Neoliberalism 101

Neoliberalism sounds, by its name, like a modern updating of liberalism. Liberalism is defined as a willingness to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; openness to new ideas and as a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

Neoliberalism is an updating of the definition of liberalism, specifically economic, or Classical liberalism. Economic, or Classical, Liberalism as opposed to Social Liberalism [1], which is more concerned with the common good than its “classical” more economically concerned variant, of course.

Neoliberalism is an ideology and policy model that favors free market competition, deregulation and reduction in government spending. It arose as a Cold War response to the state planning and government control of Communist governments and spent its first few decades on the fringes of world economic theory. It took off in the early 1970s, when Milton Friedman, an early adopter of the ultraconservative economic worldview of Neoliberalism, became a popular and influential author and talk show guest. Most American presidents, going back to Jimmy Carter, have been Neoliberals. In the economies to which Neoliberal policies were applied (under the watchful eye of geniuses like Friedman), notably in South and Central America and the former Soviet bloc, we see a radical dismantling of social safety nets, “austerity”, an end to government ownership of (or any other role in) business and the drastic reduction of all health and safety regulations. In almost all cases these policies led to vast profits for a few, while creating oligarchy, thriving organized crime, massive social inequality and violence for everyone else.

Neoliberals nonetheless continue to display a radical faith in the ability of Free Markets to solve all societal problems. Their animating idea is that private businesses, competing, unfettered, to offer the best products and services at the lowest prices, will create things far better than anything any government program can come up with. While this may or may not be true (and how free a market is that spends tax dollars to subsidize lucrative, powerful polluters like the Oil Lobby, is an obvious and reasonable question), what Neoliberalism has demonstrated is that it has no interest in or ability to solve societal problems like massive wealth inequality and its attendant injustices, climate change or the health of the labor force.

If you have a Free Market, they continue to argue, open competition among the best and the brightest, everybody benefits. A rising tide lifts all boats, massive wealth creates incentives for robust unregulated job creation. Also, they assure us all, I won’t come in your mouth.

The team at the Throughline podcast did an excellent three part series about Capitalism recently. For those who love capitalism, no worries. Unregulated, “free market” Capitalism is robustly defended throughout by panelist Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University (one of the first universities largely sponsored by the Charles Koch network) and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute (ditto). Here’s a nice sample of adjunct scholar Bryan Caplan’s work:

And a lot of what I’m going to be saying is that there are a lot of problems with the existing systems, but the most pressing problems really come down to having too little capitalism, not too much. And this is a system that produces, for all of its faults, an enormous mountain of stuff at very low prices, which enables us to go and live – livings – to have living standards that are far beyond almost anything that even the monarchs of earlier periods could ever have hoped to have.

So, I mean, like, at the beginning, when you were talking about how, you know, so many have so little, I’d say I’m really very puzzled by this. At least in capitalist countries, the average person has a living standard that would have compared very favorably to Louis the 14th of France in terms of just the quality of entertainment or health or food. It’s all way better than most people throughout history could ever have imagined.

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Check it out.

[1] This kind of shit is why people, conservative and liberal alike, distrust and even hate “academics”:

Social liberalism, also known as left liberalism in Germany,[1][2][3] new liberalism in the United Kingdom,[4][5] modern liberalism in the United States,[6] and progressive liberalism in Spanish speaking countries[7] is a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses a social market economy within an individualist economy and the expansion of civil and political rights. Under social liberalism, the common good is viewed as harmonious with the freedom of the individual.[8]

Social liberal policies have been widely adopted in much of the world.[9] Social liberal ideas and parties tend to be considered centrist or centre-left.[5][10][11][12][13] A social liberal government is expected to address economic and social issues such as poverty, welfare, infrastructure, health care, education and the climate using government intervention whilst also emphasizing the rights and autonomy of the individual.[14][15][16]

In the United States, the term social liberalism may sometimes refer to progressive stances on sociocultural issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage as opposed to social conservatism. Because cultural liberalism expresses the social dimension of liberalism, it is often referred to as social liberalism, although it is not the same as the broader political ideology known as social liberalism. A social liberal in this sense may hold either conservative or liberal views on fiscal policy.[17]

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A timely note about ethical political leadership

“No other type of ruler is so transparent about prioritizing self-preservation over the public good, and so lacking in the human qualities that define ethical leadership — the ability to feel empathy for others and act on their behalf. As one country after another has discovered, the strongman is at his worst as a leader when he is most needed by his country.

