Poodle Bites Bezos and Soon-Shiong

ET TU BRUTUS:  All roads do not, in fact, lead to Rome despite the assertions of a much-confused 12^th century French poet-theologian whose cryptic contention has survived the centuries. Nor can you say — as I am inclined when given half a chance — that they lead to Santa Barbara. But it’s incontrovertible that they — the aforementioned roads — do go through it.

Here’s a case in point. Last week, the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post both shot themselves in the foot right before inserting said feet in their mouths. You could say they also succeeded in cutting off their noses to spite their faces.  

They both decreed that their papers would no longer endorse in presidential elections beginning immediately. Both owners — the Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong and the Post’s Jeff Bezos — proffered high-minded justifications for their actions, arguing they wanted to put a lid on the divisiveness roiling the waters of our national discourse. 

To date, it would seem their actions have only served to further inflame matters nationally and within their own papers. Both publications have experienced a significant number of resignations by longtime and well-respected editors. They accused their owners of engaging in acts of  “anticipatory obedience” and selling out the public by kowtowing to totalitarians, autocrats, petty dictators, and would-be hoodlum tyrants.  Not only did both papers experience an exodus of editorial talent, but both also suffered a tsunami of cancellations. 

In the case of Bezos — Amazon owner and aspiring rocket ship magnate — it’s worth noting that he has outer space aspirations every bit as grandiose as Elon Musk’s, whose SpaceX Falcon 9s launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, with ever accelerating frequency, are causing the sonic booms that are increasingly disturbing the sleep of people and animals residing within 125 miles of the base. 

I mention Bezos and his Blue Origin operation because on the very same day he announced his new non-divisive policy, his right hand man, David Limp, who had just taken the helm of Blue Origin, had a meeting — face to face — with Donald Trump. We do not know what transpired in this meeting. Because we must guess, our minds tend to gravitate toward self-serving scenarios on Bezos’ part. 

We learned about this meeting from a host of reporters, but one of them happens to be from a former Independent news intern named Lily Mae Lazarus, who covered the story for the Daily Beast. In her account, Lazarus quoted at length from a prepared statement issued by Bezos. “I sighed when I found out,” Bezos said upon discovering his new chief executive of Blue Origin — which harbors dreams of launching entire space cities into the galaxies — met with Trump. 

To be honest, we sighed, too. 

Bezos insisted that he didn’t know about Limp’s meeting in advance and that no one from either of the presidential campaigns had been notified that the Washington Post — which has been publishing devastating articles about Donald Trump on a daily basis for the past eight years in its news, editorial, and even its funny pages — changed endorsement policy. There was no, he insisted, “quid pro quo.” “There is no connection between it [the meeting] and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”

In all due disrespect … bullshit.

Are we really expected to believe that somehow it slipped Dave Limp’s mind to tell his boss, Jeff Bezos, that he was meeting with Donald Trump about one of Bezos’s all-consuming passions? Clearly we are a stupid people. But even we have our limits.

For those not perusing the outer-space rocket-trade press with regularity, you might not know that the competition between Bezos and Musk has been heating up well past the boiling point in the last couple of months. One of the reasons given why Musk has been blasting more and more rocket ships off from Vandenberg is to saturate the commercial outer space satellite launch market, stifling any and all competition before it can tie its own shoes. 

Musk — and his company SpaceX — has become so foundationally essential to the military’s space program that he may as well be a branch of the military. Or at least that’s one way to look at it. 

A more accurate way would be to suggest that the Department of Defense and the Air Force have become a vassal state of Musk’s sprawling business empire. 

Here’s what we know: At the beginning of the year, Musk was permitted to launch six rocket ships a year from Vandenberg. Earlier this summer, that number was expanded to 36. He is now seeking “permission” for 50 from the California Coastal Commission. And it’s been publicly acknowledged by Space Force Brass and Space X that he will be seeking “permission” for 100 early in the new year. I use quotation marks here — I know, it’s kind of obnoxious — but SpaceX has a history of launching more rockets than it has permits for. 

In previous columns, I have noted that the vast majority of these flights do not involve military satellites. In fact, 87 percent of the launches involve payloads that are strictly commercial in nature. This fact is relevant to a broader debate taking place among members of the Coastal Commission. Should SpaceX  be regulated as a private contractor pursuing a private business matter, or should it be inoculated from such encumbrances? Should it be afforded the exemption from regulation enjoyed by federal agencies?

