LOOK UP: I got one step out my kitchen door when the sky exploded. A shrieking mass of black wings, beady eyes, long beaks. A murder of crows? This sounded more like a massacre.
I had my dog on a leash. Good thing. Not even 18 inches away, a thick-in-the-shoulders coyote ambled by. Stapled to every nearby telephone pole was a picture of someone’s missing pet. Clearly, the crows got the memo. The coyote — a study in practiced nonchalance — took it all in. He vanished. But on his own terms. And in his own good time.
What was this, I wondered after, some kind of parable? Who knew. I had a dog to walk.
This past Saturday, those crows came to mind as I joined 13,000 people at Alameda Park for the No Kings rally. The weird genius of these events is how they bring out laughter along with outrage. But the message, predictably, was undeniably grim. “We are no longer slouching toward authoritarianism,” we heard. “We have already arrived.” Who walks away from that feeling uplifted? Thirteen thousand crows?
Crows, it turns out, have a sense of humor. They play pranks. They mimic each other. And other animals. So too — in his own stunted, angry, 14-year-old-boy way — does Donald Trump. Seven million people in 2,700 cities marched against him? “Who cares?” retorted his spokesperson to The New York Times.
But that wasn’t sufficient for our thin-skinnedBeavis and Butt-Head in Chief. Deploying all the wonders of AI, he launched a video of himself wearing a crown in the cockpit of a Top Gun jet fighter from whence hedropped a bomb of an unnamed fecal brown bodily fluid on the denizens of New York City.
Thirteen thousand crows?
As invigorating and uplifting as the No Kings rally was, it could have stood a few less familiar speakers. Someone from the Chamber of Commerce, perhaps, to explain how tourist traffic in the City of Santa Barbara has been dropping for the past three months, 25 percent this September from the previous month. The big drop was in international tourists — particularly those from Canada — who tend to stay longer and spend more.
Or maybe someone from the California Highway Patrol could have elaborated on how clumps of metal shrapnel from a prematurely exploding live howitzer shell shot over the I-5 earlier that day — over the vehement objections of Governor Gavin Newsom — and rained down on two CHP vehicles as part of the 250th birthday celebration of the Marine Corps held at Camp Pendleton.
Newsom had been derided as a nervous Nellie for causing hour-long traffic delays when everyone knew how safe it is to fire 60 live shells — two feet long and six inches in diameter — over a crowded freeway.
JD Vance presided over the celebration. Like the crows, I guess, JD Vance also seems to enjoy a good prank.
Speaking of fun pranks, I was kind of expecting some masked ICE agents to detain Dodger great Shohei Ohtani on the mound this weekend. Baseball, after all, is America’s national pastime. What’s he doing out there?
Yes, Ohtani threw 10 strikeouts and hit three home runs — one over the roof and into the next time zone — but the fact is, he remains a foreign national. Yes, he has a green card, but if ICE agents can shoot a Chicago pastor in the head with pepper balls in plain view — his arms outstretched and palms facing upward in prayerful supplication — then who knows what ICE considers fair game.
Now that the World Series will pit Dodgers against the Blue Jays from Toronto (not an American team, for those rusty with their geography), the America Firsters might have a hard time knowing who to root for. And wait ’til they see the All-NBA A-team this year. Looks like there won’t be one native born-in-the-U.S.A. basketball player on it.
We act like this is something new, but it was a Ukrainian immigrant named Bronko Nagurski who first put professional football on the pop culture map back in the 1930s, and it was a couple of Hungarian immigrants in the 1960s — brothers Charlie and Pete Gogolak — who revolutionized the NFL by introducing soccer-style kicking for field goals.
Hell, when I call someone to fix my refrigerator, it’s always someone from Russia or Ukraine who shows up. I’m afraid to ask which for fear of triggering an international incident. If you frequent a liquor store in Santa Barbara, the owner is Syrian; if you patronize a classic doughnut shop, you’re buying from Cambodians. If you get your nails done, it’s in a Vietnamese establishment. And don’t ask me where America’s Nobel Prize winners come from, but I can tell you that 35 to 40 percent of them come from someplace else. And if you watch Point Break, one of the greatest bad movies America ever made, you’re watching a Canadian movie star, Keanu Reeves.
Keanu Reeves? Who knew?
That’s just the way it is. And if you don’t like it, don’t bother telling the crows. They got coyotes to corral. Don’t bother me either. I got a dog to walk.
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