There are two paths people can take when faced with the proliferation of polarization and hatred in their societies. They can dig their trenches deeper or they can reach across the lines to stop a new cycle of destruction, knowing that solidarity, love and dialogue are what the strongman most fears. History shows the importance of keeping hope and faith in humanity and of supporting those who struggle for freedom in our own time. We can carry with us the stories of those who lived and died over a century of democracy’s destruction and resurrection. They are precious counsel for us today.”

— Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat

from Strongmen, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Nazi minority/majority never fails to deliver

Like-minded, extremely conservative inheritors of intergenerational wealth don’t need to meet secretly in dark rooms, (though they also do that), to advance their common schemes. Not a criminal conspiracy in the strict legal sense, but a commonality of interests that leads them to act as one to advance identical goals.

Their useful idiot Trump is not a player of three-dimensional chess or even checkers, he’s an angry member of their exclusive, entitled club, which runs on imagined grievance as it plays to the passion of millions of enraged grievants on the ground.

We now have three new carefully vetted extremist Supreme Court Justices, appointed by a twice impeached president who sought and accepted the help of Vladimir Putin, after his party abolished the filibuster to push three judicial extremists, none of whom got close to 60 votes (Gorsuch led them with a robust 54 ayes). His side is set up to win every ideologically driven case 6-3, or at worst 5-4. Give ’em this, Nazis never sleep, and, though likely to commit suicide when it all turns to shit, they’re bold.

Texas, the hang ’em high state, has just given vigilantes a win-win bounty to turn in anybody who might be thinking of helping someone get an abortion still legal under Roe v. Wade. This newly deputuzed army of religious zealot Christian Soldier bounty hunters are free, in Texas, to carry guns they no longer need permits for. Five unappealable Nazis give the temporary thumbs up to the administratively innovative Texas scheme. What could go wrong?

Corporate Democrats, who carefully weigh every action while studying the polls and consulting their most generous donors, are capable of spending months thinking about and debating their timid counter-actions, for example whether they have an absolute right to investigate a bloody riot at the Capitol designed to overturn the 2020 election, or protect the right to vote, or whether the Constitution will allow the creation of five more seats on the Supreme Court to restore a semblance of credibility to our highest court (spoiler, it will). Nazis, on the other hand, do not hesitate, they follow their shock troops into the breach.

How about we open a bunch of federal abortion clinics in Texas, deputize Texas doctors to provide abortions legal under federal law (credit to Elie Mystal) until the lower federal court can rule on this creatively unconstitutional new lynch mob law? Too radical? Will it make violent Nazis too angry? Why not find out, in the name of protecting the rights of our most vulnerable?

Good analysis of our out of control, radical 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court, by Jamelle Bouie:

In the Dead of Night, the Supreme Court Proved It Has Too Much Power

Call the MAGA party what it is

Nice soundbite from Madeleine Dean (D-Pa) reminding us, amid radical Republican rhetoric about violent vigilantism, that the MAGA rioters broke into the Capitol to bust up the line of succession by hanging the Vice President and killing the Speaker of the House,

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To answer her rhetorical question: what the GOP learned from Trump’s January 6th riot is that their base loves it and that the funders and organizers of the violent attempt to decapitate the government by killing those in the line of succession appear to be immune from prosecution.

USA! USA!!!

