I Protest!

Welcome, opinionated reader. This week I'll be reporting on a variety of interactions with the democratic process here in the US. Of course, I'm mostly a spectator to these things, because if there's one thing the US is founded on, it's that taxation doesn't equal representation (although I might have got the wrong end of the stick there).

President Biden has just passed through the 100 day milestone, and his presidency has been held up to the spotlight in various ways as a result. There's still the feeling that he's getting a bit of an easy ride at the moment, because anything's an improvement over the histrionic, lurching, daily soap opera we've been accustomed to with the previous incumbent. Joe also wandered up the road to the Capitol to address the Congress, flanked for the first time by a female Vice President, and of course Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

There's a very distinct choreography about this, where Joe makes a boast, and all the Democrats stand up and clap while the Republicans look on grumpily. For Kamala and Nancy this means they're up on their feet clapping one minute, back in their chairs the next, and 30 seconds later the cycle repeats. Now I worry a bit for Nancy here, because after all she's 81 now, and all that standing up and sitting down looked like it might be getting a bit much for her. Over in the UK we've been trending towards a younger and younger political class (with Jeremy Corbyn a bit of an outlier in more ways than one) and it's odd to see that that hasn't really been repeated here. Or rather, after the relatively youthful Clinton/Bush jr/Obama presidencies, we appear to have gone back to favouring experience over energy, with the majority of the senior figures on both sides being in their 70s or 80s.

As a self-confessed elections fanatic I'm licking my lips over the potential recall of California state governor Gavin Newsom. This amusing piece of political theatre has the whiff of a vaudeville sideshow about it, with all sorts of people crawling out of the woodwork to throw their hats into the ring (we don't yet have an equivalent to Count Binface, which says more about the Americans pretending to take this stuff seriously than anything else). Essentially, recall is a way for the "will of the people" to be invoked to remove an elected official part-way through their term. To trigger a recall election, you just need the signatures of 12% of the turnout of the last election; not a particularly high bar in a two party system. Having done that, you get to vote on whether to remove the incumbent or not, and if that measure passes, who should replace them. In 2003 they chose Arnie. It should be an interesting process.

Our own personal involvement in the political process involved attending a very polite anti-Asian hate rally here in Palo Alto last Sunday. Our neighbour Bing was one of the organizers and the MC of the event. Here in the US there has been a significant rise in violent crime against those with an Asian background, mostly whipped up by you-know-who and his talk of the "Chinese virus". The Asian community has a long history in this area, and also a long history of either implicit or explicit bias or even outright persecution in some instances. It was the least we could do to go along and support Bing; of course, this is Palo Alto, so the rally outside City Hall was very polite and had a friendly atmosphere, with just one bored looking cop in attendance, despite us being literally outside the Police Station:

So there we have in; the political process in all its forms in full swing, from entirely local to thoroughly national scale. Now, about this "no taxation without representation" thing... they're not letting me vote here, so do I still have to keep paying my taxes?