Category Archives: current events

Democracy in Action

I am very impressed, if not always in a good way, by the Trump administration’s ongoing policy of posting details of White House press conferences on the internet.   I don’t know if previous administrations in the internet age did this, I suspect now that they probably did, but every time I search for some striking moment I see reported in the news (or more often in the comedy of Colbert, Noah, Meyers, Bee) , there it is on the official Whitehouse.gov website.  

The principle of making government actions accessible to the public is a cornerstone of democracy.   Let the people know what the government is doing in our name.   Let the people decide how they feel about what we are doing, after seeing all the details for themselves.   Let the people then speak, and not just 40%, or 1%, and let the government reflect the will of the people and protect our interests, majorities and minorities alike.  This is the theory our democratic, republican government is founded on.

I heard the reports of the president’s recent public chastisement of a Trump critic, former CIA Director John Brennan.  Not only angry tweets, but cutting off Brennan’s security clearance.    Raising the ante in the argument in a way no previous president has ever dared to do.   It looks like the kind of petty thing an aggrieved tinhorn dictator would do, immediately before arranging the former top government official’s death. The official statement, which you can read here in its entirety, reads in pertinent part:

Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations — wild outbursts on the Internet and television — about this administration.  Mr. Brennan’s lying and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets, and facilities [facilitates] the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.

Trevor Noah  said “unfounded allegations, wild internet outbursts and lying?  it sounds like Sarah Sanders is just reading from  President Trump’s daily schedule.”    Others have noted that Michael Flynn, former top presidential advisor, the fiery cheerleader who led the “Lock Her UP!” chants at the 2016 Republican Convention, a man who was forced to resign as National Security Advisor and later pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, still has his security clearance. [1]   The president’s outburst seems to be a fairly clear case of what psychiatry calls “projection.”   I know you are, but what am I?

I love the way the transcript is so honest and transparent that it shows the original language mistake:   and facilities [facilitates] the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.    

Stephen Miller, or some other young genius, must have been in a hurry, under pressure, to finish crafting the president’s polished written statement.  It was an act of restraint on the part of whoever wrote it, I think, not to point out that sowing division and chaos is clearly the president’s job.

That Trump himself, so challenged to marshal his “best words, very best words”, didn’t write the presidential statement is obvious.   It reminds me of a great scene from low culture.   In “Back to School” Rodney Dangerfield plays a rich buffoon who goes to college when his son is admitted.   In an attempt to impress his freshman English professor, played by Sally Kellerman, he hires Kurt Vonnegut to write his paper on Cat’s Cradle.   When Kellerman returns the paper to him, with a C, she tells him “whoever wrote this paper, and it clearly wasn’t you, doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut’s work”.    The Dangerfield character promptly strikes back, angrily calling to tell Vonnegut he’s canceling his check and telling him, over the phone: “Hey, Vonnegut, read my lips– FUCK YOU!”

But all this is an aside, another of a million distractions.  The main thing, somehow, is not to look away.   The truth matters, it actually does. Remembering the inconsistencies week to week, day do day, is important. Participating in participatory democracy is essential.  Speaking calmly, and clearly, and pointing out actual facts, is the best way to convince people currently voting against their interests to wise up, straighten up, fly right.

Everything this president does is an attempt to enhance his own image, a fake “brand” of a brilliant, highly successful business genius with a Midas touch.   He is none of these things.  Just look at his colossal, hubris-driven failures in Atlantic City, where, prior to one of his more spectacular bankruptcies, the Artist of the Deal owned the top two casinos in that town and put them both out of business going deep into hock to build a third, the Mother of All Casinos, his idiotic Taj Mahal.  His genius was in not paying a penny out of his own pocket, stiffing thousands of chumps, retaining his reputation as a business genius.

His only business success in a life that started with millions from dad, and massive political connections that garnered him hundreds of millions in tax breaks,  was as a highly opinionated fake billionaire genius/mentor on “reality TV”.    He has not shown himself to be smart or successful in any business he’s ever been involved in, except as the abrasive, self-aggrandizing star of his long-running hit TV show where he played the man he pretends to be.    And that TV endeavor, I point out sourly, was produced by people who knew what they were doing.

“FAKE NEWS!” may resonate with those who can’t believe the mainstream news is not reporting how much the damned, ungrateful blacks hate the Klan, for no goddamned reason, or how much money greedy Welfare parasites are stealing from the government every year, or how many illegal immigrants sneak into the country to bust their asses at shit jobs where unscrupulous employers ruthlessly exploit them and the ungrateful aliens still won’t learn English.    

The idea of fake news is fake.   Do not go for the fake.  Stay tuned.  Don’t let these two year-old temper tantrum tactics make you so disgusted you stop paying attention.   We all need to pay close attention, and start getting busy heading into these 2018 midterms, which many are calling the most important elections in American history.   

I have nothing more to say about this, except to salute the tinhorn Trump administration for making these important presidential decrees available to the public, for pundits and comedians to discuss and for the rest of us to read over and think about while having our morning coffee.   Viva Democracy!   With the help of a merciful All-Mighty, and the hard work of millions of us, this threat to the planet too shall pass.

 

[1] On December 1, 2017, Flynn appeared in federal court to formalize a deal with Special Counsel  Robert Mueller to plead guilty to a single felony count of “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI.[18] He confirmed his intention to cooperate with the Special Counsel’s investigation.

source

 

The Awful Ease of Incoherence

I’ve been getting a bit of the incoherent narrative full-stink in my personal life lately, and, of course, we are all subjected it to it daily in the news.    Here’s a quick illustration of the difference between a coherent story and an incoherent one, so we’re all on the same page.

Coherent:   Humans and animals are in escalating danger of habitat loss and extinction, in large part due to massive, destructive, human activities.   We don’t need science to tell us the earth herself is regularly screaming in alarm.   The largest California wildfire in recorded history is raging at the moment, along with several other wildfires in the state.   Climate disruption has increased the number of these catastrophic events every year:  record hurricanes, monsoons, floods, droughts, landslides, earthquakes in regions that never had earthquakes,  tornados in regions that have never had tornados, plus a new horror, never seen before:  fire tornadoes.  We regularly endure record heat waves, record cold streaks, new records for heat set year after year, “hundred year storms” coming along to devastate us every year or two.  

The science only confirms the disastrous state of nature we are able to observe taking lives all over in the globe on a regular basis.  Citizens of the entire world are aware of this perilous situation, only in America is there any controversy attached to this, and only because billionaire fossil fuel titans have invested countless millions to create armies of zombie-like deniers called, elegantly, “climate change skeptics”.

Incoherent version:  Human liberty itself is under attack.   Our government has become a tyranny.  Scientists with an anti-freedom agenda have conspired to make it look like there’s a correlation, a cause and effect, if you will, between the millions of barrels of fossil fuel, and the tons of clean coal, burned every day, the lucrative, clean extraction of natural gas from deep inside the earth, and the supposed warming of the earth.   The earth warms and cools in natural cycles.  Humans have nothing to do with it.   Government is the enemy, not humble servants of the people like us who want to make sure everyone has enough gas for their cars.   Without gasoline the trucks can’t deliver food to the cities.  Our very culture, our survival and our liberty, is under attack and those vicious partisans are weaponizing disputed science as the tip of the spear.  The science is disputed, there is no consensus among the mere 98% of climate scientists, including at NASA, who say this is so.

