Fires, L.A.


Ashes is bright Malibu,
Altadena’s palms,
black, naked, gravel
of bitter alms.

Roses devour
the monarch wood,
blown from Santa Ana
to a cold tide; 

rags left
from brocades of towns,
tapestries of cities
burning down.

Katy’s house,
white against ash,
drops tears into 
her outstretched hand.

Great dragons of fire
snake the night hills,
seeking their reflections
in abandoned swimming pools.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and essayist living in San Francisco.

The launch event will take place at 2 Waverly Place, on Saturday, January 25, at 1:00 pm. Readers: Christopher Bernard, Steven Hill, Ho Lin and Jonah Raskin.

Admission: Donation (Suggested: $5.00). All proceeds will go to victims of the LA fires.

Mass Murder Capitalism and the Infinity Trap

Author’s Note: I wrote this essay originally in the fall of 2020 and publish it here with a few cosmetic changes and updates. It seems even more relevant today, after the assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare—a figure who was an example of a vicious healthcare system where it has finally been proven that when healthcare is driven by whatever “the market will bear” and the desire to increase “shareholder value” at whatever cost, the purveyors of that system will, at some point, irresistibly, ask the following question of their customers:

“How much is your health, your spouse’s health, or your children’s health, worth to you”?

And who will be surprised to hear the answer: “My health? My spouse’s health? My children’s health? Why, they are worth everything to me.”

And few will be shocked by the response from the boardrooms of the healthcare “industry”:

“Oh it is, is it? It’s worth everything to you? Really? Well then, good people—in that case, we’ll take everything from you! And thank you very, very much!”

It does not take long for the logic of this statement to become fully apparent when it leads to the next equally candid exchange, heard in the confines of many a winterized boardroom:

“We who are in the healthcare industry are in the business of making money—are we not?”

“Indeed we are.”

“And our job is to make even more money in every quarter than we did in the quarter before it, is it not?”

“Our shareholders will certainly let us know it if we do not!”

“And we have two ways, and only two ways, of making more money—we sell more of our product, or we decrease our expenses. Is this not so?”

“Never a truer word was spoken!”

“We can decrease our expenses by, for example, laying off workers.”

“And a good thing too!”

“Now, protecting the health of our customers costs money.”

“Indeed it does!”

“So—what, gentlemen, if we did not? After all, we can’t save everybody all the time even with every procedure under the sun, from aspirin to brain surgery. And we never pretended we could do so. Just read over our contracts!”

“You’re right there! And we’d save a lot of money!”

“We’d make a lot of money, you mean. But to ask the question is to answer it. Is it our problem if our customers, those innocent boobies, forgot to read the fine print in the policies they bought from us—the fine print that tells them we do not guarantee payment for all or indeed for any medical procedure we do not, in our infallible judgment, thoroughly and completely approve of? No! So, if we deny covering any given medical procedure, and they suffer, is it our fault?”

“Of course not!”

“If we deny covering any given medical procedure, and they go bankrupt, is it our fault?”

 “Never!”

“If we deny covering any given medical procedure, and they die, is it our fault!”

“What a perfectly ridiculous idea! (And anybody who claims otherwise we’ll sue to the ground for endangering our good name, our reputation, and, above all, our profits!)!”

“Exactly! They should have read their contract—and if they didn’t like it, they were FREE to go elsewhere—even though every healthcare insurance contract contains, by an extraordinary coincidence, exactly the same stipulations as ours does!”

(The board roars with laughter.)

One sentence below begins as follows: “We surveyed the death toll over the last half-dozen decades and more: from the tobacco industry to the opioid crisis, the fossil-fuel to the gun industry, arms manufacturers to social media….” I would now make a substantive change: “We surveyed the death toll over the last half-dozen decades and more: from the tobacco industry to the opioid crisis, the fossil-fuel to the gun industry, arms manufacturers, to social media, to our crippled, and crippling, healthcare system….”