“Moderates” have to get into the fight for democracy

The men who drafted and fought over the blueprint for the American experiment in democracy began with the famous words “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” and then set out a plan they hoped would establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to the people and the people’s posterity. Of course, at the time, “the people” was understood to exclude the majority of humanity, women were to have no political say, Blacks were not universally considered human, let alone part of “the people”, indigenous Americans were excluded as were poor “white” men and many others over the years.

After the bloody Civil War the constitution was amended to include former slaves, and anyone else born in the United States, as citizens with Privileges and Immunities subject to Equal Protection by the federal government. Immediate steps were taken, notably by the Supreme Court, to thwart this change, but it is written into the Bible of American democracy and would eventually, almost a century later, after decades of court battles and bloody street protests, become enforceable law. Of course, it would be more than half a century after the end of the Civil War, after a long fight, before women got the vote, but the animating idea of “a more perfect union” seems to have been that democracy is an evolving work in progress, infinitely perfectible.

Resistance to this progress has always been the work of reactionaries, conservatives, the organized right. In every era they united to oppose the evolution of democracy. Their game is always perpetuity– keeping things as they are and making sure the status quo never fundamentally changes. Some have advanced shrewd arguments for their view that the way things are is about as good as it can be, advanced theories that showed the dangers of including everyone in democracy, they raised the terrifying specters of Socialism and COMMUNISM. Others simply did the grunt work to make sure people they didn’t like couldn’t vote, couldn’t get their day in court, couldn’t stand on rights guaranteed to them in the constitution. The most intellectually ambitious reactionaries created high-minded philosophies to justify their reactionary views. The Originalists, for example, hold a judicial philosophy that minimizes the radically democratizing changes to the Constitution made after the Civil War, always harkening back to the “intent of the framers,” the original wealthy white men who hammered out the original slavery-protecting “Originalist” Constitution almost a century earlier.

There are scholars who point out, with ample proofs, that the post-Civil War Constitution is a radically redesigned blueprint much more in line with a modern, ethnically diverse, largely urban, non-slave holding democracy than the unamended Originalist version. Radicals on the left want to create fundamental change in their lifetimes, not just plant seeds that will germinate a few generations from now. They recognize that time is running out to fix a badly dysfunctional system. “Moderates” are the “reasonable” compromisers who advocate a middle ground, some changes are needed, they concede, but change is best achieved in small, sometimes imperceptible increments.

Reactionaries, for whatever reason, always seem more energetic, better funded, more fanatical, more devoted, better organized, more relentless and readier to resort to any means necessary to achieve their aim of keeping things just the way they are. The reactionaries of their day said “fine, you have the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — we have States’ Rights!” and one of the rights of those states was to find workarounds for the new prohibition against slavery (the clause “except as punishment for a crime” came in handy), the Supreme Court helped out with the 14th, leaving virtually every detail of federal citizenship in the hands of the states until 1964, and, as for the right of American-born Blacks to vote… whell, there are ways to squash that shit, right at the polls. if they don’t get the message with the damned lynchings and having their damned homes burned to the ground. As for blocking all federal legislation to stop lynching, or enforce the unalienable human rights (in a democracy) we call Civil Rights, we have the filibuster!

Adam Jentleson, who recently wrote a history of how the filibuster, almost always used to advance slavery and then segregation, came to cripple the Senate, had an op-ed in the NY Times the other day entitled When Will Biden Join the Fight for Voting Rights? He begins by setting out all that Biden has accomplished with a mere 50 votes in the Senate, deftly sidestepping the filibuster to provide funds to fight Covid-19, to give economic relief to millions, to lift millions of children out of poverty. He then points out that racism at law has always required, under the filibuster, a supermajority to rein it in.

During the Jim Crow era, the Senate held long, contentious debates on the bills that built the middle class, such as Social Security or Medicare, but none of those bills needed to get a supermajority to proceed. By contrast, popular bills to stop lynching, end poll taxes and fight workplace discrimination faced endless filibusters, and were blocked by supermajority thresholds. While Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats aren’t intentionally recreating such an unfair system, in practice, they are, perpetuating the same double standard that upheld Jim Crow for almost a century.