We are treated to the weaponized tweets of an infantile, irrationally angry winner-in-chief every time we turn on the news.   These tweets make no sense except in one way:  they constantly shift the focus back to incoherence.  If there is a focused discussion of some important issue being maintained in the media, there will be a nasty presidential tweet suddenly calling out son-of-a-bitch Lebron James, attempting to denigrate the NBA great with a strongly implied “nigger” thrown in there for good measure, because the people who love real winners don’t shrink from non-politically correct speech.   Lebron James is overrated– not as good as MIKE!  Lebron should shut his fucking mouth and stop being a loser.   I could beat Lebron in a game of one on one, Lebron sucks.   Etc.  

Soon, that’s today’s story.   “The President today attacked the NBA’s greatest player, LeBron James.”   The president will double down by tweeting  the name of another player, who played his last game fifteen years ago, who supposedly (incoherently) makes Lebron look like a pile of poop.   Lebron will be interviewed about this, will respond with his characteristic aplomb, but seriously, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?

It is not a problem.  The world we live in now is largely ruled by incoherence.  Do not be fooled into thinking the facts matter, that the identical stories of fifty eye witnesses who are complete strangers to each other make any difference, same with recordings of actual conversations, videotapes of the hideous thing happening right in front of the camera phone, the world itself as you perceive it does not actually exist!  WINNING exists, and LOSING.  If you’re not winning, you’re losing.  You’re all fucking losers, tweets the world’s greatest winner, only I WIN and you all can’t stand it, losers.   Jealous, pathetic losers.   SAD!

The fish rots from the head, they say.   The only trickle down I’ve ever seen in my sixty-two years living in America is the trickle down of incivility, in-your-face hostility, hereditary entitlement, the corporate killer mentality coming home to roost in every argument everywhere.  Never admit fault, that concedes liability.  For the same reason, never apologize, unless with massive qualifications before, during and after the calculated apology.   If confronted, hit back harder.   If confronted with something you cannot counter, become indignant, completely change the conversation.  If necessary, invent some inflammatory provocation to put the enemy on the back foot.  If necessary, gather allies and threaten violence.  Most people are cowards, outgunned ten to one they will usually give up like the pussies they are.  People talk big, but a loaded gun talks much, much louder than any bigmouth, no matter how smart he thinks he is.

This is the only thing that trickles down, this psychopathic impulse to dominate at any cost.   It’s the only game in town, yo.   I note that most of us do not play this game, or that we try our best not to play it.   Anyone who has whiffed this foul game full-stink will make every effort to not to replicate it.  Still, it is pervasive.   The values of our society come from what we see reflected in the public behavior of our elected officials, ambassadors, celebrities.   The party of “I’ve got mine and fuck you, you fucking whining loser” has been prevailing the last few decades.  It is America’s one truly bipartisan coalition.

I console myself by reading histories of fascism.   There are always good people– on one side, on one side — who stand against the encroaching totalitarian incoherence.  On the other side there are millions who go along with authoritarians out of a genuine desire to put their boots on the necks of the enemies of the people.  There are also even more millions who have learned from birth to simply conform.  You do what you are told, don’t make waves, and you will generally be OK.   This is the tragic swing group, since they are the ones who, by doing nothing but obey, allow incoherent authoritarians to call all of the shots.  The millions who hate your average Hitler type, an ill-tempered, oversensitive type who won’t hesitate to use as much violence as his enemies demand,  have to tread very carefully until they can figure out the small acts they can do to put a finger on the other side of the scale.  A scale that eventually, and always, tips against these ruthless authoritarians who must always rule by coercion and terror.

Yesterday I went to see the great Jose James play outdoors at Lincoln Center.  I’ve had the pleasure to talk with Jose a few times at the home of  my close friends.   We made arrangements to get on the guest list for reserved seating on a day when the real feel temperature in NYC was 99 degrees.   This was due to the high humidity which made a mere 90 degrees feel much hotter.  I stayed hydrated and went to the show.

To sit in the reserved seats you had to have an orange wrist band.   These were given out on the opposite side of the large venue from where the reserved seats were.  It was hot, I was dripping, but walked over there on my painful knees to get my pass.   The young woman who gave out the passes was there at her small table alone.   There was an opening in the moveable barricade about six feet from her.  I went to the opening.  

A guard stepped into my path, pointed to an empty labyrinth of barricades and told me I had to go the long way around.   I gestured toward the empty table, to the girl with the iPad and a bunch of wristbands, the completely empty labyrinth of barricades.   I asked him to please let me pass, my knees were killing me, I’d walked a long way already, and that, please, since nobody else was waiting, might I just get my pass and go join my friends who were already seated?

The guard, a dark-skinned African man in a crisp, white uniform, told me that I had to go all the way around.   That was the rule.   He had no discretion to violate the rule or make exceptions no matter what, was apparently not even supposed to be discussing anything with anybody.   I soon learned why, he was being watched intently by two of his bosses, who immediately made their sharklike way toward me to find out why I was giving their hired hand such a hard time.

The large man, who had a huge pallid head like an overinflated albino melon about to burst, advanced one step too far into my space and told me with a glare: “first of all, relax”.   I told him to relax.  One step behind him was a woman, a dead-ringer for Betsy DeVos (but with dark hair), probably from the same social class (we stood in the shadow of the David H. Koch wing of Lincoln Center, after all), and about to prove herself as brilliant as DeVos in the arts of persuasion and argumentation.

Pumpkinhead told me the rules are the rules, they’re there for crowd control and I had to walk.  I told him my knees were killing me, my friends were waiting and I’d appreciate the small courtesy, which was only common decency, especially since nobody else was being inconvenienced and I was an easily controlled crowd of one person.  His turd-like smile told me exactly how far this line of moral reasoning  was going to take me.

At this moment DeVos’s cousin stepped forward with that famous well-bred idiot smile and said reasonably: “imagine if fifty people were here and they all asked us to just let them break that little rule, to give each of them special treatment?”   You see, her smile said, just common sense, just like your’s!  It’s a draw, so the rule wins!

I started asking her if this was really the kind of country she wanted to live in, where the Nuremberg Defense was the final word in any conversation, where unreasoning adherence to rules no matter what the circumstances trumped every other consideration?    Neither of them, I saw, had any problem with the downside of anything I was saying.  I was unwittingly describing exactly the country they want to live in, a place where people who don’t like the rules are kept strictly in line.

Before I could point out that while it might be a problem if there were fifty people simultaneously demanding preferential treatment, I was the only one in this actual, real-life non-hypothetical, and the favor I was asking could be considered a request for special treatment only by a rigid, rules-bound, unreasoningly authoritarian type, the girl with the iPad and the wrist bands came over from her table, where she had been waiting patiently for the next customer.