*

A friend and I took a walk across downtown San Francisco that autumn day. We were wearing masks and keeping (at least most of the time) a medically correct six feet apart. After weeks of unbreathable air, stultifying heat, and an eerie day of pink burnt-orange skies, we could, finally, breathe cool, deep lungfuls of a briny marine breeze off the Pacific under a clear, almost tangibly blue sky.

The city was cautiously reopening: cafes and restaurants were allowed to serve at sidewalk tables or cheerful pavilions built on the streets and fenced about like little biergartens, stores could let in customers, masked and a handful at a time, and in a few weeks, museums would be allowed to reopen with safety precautions greenlighted by the city.

We had been spared the fates of many of our fellow Californians and others living in the Pacific northwest: the millions of acres of wildland burning, the conflagrations reducing towns to ashes, the thousand fleeing for their lives. It was only far south of us that the bodies of dead birds trying to migrate south for the winter were falling from the skies, littering the land by the hundreds, even thousands. The birds here, though sometimes confused by the long darkness of smoke-clogged skies and dawns that only end at sunset, were still flying, the crows that had begun to dominate neighborhoods like North Beach and Hayes Valley strutted cockily down the sidewalks.

Yet it was difficult to maintain one’s calm, even on a good day like this, when the world, even nature itself, seemed in the midst of a murderous rampage—despite the fact many of us saw it coming for decades, since humanity was its primary cause. So my friend and I both knew that our lovely walk through the perfect afternoon was only a pause in the terrifying year of 2020.

We talked about it—because what else was there to talk about? Disasters around us and a looming electoral catastrophe before us: Trump and the Republican Party had given ominous signals they were prepared to burn American democracy to the ground if they couldn’t claim victory in November. The climate crisis had been staring us in the face after two generations of denial by the powerful and their deluded followers. The economy was in a coma while billionaires became even more absurdly, obscenely, wealthy, and shareholders aspired to their condition of insouciant arrogance. There was a seemingly unstoppable run of racist police killings and, in response, increasingly violent eruptions of righteous fury. Social media were completely out of control, causing a tempest of despair in the young: loneliness, depression, bullying, suicides, at least one of these, goaded by some monster, live streamed to a shocked audience.

We surveyed the death toll over the last half-dozen decades and more: from the tobacco industry to the opioid crisis, the fossil-fuel to the gun industry, arms manufacturers to social media, and one of us suddenly came up with a truly horrifying thought: an entire layer of society is making money, deliberately, knowingly, purposely doing serious injury to people. Worse than that: they are making money from killing people . . .

There is a descriptive phrase for this that may seem on the surface sensationalist and hyperbolic. The phrase is “mass murder capitalism.” The Romans of the empire entertained the populace through, among other things, cheering on gladiators as they killed each other in the arena and applauding as Christians and other misfits were torched and crucified en masse. The modern world has learned how to kill people, when necessary to increase profits and drive up their share price. And people are killing themselves so that titans of social media can increase their stock price by a few points.

It is not altogether intentional (though one can make the argument that, in some cases, it is; how else describe the worst offenses of health insurance; of the fossil-fuel industry, which has been aware of the dangers of carbon-induced climate change since as long ago as the 1950s; or the tobacco industry, which has been murdering people for profit since the ’60s? If this is not “Auschwitz for profit,” what else might such a horrendous beast “look like”?

Yet the people who run the capitalist Juggernaut are hardly Nazis deliberately planning on murdering most of the human race so they alone can rule the earth. This catastrophic eventuality is merely part of a nefarious effect, an “unintended consequence,” of extractive capitalism. There is in fact a legal term one might use to describe it: manslaughter.

Voluntary manslaughter involves the intentional killing of another person in the heat of passion and response to provocation, whereas involuntary manslaughter is the negligent causing of the death of another person. Perhaps one might call the passionate pursuit of profits an instance of “heat of passion,” and the “provocation” leading to this crime passionel being the irritating habit of ordinary people not to get out of the way quite fast enough of the pursuit of the highest return on investment.  