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His essay is worth reading. He continues:

But they can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. In March, during his first speech on the Senate floor, Senator Raphael Warnock argued that “no Senate rule should overrule the integrity of our democracy.” If Senate rules happen to preserve what Warnock called “Jim Crow in new clothes,” just as they preserved the original version, they must be reformed. For Democratic leaders, this means finding the political will to never again allow bills that guarantee equal access to voting and representation to suffer unequal treatment.

Recall that on the day Warnock was declared the winner of the Georgia runoff for Senator, a mob carrying the Confederate flag stormed the Capitol, injuring 140 Blue Lives Matter officers in hand to hand combat to prevent the final certification of the winner of the presidential election. Reactionaries will always do whatever it takes. If it takes a lynch mob, so be it. The hopped up grunts, as always, will go to prison, meantime, we get what we need — a violent, galvanizing argument to rally our side.

All the rest of us have is law and the enforcement of law. If a parliamentary rule prevents any action in the Senate, if even one defiant member of the opposition party registers an intention to “filibuster”, there has to be a way to fix this. Jentleson, a former Senate staffer, offers a workaround to those who claim, incorrectly, that the filibuster is about protecting “bipartisanship.”

[S]enators can reclaim their right to shape the rules of the Senate even when doing so runs afoul of the parliamentarian, a staff member whose influence has grown dramatically in recent decades as senators lost faith in their ability to interpret Senate rules. Up until now, senators have enthusiastically abused the spirit of reconciliation while adhering, with comic devotion, to its letter; they use it to pass trillions in spending but studiously discard the provisions the parliamentarian deems insufficiently “budgetary,” such as a minimum wage increase. But only senators and the vice president preside over and vote in the Senate, and they have final say over what gets included in reconciliation bills. Rather than acting as automatons who simply read the rulings that the staff hands them (literally), they can include civil rights in the forthcoming reconciliation bill and, when the parliamentarian rules against it, Vice President Kamala Harris can issue her own ruling countermanding the parliamentarian. Fifty senators can sustain Harris’s ruling and pass voting rights, without ever having to vote to alter the filibuster itself.

Senators can also simply reform the rules to ensure that civil rights bills are treated equally. Given the Senate’s ugly history of blocking such legislation, there is ample justification for targeted filibuster reforms to ensure that civil rights bills receive majority votes.

Of course, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose ending the filibuster, and imbue bipartisanship with lofty importance. But at the end of the day, it is up to Mr. Biden to bring home the small number of votes needed to end the tiered system that forces voting rights legislation to garner supermajorities in the Senate, while other bills sail through with just 50 votes.

Biden has the bully pulpit now and Jentleson argues that he must do everything in his considerable power to rally his party to the cause of protecting voting rights, federal enforcement of which has been systematically dismantled by the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court. If the many Republican state voter suppression laws are allowed to stand unchallenged (except in courts where resolution of the issues is years away) then we will have, in the next election, a gerrymandered Republican majority, in the House and likely also in the Senate (two for each state, populations be damned). Then, under existing parliamentary rules, anything else Biden has planned will be subject to the mockery of an obstructionist right-wing joke. Ta ta to bipartisanship and democracy, both. Welcome to the One Party United States of Charles Koch and friends.

. . . it is impossible to look at the effort Mr. Biden has devoted to voting rights until now and conclude that he is pulling out all the stops. His heart does not seem to be in this fight. Instead of pressing for the reforms necessary to pass these bills with 50 votes, he has defended the filibuster, while his administration has been challenging civil rights leaders to “out-organize” the Republicans who have implemented systematic, state-sanctioned voter suppression. Many find his stance naïve. “‘Just count the jellybeans’ is a helluva strategy,” political analyst Bakari Sellers tweeted in frustration.