I thanked her and gave her my name, as Pumpkinhead said something I don’t recall.  My name didn’t come up, to another eructation from the pallid Pumpkin.  I gave Sekhnet’s name and that seemed to work, Pumpkinhead said something else I don’t recall.   I told the girl “please, just give me the fucking wristband so I can get away from this asshole.”

This one two punch (“fucking” plus “asshole” equals “resisting arrest”) gave them all the moral ammunition they needed to leap into indignant defense of all that is decent.  I’d said FUCKING, a Bozo-no no!!   How dare I rape the ears of this innocent young black woman after assaulting the black hired guard with my offensive, nakedly racist insistence on my white privilege.  

“That’s it!” said Pumpkinhead triumphantly, “don’t give him the wrist band.  You’re not getting it!”  I had one bit of restraint left, and I used it.  

“Ah, not only an asshole but a vindictive asshole, nicely played.”  

Just as I turned to storm off, muttering incoherently about letting him take me to court for slander where truth is an absolute defense to the charge, Sekhnet came up.   Turned out DeVos and Pumpkinhead had given her some crap earlier, a variation on the same issue (she’d gone a few steps into the empty labyrinth and took a shortcut, hopping the barricades).    They gave her quite a stern talking to  about that, you can be sure.  I walked a hundred yards, sat on a plastic chair in the sun, stewing a bit, letting the anger dissipate.

Someone I knew came up and said hi, when I gave him a 20 second capsule description of my recent confrontation his eyes turned into two ping-pong balls, lolled out of the sockets on to his cheeks.  He waved a wan goodbye and I fluttered a few fingers.

Ten minutes later Sekhnet had my wrist band, texted me her location, and we sat in the “V.I.P” section to watch the show.  Jose put on a great show, singing the songs of Bill Withers, songs he was born to sing.  On Grandma’s Hands, a song about the love of a grandmother who always protected and comforted him when the world was kicking his ass, he did an inspired improvised section that blew me away.  

It was brilliant, using the musician’s many arts to drive home the obscene incoherence of a violently angry caregiver.   Grandma’s “Matty don’t you whip that boy” turned into a long, staccato, rhythmically complex, inventive reinvention of the morphing syllable that began with “whip”. Jose’s improvisation evoked the twitch of a grandmother’s pain to see her grandson mistreated, the violent idiocy of the mistreatment itself– well beyond words. [1]  His singing and wild invention took me to another, far better world, and after the show I had hardly a thought of those two incoherent fascist disease carriers who’d tried to ruin my day.

 

[1] I described it in an email to a friend this way:

There’s a point in the song when Grandma is stopping the father from whipping the boy.   Jose did a long improvisation here, where the words “what you want to whip him for?” turn into scratchy nonsense syllables, percussion, wordless hiphop, rhythmic, robotic, spastic, absurd, endless, obscenely ridiculous, the single syllable of “whip” turning into a million senseless acts of incoherent brutality.  Man!  Needless to say, I loved that shit, it was truly inspired and done with superb musicality.   Turned to Sekhnet with a big smile and said “brilliant” and M turned, smiled and nodded.  Then she looked at me one extra beat.  Tears were falling out of my eyes.

 

An Incoherent Narrative

The triumph of irrationality in human affairs is made possible by the ready acceptance of incoherent narratives.   A narrative that supports our point of view is generally accepted at once, even if it makes little or no sense.  This is often called the ‘confirmation basis’– we tend to agree with anything that supports what we already feel or believe.   The shapers of public opinion have made a science of exploiting this bias.  

They take a feeling, say anger, or dispossession, or fear of dispossession, and create a narrative to mobilize a mass of people who feel this way.   The narrative gives body to the shapeless feelings of malaise, fear, rage.  The story does not need to bear any scrutiny at all, can be internally inconsistent, key details can be changed at any time, on the fly — the main thing is that the story is simple in its outlines, easy to repeat and available to forcefully offer in support of a point of view.   The effect doesn’t follow from the purported cause?  The story is incoherent?   Who cares? Fuck you!  I know you are but what am I?  Make me!

I had a PT therapist the other day tell me that he thinks Trump is doing a great job, particularly with the economy.    I pointed out that Trump inherited a good economy [1], the same way he’d inherited a fortune, that virtually all of his businesses except his reality TV show were failures, that his trade war policies are beginning to have bad effects, that he recently had to give $12,000,000,000 in emergency relief to farmers hurt by his tariffs.    

The opinionated PT therapist allowed that Trump doesn’t care about anything, but insisted he is doing a great job with the economy.   Besides, he said, China is screwing us big time, and then went on to describe an out of control China, madly polluting the air and water, lustily fucking away, while laughing at America.  Good to know America’s big problem is those fucking Chinese, I thought, as the therapist wrenched my knees into uncomfortable positions.

Each of these things could be discussed, many of the PT guy’s opinionated statements countered with facts, but that that is not the point.  The point of any narrative is to give your own feelings a rational sound and to have a ready story to shove down somebody’s throat if they disagree with your feelings.  Trump would smile to see this PT therapist who likes him, a brown-skinned Indian immigrant with an accent, led away in handcuffs by ICE agents, while his children bawled, but I thought it an insult to mention this inconvenient counter-fact to the incoherently opinionated fuck.    

Hillary Clinton was not the most naturally gifted politician but it’s hard to believe she’s running a vast pedophilia ring with young sex slaves for hire in the basement of a pizza place in D.C.   Hard to believe, perhaps, even impossible to believe, particularly when we learn that pizza place doesn’t even have a basement, but, though the details might be a little wrong– it’s exactly the KIND OF THING a despicable person like that would do, according to those who hate her.  In fact, there’s a story out now, tacitly endorsed by the president, raging across the internet like a California wildfire, that the corrupt liberals are all in on this pedophilia thing, with fucking Tom Hanks fucking away as lustily as China is fucking the U.S.  Hanks using young children for his sick sexual thrills… disgusting. [2] Make America Great Again!!!!

We can see incoherent narratives at work throughout history.   Hitler’s forceful story comes to mind:  Germany was never defeated in World War One, it was betrayed by Jews.   These treacherous Jewish criminals, in addition to controlling the world, fomenting war and profiting from it, were determined to impregnate as many Aryan women, preferably virgins, as they could.  They were intent on polluting the gene pool with their poisonous DNA, in this way undermining and eventually destroying the superior race.   It was a matter of simple self-defense then, to fight these preternaturally evil degenerates.   The only way to deal with these ruthless fucks was by rooting them out, every one of them, and doing whatever was necessary to ensure they would never reproduce.

That’s the basic blueprint of an incoherent narrative.  The beauty is the simplicity.   You hear the story, it confirms your suspicions, and now you know what you must do.  I always hated that fuck who ran the candy store, that Jew bastard.  Now, after listening to Mr. Hitler,  I know exactly why I was right to hate that piece of dreck.  My spider sense, tingling, in the presence of the very evil that is destroying everybody and everything I love.   What must be done is now clear.