Since Musk started blasting off from Vandenberg, he’s been treated as a federal agency, meaning he’s been exempt from the regulatory oversight he’d get as a private commercial enterprise. 

To date, no military justification has been offered for the sudden increase in the number of Vandenberg  launches. Perhaps Musk is hearing Jeff Bezos’s footsteps. 

Getting back to Rome and all the roads that lead to it or through it, this is the context in which I see Elon Musk’s exuberant and over-the-top support for Donald Trump. Musk has donated $130 million to his own private PAC which has been moving mountains to get Trump re-elected. 

Personally, I’m a sucker when it comes to the red glare of Elon’s rockets. I think they’re undeniably beautiful. But it’s beauty I can live without. Or not as much. 

The tree huggers and insomniacs have started to come out of the woodwork, showing up at Coastal Commission meetings to object that all the sonic booms could, and do, have a deleterious effect on a host of living creatures that live below. Whales, red-legged frogs, and snowy plovers, to name a few. 

For the record, nobody argued the launches had to stop; instead they argued we needed better monitoring on the impacts of these booms. And then we needed to take steps to mitigate the impact of those booms. It’s not as if the Pentagon and Musk don’t have the money.

When Coastal Commission staff embraced these demands, the military brass at the base initially told them to pound sand and otherwise get lost. For a while things got nasty. Then the brass changed their tune and said sure, why not? 

The critics objected. By the time all the monitoring programs would be put in place, Musk would be launching more than 100 rockets a year and it would be too late to mitigate much of anything. 

Coastal Commissioners, admittedly a lefty-Democratic, Trump-hating bunch, lost their heads and launched into some anti-Musk and anti-Trump diatribes before voting 6-4 to deny Musk a largely ceremonial seal of approval. Musk then sued, claiming his First Amendment rights were being stomped upon. Even Gavin Newsom, no friend of Musk or Trump, said the commissioners crossed the line. 

I have written three columns on this now. I have received multiple emails from individuals disputing the existence of sonic booms. I will note, they all came from individuals with male-sounding first names. I got an even larger number from people detailing just how loud the sonic booms were and what got rattled when they went off. I will note that all of these came from writers with female first names.

Two Saturday nights ago, my son and I went downtown to listen to some music. We wound up banging away on one of the painted pianos that spring up every fall along State Street. For the record, we did not get arrested. But a two-year-old girl with a binky in her mouth — accompanied by her grandmother — demanded equal time and very sweetly commandeered our stool space. For the record, she played a lot better than I did. 

When we got home, my son and I were greeted by a loud rumbling sound that called to mind a herd of raccoons drag-racing across the roof. Then the windows started to rattle. I thought it was an earthquake. My son knew better. It was a sonic boom, he insisted. And indeed, I would discover, he was right. 

Even guys, it turns out, can hear them. 

As someone who, among other duties, writes endorsements for a living, I have no delusions about our impact. If we move the needle by three percentage points, that would be a lot. Most times, we reflect reality far more than we influence it. But the endorsements do matter. They give voice to some shared community sense of values. In our increasingly dyslexic, angry, alienated, and suspicious world, every little bit helps.  

And given that one of the candidates just announced he intends “to help women whether they like it or not,” I guess chivalry is not entirely dead yet. I think the owners of the Post and the L.A. Times are guilty of dereliction of duty. Their own editors accused them of “anticipatory obedience.” I would say it is more a case of “anticipatory obsequiousness” in which the owners — Bezos and Soon-Shiong — put their personal self-interest ahead of their own editorial staff, their readers, and our own country. 

I know, what else would you expect me to say? That doesn’t make it any less true.

A legitimate case can be made for not doing endorsements. The fact that neither one of them told anyone at their own editorial boards, who were, in fact, writing strong endorsements for Kamala Harris, speaks volumes. The endorsements were summarily killed. 

None of this bodes well for journalism. Not in the short run. Not in the long. 

As for “All roads lead to Rome,” that’s a phrase that means pretty much the same thing as there being “more than one way to skin a cat.” It turns out the French theologian who coined that phrase — about Rome and its roads — Alain de Lille — was much fixated on purging homoerotic references out of pagan Roman literature. Sodomy and masturbation in particular, he argued, were just not natural. Who knew? 

Given all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I’d suggest de Lille has found himself pissing up a mighty long rope. And that endeavor might qualify as a genuinely unnatural act. But nothing could be nearly as unnatural as a second term for Donald Trump.

What else did you expect me to say?