He concludes:

The effort Mr. Biden poured into infrastructure shows what genuine commitment from the White House looks like. While the president has given one major speech dedicated to voting rights, he has held numerous speeches and events on infrastructure, sending the signal that the issue is a top priority. His cabinet and staff practically camped out on Capitol Hill. By late July, according to Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein, his staff had held at least 998 meetings and calls on infrastructure; the office of legislative affairs had held 330 meetings and calls with members of Congress and their top aides in the previous month alone.

Mr. Biden has invited comparisons to President Lyndon Johnson, but Mr. Johnson paired accomplishments like Medicare with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, as now, the task was deemed so daunting that some cautioned against investing too much of the president’s political capital in the effort. By the time of his assassination, President John F. Kennedy had let segregationists take civil rights hostage to his top domestic priority: a tax cut.

But when Mr. Johnson’s advisers counseled him to give up on civil rights, too, he shot back, “What the hell is the presidency for?” He personally intervened to get the civil rights bill to the floor, then forced his former mentor, fellow Democrat and self-avowed white supremacist, Senator Richard Russell, to lead a filibuster for roughly three months, betting that he could crack an obstructionist front that had remained solid since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Mr. Johnson had to deal with more than a few reluctant senators — most of those filibustering the civil rights bill were Democrats. To beat them, Mr. Johnson did not use magic powers. He simply spent months working every angle, relentlessly.

If Mr. Biden fails where Mr. Johnson succeeded, he will have left intact the system of legislative segregation that preserved Jim Crow. Whatever else he accomplishes, that will remain part of his legacy.

The president may try everything and fail. But the stakes are so high, he has to try.

As Joe Biden himself has said many times — come on, man!

No consequences for murder equals a license to kill

If a bullying kid never faces consequences for terrorizing and beating up classmates, it is permission to the little fuck to continue bloodying noses. If a terrorist organization is free, for a century, to lynch people with the winking cooperation of local authorities — after the federal government has been taken out of the anti-terrorism law enforcement equation by the Supreme Court — why WOULDN’T they continue terrorizing and making examples of anyone claiming their federally guaranteed constitutional rights? The main reason society punishes things like murder, rape and torture is because if you don’t punish these things they simply become normal.

Ezra Klein recently made a good point about the lack of consequences for the architects of our generally disastrous (if always highly lucrative) military slaughters abroad:

The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them.

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So, on the right, and even among the moderate, corporate, conflict averse mass media, Biden is to blame for problems with a largely successful civilian evacuation after a military withdrawal negotiated by Trump, a supremely artistic deal that included the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters in a negotiation that did not include the democratically elected government of Afghanistan. Anything goes wrong, it’s the fault of the illegitimate, corrupt, mentally challenged, defeated clown who botched the perfect peace deal (after stealing a landslide victory from the rightful winner)!


The latest episode of Heather Cox Richardson’s podcast (with fellow historian, Joanne Freeman, an expert in the Revolutionary War period) called Treason(ish), comes to mind.   


The main takeaway, for me, is that lack of accountability, lack of consequences  — for things like violent treason — ALWAYS ensures the same kind of behavior.   Guarantees it, really.

As part of the surrender that ended the Civil War Grant allowed the defeated Confederate army to keep its guns and go home with a gentleman’s promise they wouldn’t use the guns to continue the armed insurrection.  None of the Confederate generals who massacred surrendering black troops during the war were ever charged with anything (outside of the Nazi-forerunner, Henry Wirz, who ran the notorious Andersonville death camp, and who was executed for his devilish crimes).  No leader of the Confederate rebellion faced any sort of terrible consequences. Many served in the US federal government after the war, continuing their dogged fight for race-based superiority. 