In America we had a huge economic crash in 1929 that reverberated around the world as The Great Depression.  Our capitalist economy was saved by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s bold initiatives.   With tens of millions of Americans destitute and hungry, FDR devised plans to put as many as possible back to work, to ensure that those who had no work didn’t starve.   The New Deal “social safety net” was our nation’s first real attempt to make sure masses of people didn’t die, or become Communists, because the richest Americans were, in a sense, lustily fucking them.  Like Tom Hanks, like China.  

One of the first key pieces of New Deal legislation made it illegal for banks to make huge speculative gambles using customer money.  That was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.  For almost seventy years it protected the U.S. from another massive economic collapse.  Then some very rich people had an excellent idea: why gamble with our own money when we can use those countless billions people have put in the bank, money that’s just sitting around, idle?   Deals were made, Clinton signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, his successor made many cynical decisions that benefited the richest Americans et, voila, the massive misery of the fraud-driven 2008 economic collapse.  Now the right wing project is dismantling the entire New Deal.

You can’t do this without a compelling narrative.   The brightest and most determined of these super-wealthy radical right wing folks have been playing the long game to convince Americans that government is not the solution to anything, using the incoherent narrative brilliantly.   Government is the problem.   Simple and direct.  Government regulation fucks everything up, destroys liberty and kills initiative along with freedom.  Government is the enemy of liberty.   We need to restrict the government’s power, shrink government until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub.  We do this by starving the beast.  The monster runs on tax dollars.  Stop the tax scam.  If millions of parasites on dismantled government programs die, so much the better.  Eh, scratch that last statement, it does not advance our narrative really, true though it is.

The only trouble with this narrative is that the government performs a host of crucial functions and that many government programs are greatly appreciated by millions of participants who benefit from them. Clearly not every beneficiary of Medicare, or Social Security, is a parasite. So here’s what we do.  We fund campaigns to put people in office who will sign a pledge to advance our anti-government agenda.  Once the government can be literally shut down by obdurate, disciplined zealots, our point is beyond dispute.  

See, can it be more clear?  Government, fucking government, can’t do anything, deadlocked, stupid, corrupt.  All despicable, self-serving whores. We should know, we paid many of the whores, raised them out of obscurity, put them in office after they pledged to cripple the hated liberal president and his overreaching government programs.  

In 2012 our network spent $120 million, lost the presidential election, damn it.  In 2014 we spent $180 million, did much better.   In 2016 we spent twice that and the results speak for themselves.  We have more than $400 million in the war chest for the 2018 midterms.   Plus, campaign funding practices that were once illegal are now TOTALLY legal, constitutionally protected “free speech” and we have a clear corporate wealth-friendly majority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.   How far we have come in convincing millions of average Americans that their government sucks!!  

See, government is the problem.  Fuck the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, the right to collective bargaining, anti-pollution laws, a so-called environmental agency to enforce those laws, the Communist inspired catastrophic climate change hoax supported by partisan NASA scientists, so-called Civil Rights legislation, programs to make sure children and old people don’t starve, all the rest of that fucking liberal bullshit.  The government is fucking you as lustily as Tom Hanks, China, Oprah.   Disgusting!!!

I suppose it is the mind-fucking prevalence of these incoherent narratives in public life that makes me so intolerant of incoherent narratives in my private life these days.  If I can’t have a conversation with a back and forth, a serious mutual effort to understand the other person’s point of view, and some internal coherence to the thoughts presented, I’m out of there.   I thought of this one the other day, which I offer as my last example.

A friend has an issue with his memory, sometimes things we agreed on are simply forgotten.  Shit happens.  He’s quite sensitive about his memory issues, I’ve learned.   We had an uncomfortable confrontation on my apparent treachery: I had not told him something I’d told his family (waiting to tell him only if and when my efforts had born fruit) and he felt betrayed and belittled.   He confronted me about this.  It was an uncomfortable confrontation.

Later I recalled that I’d told him the entire story, starting with the recent good news and including why I’d left him out of the loop, months earlier.  I mentioned this to him, as an example of his faulty memory, responding to his insistence that his memory of our recent conversation was clearly as good as mine.  

Granted  he was on the defensive, but what he said next surprised me, and not in a good way.  He told me that in fact he hadn’t forgotten that I’d told him the entire story weeks earlier, that he remembered the whole thing, every detail.   Apparently this vindicated him, his memory is fine.  

“That makes putting me on the spot like that much worse!” I said in exasperation.  “If you remembered that I’d told you everything already, how can you then confront me about it in an inquisitorial way as though you knew nothing about it?”    

He bulled right past this point, for purposes of his narrative that I was wrong about his faulty memory, my last point made no difference at all.   This kind of thing works fine in current American politics, as we have seen, though it has does nothing to support friendship, let alone love.

 

 

[1]   Good economy, in this case, being synonymous with a thriving stock market.   More money for the wealthiest investors.  More profits for corporations.  Less taxes for the wealthiest.   To the bitch on the street, working two or three jobs, this “good economy” bullshit is a little fucking galling, considering her real wages haven’t gone up in decades.   Millions of children in poverty going to sleep hungry every night in the wealthiest nation on earth has nothing, really, to do with the “good economy”.

[2]  Why the talented, down to earth, self-effacing Tom Hanks?  I have no fucking idea, except, maybe that he said something these trolls found offensive and why not make the story really fucking good?   If the all-American seeming Hanks is in on it, who could have any doubt that Bill and Hillary are gang banging five and six year olds in their secret sex dungeon, not to mention all the child sex Jay-Z and Beyonce, George Soros, the hated Obamas, Oprah, Al Franken, etc. are in on?

 

Irrationality 101

For most human purposes, rationality takes a back seat.   All that is necessary for human action, most of the time, is a rationale, a slogan, an emotionally resonant excuse.   It is hard to think of a collective misfortune more horrible than war.   Yet every war is always somehow justified, even when it is inexcusable aggression, illegal under the spongey law of nations and conducted solely for the profit of a few who don’t care how many others must die so they can grow richer and more powerful.  Justified.  Read your history book, read virtually any history book.   War, unfortunate, yes, hell, of course, but necessary, you see, because… that guy over there is Hitler.  He’s fucking HITLER!   Nuff said.

My sister and I had a good laugh when she pointed out a howlingly imbecilic line I’d written in an otherwise promising first draft about our family life.   Describing our nightly fights around the dinner table as a battle field I went a step too far.   My sister read the line with beautiful archness: “the brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was as nightmarish as any war scene you can imagine.”    ANY war scene, she repeated, with deft intonation for maximum ironic emphasis.  In the beat it took me to reply she reeled off a string of famous atrocities that left no doubt of the idiocy of my claim.   Instead of a reply I burst out laughing.  We had the best laugh we’ve had together in years.   Then I caught my breath, pulled myself together and deleted the absurd line.  