Then there is involuntary manslaughter: killing people without realizing it, though one might, and indeed should, have known what you were doing could very well have such lethal effect.

But what do you call it when an “unintended consequence” has been revealed for all to see; when the fact that you are murdering people for the sake of ever-increasing returns is blatant, is even flaunted—and you keep on doing it anyway?

You would then be called a murderer. A first-degree murderer. And in America we have an array of specific punishments for that, from life in prison to the death penalty.

It may have been the tobacco industry that taught modern American capitalism that, as long as what an industry manufactures makes someone a great deal of money, it can get away with harming, even killing, in the long run, many, and even most, of its customers. The fossil-fuel industry was not far behind. Big pharma has been doing it more discreetly for years, to say nothing about what is sometimes suspected of for-profit hospitals. The arms industry has always done it for a living. The gun industry, with its front organization the NRA, is almost embarrassing in a hypocrisy that even its supporters don’t pretend to believe.

My friend and I dug around a little more. We were playing a mind experiment—what had we to lose? We might even develop one or two insights worth sharing with others more qualified and knowledgeable than ourselves, who might use them to have deeper, keener, and more valuable perceptions, genuine discoveries – something the rest of us can act on, even fight for.

There seemed to be something driving both the obsession with accumulating ever greater piles of cash that has no other purpose than acquiring more cash (money is useless for anything else, being inedible, ugly, and a hopelessly poor building material)—something called “hoarding” in other circumstances, and considered a medical condition requiring discreet but firm intervention, not celebration, social power, or political control by the syndrome’s victim—and, for example, the same thing that was driving some young girls to harm themselves, even kill themselves, as a result of the amoralism and cruelty found in social media.

They all share something we decided to call “the infinity complex” or infinity trap, depending on whether the internal compulsion or the outer effect is being emphasized – in either case, it is shorthand for a perverse fact about human psychology.

It is a well-known fact that we human beings feel less pleasure acquiring something we want than pain at losing something we have. There is also an addictive pattern to acquisition: the more we get, the less pleasure we often get from each equivalent addition, though this does not keep us from obsessively seeking the old thrill we remember from the good old days of our possessing minority.

Applied to the accumulation of money, cash, or “capital,” this translates into the wealthy becoming addicted to acquiring money without ever being able to attain satisfaction: they never have “enough”; they are always trying to add one more zero to the end of their financial balances, and to feel that little thrill that still comes with it. And avoid the pain of the loss of one, no matter how many zeros there already are in that quagmire of a financial account. And it is always possible, no matter how many zeros are already there, to add one more zero. Desire for money is infinite because the number series is infinite; thus, the infinity complex. And a wealthy man can never have enough once he is caught in the infinity trap.

Social media addictions have the same psychological source: a young girl (for example), who is naturally insecure and needs reinforcement from her peers to be reassured of her own value, gets a “like” on Facebook. All well and good. She gets more likes. Even better. She really likes getting likes, soon she becomes practically addicted to them—so much so that, at a certain point, when one of her posts, for some reason or for no reason, doesn’t get any likes at all, or even gets fewer than before, she feels a moment of panic . . .

Yet, no matter how many likes she gets, she becomes increasingly frightened she will not get as many of them next time. And what if she reaches the point of getting no likes at all? (Believe me, I know this can happen; more and more of my Facebook posts these days get no likes, and even I feel vaguely hurt and unsettled by this.)

Since most of this young girl’s social interactions happen online and not face to face, as a result her feelings about her own worth, which are insecure at best during these years, hang on the very thing that is making her miserable. She may easily spiral into feelings of despair, which she tries to cure by getting more likes on all her social media. But this makes her even more desperate. The addictive cycle has been secured; she too has fallen into the infinity trap.