Heather:

So one of the things that jumped out at me when we were going to go ahead and do this episode was a song that is sung in the south in 1866, immediately after the war, it was called, I’m A Good Old Rebel and it went like this: ‘I hate your Spangled Banner, your great republic too. I hate your Freedmen’s Bureau, in uniforms of blue. I hate your constitution, your eagle and its squall, and a lying thieving Yankee, I hate the worst of all. 300, listen to this, three’… I’m sorry, I live this stuff.

Joanne Freeman:

Go for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

‘300,000 Yankees lie moldering in the dust. We got 300,000 before you conquered us. They died of Southern fevers and Southern steel and shot. And I wish it was 3 million instead of what we got.’    Can you imagine that after the Revolution and that entering American culture in that period?

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The only consequences faced by anyone in the south after the Civil War (aside from Klan leaders locked up by agents of the brand new Department of Justice, awaiting trial, until the Supreme Court quickly decided they were not really subject to federal law) were faced by American Civil War veterans who fought for the USA — Black ones, routinely massacred any time they tried to assert their newly “guaranteed” constitutional rights.

Heather:

I’m going to say that while I would like to talk about the way the government worked and the way the laws worked in that period and we need to, what really jumps out to me in this period is I’m so glad you’re sitting down, culture.

Because what really matters in the determination of the way this is going to play out is the fact that when Ulysses Ulysses Grant for the United States goes ahead and accepts the surrender of The Army of Northern Virginia from General Robert E. Lee. He does so with minimal punishment. He lets the men keep their firearms on their own words saying they’re not going to continue to fight. He says, go ahead, go home and plant your crops because I know everybody in the South is starving as they were. And he believes that being lenient is going to bring these people back into society. And interestingly enough, a number of the leaders at that point including people like Wade Hampton are like, well, I wasn’t there, I didn’t give my word, I’m going to go run a guerrilla war, which they don’t actually do and that’s itself an interesting story. But what he sees, what Grant’s sees as being magnanimous, because everybody is really going to want to be in this together, really quickly gets reinterpreted on the Southern side as being, look, see, they knew we were right all along.

We had the better argument, nobody dared to stand up against us because we were the ones with the moral argument. And you can see really quickly in the summer of 1865, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, by a Southern sympathizer, the idea that they’re going to literally assassinate the leader of the opposite government, the government that won the war, and there’s not going to be any kind of backlash in a legal sense against that. Of course, John Wilkes Booth is killed in the manhunt for him and they do actually hang the people that are believed to be responsible for Lincoln’s death, a number of them. But that’s it. That and Henry Wirz who ran the Andersonville Prison camp, they’re the only executions of Confederates after the war. But again, one of the things that keeps me up at night is there are tons of executions after the Civil War, tons of them, but they’re of African-Americans who fought for the United States government.

I mean, you look at the whole picture here. It was an incredibly vengeful period, but not of the victors against the losers, the other way around. And one of the things I think that really drives that is the idea that the government had represented first by Grant and then after that, by Andrew Johnson who took over after Lincoln was assassinated, that everybody’s got the right idea, everybody wants to get along, we can do this and all be friendly and the people who wrote things like the Good Old Rebel song have every intention of taking every step that they can, and they continue to push that envelope until they essentially re-take over the south after 1877.

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Makes me wanna holler.   We have “controversial” public monuments to violent traitors who committed war crimes they were never tried or punished for, instead they have literally been put on pedestals as immortal American heroes.  150 years after the Confederate surrender a ragtag mob of outraged Trumpists carry the flag of bloody treason, (laundered by an army of influential historical revisionists, into an innocent, totally non-racist, banner of “States’ Rights”), into the halls of Congress after fighting the Blue Lives Matter cops in brutal hand to hand combat — to violently stop the joint session of Congress in its constitutional duty to finalize the election of the next American president.   Now it’s time, says the Trumpist GOP in one voice, to just turn the page.   What could go wrong? 


Writing it as fiction

“Writing truth as fiction must never be done with a heavy hand,” the old man said, quoting a line from his last published short story.