There I had a rare moment of good fortune, somebody gently pointing out my foolishness, and doing it with humor and superb understatement that made me see it for myself.   The laugh made it undeniable, how laughable my claim had been.   I submit that this moment was an outlier in general human affairs, a rare moment when rational good sense triumphs over a feeling of poetic license, shoddy but justifiable thinking, emotional overstatement.    

Yes, of course, no child should ever be subjected to the mistreatment my sister and I regularly endured from our parents.   Yes, of course, I have a right to be hurt and indignant, even angry, about the abuse we were made to suffer.   But was it really as horrific as Turks on horseback driving helpless Armenians into a river to drown, worse than the Janjaweed, ISIS, the viciousness of the fanatical SS?

Eh, probably not, now that you put it that way.

But there’s the thing about irrationality, as a general rule it doesn’t stop anyone.    We have an irrational chaos-monger insisting he will make our country great again, apparently by wiping out every vestige of decency that people have fought for centuries to achieve here.   All he needs is a slogan and his base will roar, full-throated support, chant anything, no matter how idiotic.  “Drain the Swamp!” which they chanted during his historic presidential campaign, a slogan he told an interviewer he had his doubts about, but then decided was great when he saw how the crowds took to it, was actually translated from the original Italian– it was a mantra of Benito Mussolini as he rose to power [1].  Many people are saying Mussolini was a fascist, but there are many views, on many sides, on many sides.  Just sayin’.

There is no point feeling superior to a stadium full of desperate people chanting “lock her up!” or “Fake NEWS!” or “Suck my ass!!!”.   No reason to feel superior to a strutting, supremely confident-seeming cruel bully with seemingly very few actual thoughts in his head.  As a species, we are no more rational than anyone in that Make America Great Again crowd.   Which is not to say we don’t each have the ability to be more rational — all it takes is somebody stating the truth in a way we can hear it.   After my sister and I had a good laugh, there was no way to deny how laughable my claim about the atrociousness of our family war was.   Is being called a “fucking cobra” as bad as being locked in a church with everybody in your town and having it burned to the ground?   I suppose not.

And so it goes down virtually every issue we constantly debate in our battling society where unfair competition for material possessions is shrugged off as merely the law of nature.  One of the “debates” that drove me most insane during those madcap Cheney-Dubya days was the torture debate.  A fucking “debate” that will not fucking die, I might add.  We had an administration determined to use practices we’d long ago signed on, as part of the civilized world, to ban forever.   All that was necessary to overcome all those treaties was a horrific event followed by convening a small team of partisan lawyers to craft an argument — how idiotic an argument didn’t matter, just a secret memo to justify it in the odd event anyone was ever held accountable for the illegal program.  

In light of the secret torture memo a hard kick in the balls was now “enhanced interrogation” instead of “torture” because it was not as painful as the shutdown of a major organ system.  Nobody in their right mind could argue that a little kick in the balls is as bad as, say, your lungs shutting down.  Are you fucking crazy, you’re going to claim a kick in the balls, or sleep deprivation, or a freezing cell, or stress positions, or “walling” or water-boarding is as bad as your goddamn heart stopping?  Fuck off, peace bitch, we reframed this “debate” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The other day I had a tiny moment of blessed relief, when a friend who loves to argue somehow drew me back into the fucking torture debate for a moment.   “You’re saying even if you have the person who planted the ticking time bomb that’s about to kill 5,000 children, you can’t use torture to make him talk.”   I took a breath.  

“In that one in a million scenario, where you have the actual guilty fuck strapped to a chair, and in a matter of minutes 5,000 kids will die if you don’t get him to talk– yeah, sure, put the fuck on a water-board, electrodes on his balls, the works.  I’ll fucking torture him myself, if we somehow know for sure that this is the actual psycho who planted the bomb.   The murderous fanatic probably won’t talk in any event, but it’s worth a shot, to save that stadium full of kids.    But the likelihood of that imagined scenario ever happening  is less than a lightning strike, winning the lottery,  inheriting 300 million from dad, like David and Charles Koch did.” 

In that liberating moment I felt free from the moronic “ticking time bomb scenario” hypothetical always used to justify torturing anyone who might possibly “hate our freedom”.   But it was a momentary feeling of relief.  My friend, although he backed off a bit, still seemed to believe that there are situations where, the absurdity of the highly unlikely (how about NEVER) “ticking time bomb” hypothetical notwithstanding, that you would be justified in torturing somebody.   It reminded me of our long ago torturous debate on the subject via email when I eventually asked in exasperation: what next, are you going to start actually torturing me?    To which he wrote something to the tune of: Oh, but I already am…  

So here we have a man, highly intelligent, well-read, a skilled debater, a moral person with nuanced political views, many of them progressive, for whom a “hypothetical” with a likelihood of 0.001% is good enough to justify, in some cases, an otherwise morally unjustifiable position.   Not to say I could picture him torturing anyone (not physically, anyway) but that idiotic hypothetical is all he needs to keep arguing the position of the most vicious, ruthless, cruel and lawless among us.  

Imagine the average person, without my friend’s fine education, generally refined moral awareness, wide reading, long professional experience making and dissecting arguments,  confronted with an irrefutable bit of logical sounding rhetoric like “we got to fight ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here!”   Jesus, that makes perfect sense.   We just need to go over there, kill or capture all of ’em, detain the live ones forever, torture ’em — end of problem!  Next!

You see, they hate our fucking freedom.   They’re not like us.  They don’t love their children, they use them as human shields.  They’re terrorists who hate us because we’re better than them.  You get that?   They have a massive cultural inferiority complex that makes them insane.  Somebody who would do what they do is not a human in the same sense that a middle class white American is a human.   They’d kill us all, and certainly not hesitate to torture us, in much worse ways than the many techniques in the $10,000,000 manual our legal team deemed totally legally defensible.  You see, we’re talking savage, primitive fucking fucks here.   You do understand the difference, don’t you?  

On the other hand, my dear fellow American, you can see the obvious flaws in that stinking pile of horse diarrhea.  I know you can.   You just have to look directly at it, get a real whiff, think of your friend from school, the kid from Pakistan, a self-effacing, warm, funny guy…  well, you would exempt Fahrid from any torture program, if you could…

 

 

[1] According to Madeline Albright in her recent book Fascism: A Warning.

This is Why I Love Naomi Klein

This Sunday the Grey Skank is devoting their entire magazine to a single article about catastrophic climate change.   I heard an interview   with the author of the long article, who seemed a very bright, well-informed and reasonable fellow.   As you would expect from someone who writes for the Grey Lady.   That said, I am always suspicious of the first drafts of history written by the New York Times.   Humankind, the Times apparently concludes, is at fault for the climate mess we are in.   We were not up to the challenges of keeping up the momentum to halt climate catastrophe that was developing up to 1988.  We all failed, it seems, human nature itself dooming us to our doom.

The New York Times often tends to leave out one or two crucial factors, for no doubt excellent reasons that, most likely, have nothing to do with the myopia of their distinctly upper middle class worldview [1].   I always read the Times with an eye toward the story not being told and consult other sources to  get as much of the rest of the story as I can.  My father, who read the Times cover to cover every day,  always supplemented his reading of the Times with other publications.  As an adult now myself, I understand why the Times alone is not enough to keep us fully informed on the pressing issues of the day.