For evidence of this, we learned that suicide rates of older teenage girls have doubled, and for younger teenage girls have tripled, since the first successful social media platform, Facebook, was introduced.

We have created an economy, a culture, and a society that exploit this weakness in human psychology to the hilt, all because it makes a small number of people a vast amount of money. It has reached the point where it is wreaking havoc on the young; it is destroying impoverished communities across the U.S. through opioid addiction; it has affected the health of several generations of people across the globe through tobacco addiction, and now is having a similar effect through vaping; it is ruining political and cultural discourse through a perpetual tsunami of misinformation inundating the internet—and most criminally and ultimately catastrophically, it is destroying the planetary ecosystem through global heating, destruction of natural habitats, and ripping to shreds the ecological network that makes human life on earth possible.

It is painful to admit this, and many will deny it or accuse me of exaggeration, but I believe the evidence has become too clear to remain silent. The core of world capitalism, which includes the fossil-fuel industry and all other industries connected to it, many internet companies, and big pharma, has become a global criminal syndicate, a Murder Inc. beyond the most violent and brutal dreams of any organized criminal network. And we have become addicted to an entire array of triggers that feed an insatiable human capacity: the drive never to be satisfied.

We must begin by ending the neoliberal project of global capitalism now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Not in the next decade.

Or many more will die like the flocks of birds falling from the sky in their thousands over the southwestern states, like our fellow human beings, most of them innocent of creating this catastrophe, who are perishing from the heatwaves blanketing the world every summer and crushed beneath new forms of authoritarianism driven by a toxic blend of neoliberal ideology and information technology we have lost control of, to a conclusion in social psychosis and suicidal destruction.

____

Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet, critic, and essayist. His book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021.

Too Many of Us . . .

     I hear a shaking of wings.
     When I open my eyes, what I see
     is what I see no more.—Cavafy

The gentle ones retreat into the dark
without a flourish.
They leave behind a smile
naked and surprised.

Their kind eyes are embarrassed;
death is not only tragic; it is tactless; 
it reminds of everything the living want to forget.

The line of footprints in the sand
stops here . . .
                       But how can this be? 
As though a hawk
(or an angel, if you believe in angels)
fell, seized the walker with its talons,
then soared away with him into the sky.


for Carlos Ramirez, Stephen Mackin, Don Brennan, Stephen Kopel,  Iván Arguëlles, and Marvin R. Hiemstra



Christopher Bernard is a San Francisco poet, writer, and essayist. 

An Ordinary American Monster: Liberalism, Capitalism, and Donald Trump

By Christopher Bernard

He was inevitable. The innocents who believed either in the fundamental goodness of humanity, or in the power of our institutions to undermine humanity’s drive to evil – its selfishness, greed, hunger for power, arrogance, deceitfulness – did not just fail to defend us from him. They helped create him. And then made it almost impossible to defend against him. You see, he had rights, and these rights were guaranteed. And his rights superseded our rights to be protected. That is the way it is with rights: the agent has more than the patient. When the elephant has the same rights as the mice, it is not the elephant that is crushed.

And this is the way with liberalism. And, with capitalism, which is the economic driver of liberalism; this is the way with America and its “exceptionalism.” This is our way, the American way. We have avoided, or conquered, the worst effects of our way of life for a very long time. Until now.

Yet who doesn’t love liberalism, especially when it is applied to them? The very word is steeped in generosity, in magnanimity and loving kindness. I love the freedom it accords me to do whatever I wish whenever I wish. I love the feeling of lightness and air it surrounds me with, like a bath. I love the fact it gives the same freedom to everyone I know and care for, even though they sometimes use it in a way that (usually inadvertently) does me some harm. And even for people I do not particularly like or love: I hate the idea of them, or of anyone, confined, oppressed, suffering, for any reason at all. In fact, if I had my way, Dante’s Inferno would be empty. Indeed, if I had my way, life on earth would be a paradise.