“You want to write what really happened as a fictional book, that’s fine, leave nothing important out of the story, at the same time, you do the reader no favors trying to be cute about how this fictional story may be based closely on deeply experienced personal events, or events torn from the front page of the newspaper.”

“So, for example, avoiding the heavy hand, you’d never have a character immediately bring up Larry Fucking Elder and the latest California fucking recall of the Democrat [sic] governor.”

The old man shook his head. “Perfect example, and self-proving one too. It’s too late, once you do that kind of move, to undo it.”

“But isn’t that what editing’s for, man?” I said, though I was somebody else, an entirely imaginary person, living in an alternate universe. “but now that I’ve sullied my lips by mentioning Larry Elder…”

“Fine,” the old man said, “this is worth a footnote, I suppose. When the aptly named Dick Cheney set off the California Energy Crisis by deregulating energy on the West Coast, and you know the minutes of his ‘Energy Task Force’ meetings with oil executives and the identities of those executives were never revealed, per Antonin Opus Dei Scalia, they recalled a Democrat, Grey Davis, over the budget shortfall produced, down to the dollar, by the soaring price of unregulated energy on the west coast, and you quickly had the celebrity Arrrrrnold in there – probably the last reasonable Republican in office. Scalia, for his part, was huffy when asked, decried it as ‘a sad day in America” when an American journalist would ask a sitting Supreme Court Originalist about the appearance of impropriety of him flying around on Dick Cheney’s private jet while he was deliberating over a lawsuit brought against Cheney.”

“USA! USA!!!” alt-me said.

“Just one other thing, the California recall is another example of shit like the Electoral College, the filibuster, tools to keep the hands of the elites on the reins of power in an electoral democracy. As a result of this bizarre legal provision, a guy who won 62% of California’s vote can be ousted by a guy who later wins 14% of the vote, after a 51-49 decision to take the elected governor out.”

“Dass sum shit, as my father used to say,” I said, as not I.

“Living in a time when a hate jockey from talk radio gets the highest civilian honor this nation has hung around his neck by the prime beneficiary of his years of hate speech, it makes perfect sense that the tutor of American Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller, a status quo loving black former talk radio celebrity, at that, is poised to be California’s next governor if they can turn out a 51% share of their angry base in this emergency election to oust the governor elected by 62% of California voters. Makes perfect sense, right?”

“Yeah,” someone said, echoing my thoughts exactly.

“The intrusive narrator is another thing to be on constant guard against. We all know that move, Bob Hope looking directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and confiding to the audience ‘this is the last movie I ever do for Paramount, they let a bit player from MGM walk in right before the credits roll to steal my girl… sheesh’.”

“We hear that,” they said.

“Another thing, these pronouns y’all use these days,” said the old man.

“It have a problem with that?”

“Never mind, kid. It’s all good, as we say. I just wanted to give you my two cents about the tricky nature of writing fiction from your own life. Especially if you’re trying to take a political, humanist, stand during brutally political, inhuman times,” the old man took a thoughtful swallow of his scotch. “Nazi novelists are never at a loss for their plot lines. Anti-Nazi novelists have to be a lot smarter if they want to write something that could have any effect on those wavering toward joining the exciting mob.”

“The Exciting Mob,” she said, “it sounds like a movie from the fifties with Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin.”

“One last thing,” said the old man, “before I fade back into the ether of this guy’s imagination,” and he pointed at yours truly, incorrigible as Silvio Berlusconi in pursuit of a beautiful young hooker, “if you’re doing this to show off, just stop it. Any moron, literally, can opine without the least censorship or even the guiding hand of common sense, spew those opinions into a few sloppy paragraphs and hit ‘publish’. If you employ a savvy ‘social media’ plan, you can reach countless people with your half-formed, ill-informed yet heartfelt and deeply believed opinions.”

“What is your point, old man?”

“If you’re doing this just to show off, please just stop it.”

“OK, fine.”