Which is where a journalist like the brilliant Naomi Klein comes in.  I have always been engaged by what she has to say.   When she writes of the Times piece  “this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud”  I want to know exactly why.   I had the feeling the Times was going to somehow partially miss the mark with their important landmark piece, Naomi Klein was about to tell me how they’d missed it.   You can read her recent article here.

When I think about the New York Times, so valuable in many ways, I often think:  fucking earthlings…  If you are in their demographic, it is a wonderful part of Sunday sitting in the cozy family room unwrapping and sharing the gifts of their vast Sunday edition.  If you are poor, disenfranchised, homeless, well, the reading of the Sunday Times is not as great a gift.  Let’s just leave it there.  

Read Naomi Klein’s article in conjunction with the Times magazine this Sunday and you will get more of the picture than the Grey Skank will give you herself.  Here is Naomi Klein’s good news:

And the good news — and, yes, there is some — is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and growing movement of green democratic socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative — it’s our one and only planetary lifeline.

Yet we have to be clear that the lifeline we need is not something that has been tried before, at least not at anything like the scale required. When the Times tweeted out its teaser for Rich’s article about “humankind’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe,” the excellent eco-justice wing of the Democratic Socialists of America quickly offered this correction: “*CAPITALISM* If they were serious about investigating what’s gone so wrong, this would be about ‘capitalism’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe.’ Beyond capitalism, *humankind* is fully capable of organizing societies to thrive within ecological limits.”

Their point is a good one, if incomplete. There is nothing essential about humans living under capitalism; we humans are capable of organizing ourselves into all kinds of different social orders, including societies with much longer time horizons and far more respect for natural life-support systems. Indeed, humans have lived that way for the vast majority of our history and many Indigenous cultures keep earth-centered cosmologies alive to this day. Capitalism is a tiny blip in the collective story of our species.

source

Of course this is an unthinkable thought for the “liberal” New York Times.  After all, it is beyond dispute that Reagan and Thatcher defeated Soviet Communism back in their day and so the only viable economic ideology in the world today, now that socialism was invalidated, you dig, is the global “free market.”  Yes, there are problems with capitalism, the Times seems to agree, but picture your retirement portfolio without the dynamic, ever churning roulette wheel of the stock market making sure you don’t have to eat cat food in your old age. In a certain way the stance of the NY Times is marked by a lack of creative imagination.

Imagining a different and better world, analyzing the clear brutality of this global “free market” we are all being sold, for billions of human beings, animal life and the planet itself , and writing about it vividly, is but one reason I love Naomi Klein.

 

 

[1] In a story about the good news that, statistically, black American are now living almost as long as white Americans, the decisive factors, according to the Times, have little to do with the extreme stresses of institutionalized racism, apparently.   Poor dietary and lifestyle choices of black Americans are the culprit, it turns out.  Jeez, good thing we have the fucking New York Times to enlighten us!   You can read more about that, and the wonderful article itself,  here.

A Bit of homemade Fake News

The president recently imposed tariffs on various countries as part of his plan to Make America Great Again.    The jury is still out about whether these trade wars he started will have a disastrous effect or not.   One small bit of news:  after retaliatory tariffs by China caused the price American farmers get for soybeans to plummet, the president vowed to bail out farmers with a $12,000,000,000 emergency government grant like the type used during the Depression to prevent foreclosures on small family farms. [1]  

On the surface, there is a lot of heedless idiocy here, as in many of the president’s angry, hastily implemented policies, which are promulgated largely to stoke the anger and resentment of his angry base.   To fix a problem directly caused by his policy, the president now offers to pay twelve billion dollars of taxpayer money, right after radically slashing taxes for the largest taxpayers — and driving the national deficit steeply toward an even trillion dollars.   Way to make a deal, buddy.

On a level just below the surface, this is business as usual.   Welfare for individuals struggling to survive a poverty lifestyle is frowned on by the radical right (current custodians of the GOP) as socialism, Marxism, a hated vestige of the hated New Deal, a reflection of liberal hatred of American values.   Make them work, make them take urine tests, make them pull themselves up by their own Adidas, let them miss one arbitrary, last-minute face-to-face meeting and –goodbye government tit!   “Welfare” for the wealthiest… well, that’s a little more complicated.

It’s true that “farmer” evokes the image of salt of the earth people working hard to bring forth the bounty of the land.   The farmers who will reap most, if not all, of the $12,000,000,000 the president proposes to give them, probably do not fit this image.  Most American farms today are owned by large corporations.  It is hard to find out who will be the main beneficiaries of this bailout, though I suspect not all of it will go to salt of the earth families battling the earth itself for their livelihood.  

The people who owned slaves and lived in genteel antebellum luxury were invariably called  “Planters”.   They planted nothing themselves, except perhaps the occasional seed in the womb of a good looking chattel they owned.   They were, in one way of looking at them, parasites and monsters, even if everything they did was perfectly legal and morally correct at the time.   After all, the Bible said so, as did the Supreme Court, did they not?

I haven’t spent the additional two minutes to research this, but you are welcome to. [2]   I would wager that the recipients of the bulk of this twelve billion dollar giveaway are the kind of farmers known as “agribusiness”.   Huge tracts of land, owned by corporations, worked by hired hands who are not going to be buying private planes in this lifetime.   Farmers.   Absolutely.   Nothing to see here.

But let’s assume they are all small farmers struggling to keep up with mortgage payments and laying out great sums to grow their crops, their hogs, what have you. [3]  I like what Republican senator Nebraska Ben Sasse had to say about the administration’s trade war: “cutting the legs out from under farmers and White House’s ‘plan’ is to spend $12 billion on gold crutches.”   (source)

Sasse added, gratuitously and unfairly:  “this administration’s tariffs and bailouts aren’t going to make America great again, they’re just going to make it 1929 again.” (The Great Depression began in the U.S. that year.)   (ibid)

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that has all the earmarks of a Koch Brother’s front group, was also dismayed, calling the president’s bailout plan “a recipe for disaster that would undo decades of progress toward weaning agriculture from financial dependence on federal subsidies.” (op cit)

Way to go, fellow stable genius from Queens!  Pay no attention to fake news.  Those enemies of the people suck!

 

[1] The plan will rely in large part on a 1933 program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), a division of the Agriculture Department created during the Great Depression to provide financial backup for farmers.          source

[2]  This is as close as I came in one minute trying to find out who the main beneficiaries of this complicated bit of presidential generosity will actually be:  

While such efforts are widely popular in rural states, some anti-spending Republicans and urban Democrats have said they unfairly prop up agribusinesses at taxpayers’ expense. Trump’s proposed 2019 budget also would have slashed funding for the CCC.    