But the Supreme Being didn’t ask me when drawing up plans for the cosmos. Really, he should have. I would have had some nice liberal ideas, and also a few useful ideas that might have saved us from liberalism’s formidable flaws.

It is not often noted that liberalism is not so much a political philosophy as an abdication from having one, a kind of what the French call faute de mieux (“for lack of anything better”), a jury-rigging and gigantic shrugging off and throwing up of one’s hands at the very idea of discovering how a society, how a polity that supports the well-being of all its members, might actually work: every attempt to found a “philosophy of liberalism,” from Hobbes to Locke to Jefferson and the framers of the United States Constitution, has failed, mired in helpless contradictions and blinded by forms of willful self-deception.

For at the very basis of liberalism lies a series of gaping holes liberals keep pretending not to notice, and then keeping falling into them while pretending they are just potholes they are mending on the way to the millennium.

To wit:

Liberal: “The freedom of the individual supersedes the rights of society as a whole.”

Skeptic: “Really?”

Liberal: “That’s right. And we must tolerate all religions and philosophies because people can’t agree on first principles, and we want to live in a society that is at least relatively at peace.”

Skeptic: “But you just told me you in fact have a ‘first principle’!”

Liberal: “I hoped you hadn’t noticed that.”

Skeptic: “And what about people (most people throughout history, really) who believe the rights of groups, of families, of society as a whole come first – and in fact they must come first, for obvious reasons? No individual human being can exist outside a society; we are social creatures from the day we are born, and remain so until the day we die. The only perfectly autonomous individual is a dead one. We all begin as infants, and if we weren’t immediately supported by a complicated network of social support – from our parents and family to doctors and nurses – we would be dead within hours, even minutes, of coming out of the womb. We are components of a group before we ever become (relative, since we never become complete) individuals. So privileging the individual above the society is literally an insane idea – it would be like saying the tire on a car is more important than the car itself.”

Liberal: “[Several pages of incoherent and inconsistent logic-chopping we will not bore the reader with. But their ultimate argument always comes down to:] Everyone loves liberty, everyone wants to be free, just like us. Everyone wants to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it. The fact that most societies since the dawn of time have considered this the height of human immaturity at the very least, and, at worst, of moral irresponsibility and active evil, to be condemned, excoriated, and punished, makes no difference. Their morality is just out of date – these things change, history has its own morality and ethical standards, there are no absolutes, but history is progressive (yes, I know the Nazis came after Florence Nightingale, but don’t bother me with facts!), we are progressive, we are liberated, we are enlightened! And who gets to define what these noble values mean (to anticipate your irritating question)? Why, we do, of course! And so, if anyone doesn’t choose to be free, we shoot them until they do. It’s really very simple: as Rousseau and John Stuart Mill so wisely said: people sometimes need to be forced to be free. And as far as infants go, we’re doing this for the children!” 

Skeptic: (Silent. After all there are no words by which one might wade through such a swamp of self-contradictions.)

But then there’s the liberal doctrine of “tolerance.” How can anyone possibly oppose that? It sounds so nice!

Liberal: “We must tolerate all forms of thought and action as long as they do not cause harm to other people.”

Skeptic: “Okay. And who gets to define ‘harm’?”

Liberal: “Why, liberals do, naturally!”

Skeptic: “So what do you do with people who don’t agree that something you tolerate does not cause ‘harm,’ indeed they believe it is an absolute evil that must be destroyed? Wait, don’t tell me! You . . .”

Liberal and Skeptic “. . . shoot them until they do!”

Skeptic: “Well, of course we do. But I have another issue. Isn’t there a danger liberalism will encourage the most anti-social forms of behavior; in fact it will reward psychopaths and empower ‘malignant narcissists’ when they also happen to be talented manipulators? It could hand power over society as a whole to some of the worst monsters humanity is able to create. At the same time it will have made it almost impossible to protect against them.”

