ohio.

It started with a rally and protest against America’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. It devolved into a standoff between National Guard soldiers and students, with tear gas being fired and the students retreating to a position where they found themselves boxed in.

There was a standoff, and then the soldiers were ordered to kneel and aim their weapons.

“Everybody laughed, because, c’mon, you’re not going to shoot us,” recalled Chris Butler, who was one of the protesters.

But they did

shoot them.

Chrissie Hynde (yes, that Chrissie Hynde) recalled, “I thought it was fireworks. An eerie sound fell over the common. The quiet felt like gravity pulling us to the ground. Then a young man’s voice: “They fucking killed somebody!” Everything slowed down and the silence got heavier . . . The guardsmen themselves looked stunned. We looked at them and they looked at us. They were just kids, 19 years old, like us. But in uniform. Like our boys in Vietnam.”

Four students, Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Miller, 20, Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, and William Schroeder, 19 were killed. Nine others were wounded. One of the wounded was left paralyzed.

The next day’s New York Times headline read “4 Kent State Students Killed by Troops.” Below the headline was a photo of an anguished student kneeling by the body of Jeffrey Miller. The image was of Mary Ann Vecchio arms outstretched in supplication. “Why?” she seems to be asking.

The Pulitzer Prize winning photo has remained symbolic of a nation’s turmoil during the Vietnam War era.

The event inspired Neil Young to write the song “Ohio,” which was recorded by the band Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The song became one of the many anthems of the resistance to the Vietnam War.

“Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?”

I was 17 years old and a nation was in a rage after that incident.

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Fifty-five years later

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On Sunday the 8th, three hundred of the 2,000 guardsmen were deployed at the Los Angeles Federal Building.

The scenes in L.A. turned uglier as the protesters’ anger turned towards the Trump regime and its inflammatory action of mobilizing the National Guard, along with Pete Hegseth’s threat to send in active duty Marines. Police and CHP were now tasked with keeping the angry crowd away from the National Guard.

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Say what you want about Nixon. He was a mean, scowling crook, but at least he was relatively stable and he possessed some qualifications to be president.

Donald Trump, an impulsive, irresponsible man with a burning hatred towards California is anything but stable, and he’s exceptionally unqualified to be president. He runs on high octane emotion and over the course of a weekend he did what he’s been wanting to do since his first term. It was his long awaited opportunity to unleash his ire, and the military, on California.

To make things worse, it was amateur hour as Trump’s crew of emotionally ill-equipped dilettantes stumbled their way through a crisis, pouring kerosene on a wildfire of chaos.

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During his first term, Trump had surrounded himself with appointees and staff that retained some semblance of decency and respect for the law and the Constitution. Those people have since been christened, the “guardrails.” Those appointments were Trump’s first term error, one he would not repeat at the start of his second term.

This time around there are no guardrails. There is no Mark Esper to tell him no, you can’t order American soldiers to shoot American protesters in the legs. There is no Mark Miley, no John Bolton, no H.R. McMaster. There are only rabid sycophants and radical ideologues who share Trump’s racism, his thirst for absolute power, his hostility towards long standing norms, laws, Constitutionally protected rights, and anyone who would have the temerity to refuse to toe his arbitrary authoritarian lines.

Trump is getting the fight that, for years, he’s been spoiling for. He got himself another made up “crisis.” Trump’s agenda thrives on phony “emergencies” so that he can whimsically bypass the Constitution. And so, one weekend in June allowed him to take another stride towards the authoritarian regime he craves.

His Stasi goon, Tom Homan, threatened to arrest the Governor of California and the Mayor of Los Angeles. There has been a fire hose of inflammatory rhetoric coming from the Republican party. Meanwhile Trump’s unofficial state media, Fox News, OAN, and Brietbart has busy spewing black lies.

How ironic and how hypocritical is it that the sitting president who incited an insurrection in 2021, along with the party that has spent four years working furiously to rewrite history and minimize that insurrection, are all suddenly screaming

insurrection?

Ted Cruz, the particularly odious Senator from Texas further fanned the flames by posting videos of burning L.A. police cars, insinuating that they were burned during the weekend protests. The footage was from the 2020 George Floyd protests and riots. His post was the pinnacle of partisan irresponsibility.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said of Pete Hegseth’s threat to send Marines to Los Angeles, “One of our core principles is maintaining peace through strength. We do that on foreign affairs and domestic affairs as well, I don’t think that’s heavy-handed. I think that’s an important signal.”

“An important signal.” Words to live by for an autocracy in the making.

Over the course of nearly five months, the regime has been sending many “important” signals; from masked ICE agents arresting kids and soccer moms and citizens, to kidnapping foreign students and shoving them into unmarked vans, to harassment of law firms and universities, to threats against judges, to executive orders targeting perceived enemies of the regime.

Yes Mr. Speaker, it is an important signal. A signal of intimidation. A signal that the regime is ready to come after anyone and everyone who misbehaves.

Signals to keep the citizenry off balance. Signals meant to paralyze a burgeoning resistance. Signals to the regime’s hardcore supporters that open season against the marginalized and the “different” is just beginning.

As the Trump regime’s hard line became clear, Cora and I decided that we wouldn’t venture out of the country so that we wouldn’t have to touch Customs and Immigration upon our return. I’ve found that it’s not an uncommon concern among American citizens and especially among legal residents. And so we decided to travel to New York. On Thursday, the day before events unraveled in Los Angeles we changed our minds and decided that we couldn’t live in fear. We decided to visit France. Now, just a few days later, we’ve received the “important signal” and we’re once again rethinking our plans to travel abroad.

Yes Mr. Speaker, “An important signal.” Words for a democracy to die from.

A week ago, I posted a quote above my desk. It’s from a movie that Cora and I watched recently. The scene was in Germany, just as World War II was beginning. The quote reads,

“Farewell to the world as we know it”

I’d planned to shut down the America’s Nightmare series with one final piece. And then came the events of the weekend of June 6th and another step towards authoritarianism. I felt that it demanded some comment, thus delaying the final piece of the series.