(same source)

Note that until the other day the president was all for slashing funding for this program, Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), that he now uses to pay $12,000,000,000 to some of our greatest citizens, our greatest citizens.  He even made green hats for them, saying “Make Our Farmers Great Again.”   Way to go, buddy!

[3] Perhaps you’ll have more patience for this complex article than I did.

The need for accurate information as the basis for reasonable actions

It is impossible to make a good decision if you don’t have all the facts you need to consider.  Information, it seems absurd to point out, is necessary for making informed decisions.  The partisan oversimplification of complex problems, while good for marketing on hats and bumper stickers, and winning partisan elections (of course) is a big part of the problem of trying to be an effective citizen in a democracy.   “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” is no longer the punchline of a joke, we are up against it daily from the highest levels of our contentious, embattled government.  Nowhere was it more explicitly stated than in the president’s remarks to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City the other day:

President Donald Trump: “Just stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”   [1]  

I heard a great conversation between Jeremy Scahill and a historian named Nikhail Pal Singh on the podcast Schahill hosts in which the idiotic, ahistorical oversimplification in American politics, which leads to the destruction of political intelligence, was very productively kicked around between them.  The conversation was part of Scahill’s admirable ongoing effort to provide critical historical context. I have transcribed the section of the recent Intercepted podcast that caught my ear (the interview begins at 40:30).

After noting that “POTUS” sees the world in starkly competitive, transactional terms, and has simplistically externalized evil on to the Other, the historian and Scahill discuss the need to have a realistic conversation about solving world problems now, while we have the resources and ability to do it.  The historian, Nikhail Pal Singh, nails a lot of important insights in a row.

Nikhail Pal Singh:  A lot of the ways Americans like to talk about what’s wrong really have the most fanciful aspects to them, they’re almost completely abstract.   The idea that somehow the problem is the porous border, or the problem is Russia, and Russian interference, these don’t connect really to any concrete analysis of what is actually going on in the world, or what is actually going on in the country.    

As long as that’s true we’re always going to be flailing about and casting about for explanations for what ails us that don’t really match up with reality. 

Jeremy Scahill:  (Asks Pal Singh what he thinks about the loose political use of of highly charged words like “treason”.   Scahill then plays clips of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and others solemnly comparing Trump’s recent performance with Putin at Helsinki to “Pearl Harbor” and “9/11”, overwrought hyperbole that strips events of their historical meaning and context.)

Scahill asks how this kind of historically tone-deaf rhetoric will “impact our political intelligence going forward, and also our ability to actually keep a grasp on historical context?”

Nikhail Pal Singh:   These kind of remarks just illustrate the lack of knowledge of U.S. history and how profound that is among many of these commentators.  How do we attain political intelligence?   How do we attain the kind of understanding and ability to make assessments in an information environment that’s filled with uncertainty and that’s always going to have dimensions of uncertainty in it?  

How do we create the basis for common action in a period in which many of the most powerful forces in the world are actually invested in the fragmentation of communities, in the fragmentation of people’s ability to think clearly and act collectively? 

How do we build up, or rebuild, collective capacities, because I think the best information comes from people being able to reason in common in a context in which they can inform each other and seek out new information, if they don’t have adequate information. And I think the time frame of a lot of what happens, also makes that very, very difficult to do.

As a historian, you know, when I read those kinds of comments I try not to despair, because I look at it and I think it’s just silly to compare this summit [with Putin] to the worst moments in American history in a country that essentially committed genocide against an indigenous people, dropped atomic bombs on Asia, killed three million people in Southeast Asia,  has barely been a liberal democracy for fifty years, having lived its entire career as a country built on white supremacy.  I mean, these are the broad, basic facts of American history.

I think a lot of people understand now, a lot more people understand, a lot more people, I think, are thinking about what it might mean to try to make the United States into a decent place.  But, obviously, the forces that are arrayed against us in doing this, most of all the Trumpists and white supremacists, but then, also, the centrist Democrats who really would like all of this to go away so they could to get back to business as usual, are kind of in the way of that broader, popular recognition of the need to look at our own country and to think about what it means to heal ourselves, to really correct the course we’ve taken in foreign affairs, and domestically, at the same time.

Jeremy Scahill:  OK “comrade” Nikhail Pal Singh, how much is Putin paying you for that “whataboutism” that you’re pretending is actually history? 

Nikhail Pal Singh:   I’ve said this before, and I don’t think it’s whataboutism to say that the biggest threats in the United States come from decisions that have been taken, legally, in full transparency, within our own system.   Citizens United, Shelby v. Holder [2], one unleashes the power of corporate money and dark money into our politics with no limit and the other guts the Voting Rights Act in a country that has been built on racial segregation and racial violence.    How both those things happen in this moment, I think, is very,  very significant in understanding where we found ourselves in 2016. 

And you didn’t need the Russian intervention for those things to happen.  Those things were driven internally, they were driven by the plutocratic insurgency on the one hand, that equates money and speech, and they were driven by the longer legacy of divisive, racial, white supremacy politics which has never been content with the idea of the United States actually being a democracy that included the diverse people who have been part of building this country for over two hundred years, many of whom were brought here involuntarily.  So we haven’t made our peace, as a country, with that history.

At the end of his life Martin Luther King Jr. outlined the problems we face in becoming what he called a beloved community, a community that could act in concert and think of itself as such.  And he called them the interrelated evils of Racism, Materialism and Militarism.

Racism, Materialism and Militarism are still really what bedevil us.  Neither the Republican party, which is certainly more culpable for the situation we find ourselves in, nor the Democratic party which is certainly equally beholden to materialism and militarism, at the very least, want to deal with these issues.  Neither really wants to address how we’ve lost the ability to function in some way as a polity, addressing the things that are most urgently at stake for most people. 

source

Rarely, if ever, have I heard the issue of America’s historical ignorance, and how it affects electoral politics and policy,  put more cogently or concisely.  These questions make a thoughtful citizen think hard about the predictable price those who never bother to even glance at the lessons of history must pay, along with the rest of us. 

Without information, and a working knowledge of the worst mistakes desperate people have made in the past, various deals struck with various devils in different ages (often weak, tortured, cruel men posing as “strongmen”) you and me, my friend, might as well stick a fucking fork in ourselves.  

As no less an authority than America’s foremost authority points out:

“Just stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Ignorance is bliss, fellow citizens, until they send guys with guns to force you to come with them.

 

[1]  source

 [2]  This disastrous, democracy-slashing 2013 Supreme Court decision, another 5-4 partisan decision, hangs on the vote of “swing vote” Justice “My Legacy!  Mr. Trump, my legacy!!” Kennedy who voted with the conservative corporatist block in this stunning, unappealable decision.   The conservative justices decided that in a post-racial society that had already elected a Negro as president there was no longer any need to scrutinize the voting practices in formerly overtly racist states, states that had long histories of unconstitutionally disenfranchising voters based on race and party affiliation (hence the Voting Rights Act of 1965).    The truth of this post-racial state of affairs was “affirmed” by many of the states in question immediately passing new restrictions on minority voting.  

USA!   USA!!!!