Liberal: “But if we liberals just scold enough and say out loud what a very nasty person it is and how we should really not let these people either become billionaires or become president of the United States, and just follow the Constitution, which is after the greatest political document in the world, with its marvelous array of check and balances, and division of branches of government, and an actively questioning Fourth Estate of news organization, independent of any interference by psychopaths or ‘malignant narcissists’ or political sway of any kind, and we have after all a robust and independent debate going on in America on all the important issues of our time, without fear or favor, don’t we? I mean, well then everything will work out just fine. We hope. Maybe.”

Skeptic: “My gosh, you actually believe all of that . . . gibberish?”

Liberal: “Of course I do! We are what liberalism created! We are the freest country in the world! Oh wait: I meant to say, ‘We are the greatest country in the history of the world!’ (Don’t want to be cancelled, heh, heh!)”

Skeptic: “Whew! I knew you didn’t know yourself very well, but I never guessed how much. Despite the qualms I have about the knot of self-contradictions making up your so-called ‘political philosophy,’ it doesn’t bother you at all. And it sure looks like a heck of a lot more fun than worrying about being ‘moral’ all the time. Where does one go to sign up?”

Liberal: “No need to! Just stop thinking so much and Do Whatever You Feel Like Doing Whenever You Feel Like Doing It, and devil take the hindmost,”

*

And capitalism? Capitalism is liberalism on meth, cocaine, steroids, old wine for me, fentanyl for thee. It is the economic policy of liberalism, of America and her “exceptionalism”: it makes the monsters rich. The elephant crushes the mice because he can. The mice have the same right to crush the elephant . . .

*

And then there is Trump.

But what is Trump?

Perfect liberal, perfect capitalist: psychopath and malignant narcissist with a gift for manipulating millions of us. A man who is just doing whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it – and he has very good lawyers in using the laws invented to protect his liberal “rights.” And devil take the hindmost – the rest of us.

Trump is a very ordinary American monster.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a novelist, essayist and poet, and author of numerous books, including the award-winning collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses. He is founder and lead editor of the webzine Caveat Lector and recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Choice


Not an easy one, to be sure:

We call them “Republicans”
and “Democrats”:

self-righteousness, sometimes half blind,
versus greed, often naked;
entirely real fascists against
sometimes dubious progressives.

On one hand, possible dictatorship, 
oligarchy, democracy’s end here;
on the other, cultural anarchy
weaponized by pity,
the cruelest of false virtues.

Both sides flirt with visions 
of anarchy 
masking a hunger for power,
to bully and frighten the rest of us,
throwing us to confusion
whether stirred by the 1619 
Project or the latest billionaire.

Both sides support mass 
slaughter of children and women 
“for the sake of security,”
crowing for blood or weeping
tears to disgrace a crocodile.

How can anyone sane,
decent, honest, caring,
choose between them?

And yet they are not equal.

I ask myself: Has either side
shown signs of bending
toward decency, even
honesty?
Does either side admit
its human fallibility?
Has either side ever 
corrected before a truth
it did not, exactly, welcome?
Did it then change,
even if reluctantly?

Or does it drive relentlessly
toward the farthest edge
of its own lunacy,
double down in hatred,
threaten our destruction
rather than admit error

and never defeat?

If a time comes when we must choose
between two madnesses
that cannot face a truth
they do not wish to face;
that live a fantasy
of vengeance, lies, and hate,
drunk on certainties
that face any doubt with calls
for silence, removal, blood;
that will not turn the helm an inch
to escape the ice before them
and certain catastrophe
for the rest of us—

then there will be no choice.

Nevertheless, there is the question:
is it a necessary evil
to choose between evils
when it is simply an evil
to refuse the choice?

No, it is not an easy one.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist. He recently helped to organize and host “Poets for Palestine: A Poetry Marathon to Benefit the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance” in San Francisco.