American Democracy in Action

I was on youtube just now and clicked on a video clip from Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show.   The clip was entitled: 

The Putin Plot Thickens with an Alleged Russian Spy 

There was an ad before the clip.  It was paid for by an outfit called DonaldJTrump.com, apparently the president’s 2020 presidential campaign. The ad urges viewers to sign an online “SCOTUS petition” for federal appellate Judge Brett Kavanaugh, POTUS’s pick for the Supreme Court, a man the ad praises lavishly.  

As any red-blooded American knows, this is the way Supreme Court justices are picked: by on-line petition.   The power of our great democracy at work.  It’s not as if the Republicans don’t have the votes for the newly slimmed down simple 51 to 49 majority needed to confirm this radical conservative, but, as our man of the people president has been saying all along: let the people speak.  Here’s one of the best bits of recent American speech.

God bless these United States of America.

A few more words about Jane Mayer

This is an addition to my previous review of Jane Mayer’s impressive 2016 Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

The shit hit the fan in America when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. The Democratic president had both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court still had a “swing vote” [1]. Hope and Change were in the air after two terms of bungling, warring, tiny minority-enriching right wing rule that culminated in a massive fraud-driven economic crash. It was a bleak time for the radical right, and their best and brightest got busy strategizing and putting their strategies into action.

After their victory in Citizens United, the cleverly argued case that legalized unlimited campaign-related spending as the protected speech of legal fictions now considered “persons”, Charles Koch and his network went into overdrive. The secretive billionaire group funded the “grassroots” Tea Party making it possible for Americans to see continual, locally organized anti-Obama protests on television every evening from every corner of this gigantic nation. There appeared to be a groundswell of spontaneous, united opposition to Obama, who was otherwise enjoying a 60% approval rating, but no matter. The optics are key.

After putting Scott Brown into office, with a huge infusion of cash right before the interim election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, ending the Democrats ability to overcome a filibuster, Koch’s network got busy nationwide in the lead-up to the 2010 midterms. In that election they spent over $137,000,000, gaining 63 seats in the House of Representatives and wresting control from the Democrats. The massive spending also allowed Republicans to further eat into the Democrat’s Senate majority, where a bunch of the contested seats were flipped. Crucially, Republicans also picked up massive influence in state elections across the country, taking over a majority of state governments. This last bit was crucial as electoral district lines were about to be redrawn after the 2010 Census.

Democracy was not necessarily going to be the long-term solution for the Koch network and their unpopular ideas, but this kind of unprecedented national electoral victory was intoxicating. Unlimited “dark money” changed the game. Few candidates could survive being massively outspent by an opponent who could constantly air effective attack ads right up to election day.

Not much was known about the roots of powerful advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity and many other interlocking right wing foundations, think tanks and non-profits set up by the Kochtopus until investigative journalist Jane Mayer and her colleagues began researching the players and their connections. She wrote a long 2010 piece in the New Yorker that infuriated Charles and David Koch and their friends. Mayer had previously written about the billionaire funder of liberal causes George Soros, whose foundation, the Open Society Institute, spends up to a hundred million dollars a year on its causes. Soros, unlike the Kochs, had agreed to be interviewed for Mayer’s article. He accepted the unflattering things about about him and his influence machine in the piece without protest. David Koch went wild when he read Mayer’s article about his family business.

Koch complained in a four page letter to the New Yorker about the unfair portrayal of his “covert operations,” insisting there was nothing secret about his well-funded and extensive network of political influence, without citing any factual inaccuracies in the article. Koch then gave an interview during which he called Mayer’s New Yorker piece “hateful, ludicrous and just plain wrong”. [2] Not long after Koch made those comments, a smear campaign was underway to discredit Jane Mayer, featuring e-mailed threats and ultimatums, private investigators and an opposition research staff.

They didn’t find much they could use, but trumped up a “plagiarism” case against her that was posted briefly on-line, before it was taken off-line, probably to avoid litigation over the attempted libel. The plagiarism case was extremely thin, with four insubstantial paragraphs cited (from a long career at the New Yorker.) Two of the four citations contained attributions to the people she was allegedly plagiarizing. The Kochtopus, not directly implicated in the smear campaign because — why would they be? — didn’t succeed in destroying Jane Mayer or her reputation, but not for lack of trying. Fortunately, they also didn’t succeed in shutting her up.

In January 2016 her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right came out. It is a hell of a book, an important story that should be widely discussed as we are locked in this vicious zero-sum fight between the facts (and truth) and endless spin (and powerful lies). Who are you going to believe, a bunch of hysterical climate scientists claiming that our escalating global climate catastrophes are somehow related to man’s heedless pollution of earth, sky and water, or two of the richest men in America who make their money dirtily extracting a highly toxic, and very lucrative, natural resource, while defending liberty?

Integral to the radical right’s position in the “post-factual” fight is sowing skepticism, doubt, outrage about things that are otherwise indisputable. We see this in the right’s pre-emptive dismissal of the mainstream media, well-researched, carefully vetted work of honest American journalists is now reduced, for the simple minded, to traitorous “fake news,” the hateful spewing of “enemies of the American people.” Bizzarro world, my friends.

Take a look at how the two sides of this debate are stacked up, and how unlimited money (“speech”) among a tiny group of super-wealthy anti-government radicals makes for slaughter sides. Tell me which side is the more deadly enemy of the American people.

[1] albeit a swing vote who voted with the right in Citizens United, actually writing the partisan majority opinion.

[2] David Koch, a world-class philanthropist, is not always so self-righteously pissed off. As Jane Mayer writes in her 2010 article, and in Dark Money, he is also capable of world-class self-deprecation:

David Koch joked about his good fortune in a 2003 speech to alumni at Deerfield, where, after pledging twenty-five million dollars, he was made the school’s sole “lifetime trustee.” He said, “You might ask: How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars!”

A Cause for Optimism about Democracy

I thought I had possibly dreamed this, but apparently not.  

Our president, the man who can’t seem to stop bragging about his historically large 106,000 vote Electoral College mandate (take those close votes in three states and flip them and Hillary wins), was rebuked 98-0 by a viciously divided senate the other day.

It happened like this.  He met with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin last week in Finland.  The strongman apparently easily lifted our large president over his head several times during their secret meeting, greatly impressing our great leader.   After the meeting Putin was wearing the smile of the cat with the canary in its mouth and our president seemed even more childish, confused and foolish than usual.   Putin apparently asked that he be allowed, in return for granting the Mueller team access to twelve recently indicted Russians, to interrogate a similar number of American diplomats including the former American ambassador to Russia.  Our president said he would consider it.   The Senate, bitter partisans who can agree on nothing, immediately voted 98-0 to “shut the fuck up, you imbecilic asshole!”

I find a reason for optimism in that unanimous vote by hacks for both supremely corrupt pay-to-play parties.  There is a limit, ladies and gentlemen, to what someone who has contempt for democracy, fairness and even honesty can be allowed to do, even if he’s the almost unanimously elected president of the United States.  I like to think so anyway.

Here’s a short article about the vote.