When you’re a tsar they let you do it

Floridamandias

I met a pollster with the latest news

Who said—“Fleece vests and shiny boots of rock

Litter the Everglades. Near them, in the ooze,

Half sunk, a ruined campaign lies, in hock,

Disorganized. The race was his to lose.

‘Kick immigrants and fags,’ his handlers said,

‘LGBT—rile up the common folk.’

But out the gate the effort’s looking dead.

On OAN and Fox the chyron reads:

He’s Ron DeSantimandias, Scourge of Woke;

The budding fascist that this country needs!

It hasn’t worked. In Mar-a-Lago far

The Former Guy maintains a solid lead,

The MAGA hordes are sticking with the Tsar.”

 

Bucha can’t eat just one

 

I am reluctant to get caught up in the current war fever (or, I suppose, sanctions fever) in large part because I remember how ginned up the spurious casus belli was twenty years ago as the Cheney Shogunate prepared to invade Iraq (aluminum tubes! Chemical weapons! WMDs! “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud!”). Public sentiment was being lashed forward across the spectrum of media outlets, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Hell, a dozen years before that, under Bush the Elder, there was something like the same drumbeat, delivered along a then narrower media spectrum, and even I felt the pull of the (under those circumstances significantly less meretricious) propaganda ringing across the public discourse.

These latter weeks we are invited to condemn and excoriate the Russians for their conduct of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, and you know what? I’m all in with that.

Some context, not qualifications: I recognize that to the extent that this country could ever claim the moral high ground in matters of armed conflict, it surrendered any pretense to the commanding heights with “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (initially, it is reported, “Operation Iraqi Liberation” until some Pentagon staffer was alert enough to note the appropriate yet awkward acronym). These latter years the USA has tended to conduct its offenses against human rights remotely, and at retail, which was of course scant comfort to a given wedding party in the Helmand Province when a drone operator near the end of his shift at Langley decided to toss a couple of Hellfire missiles in the general direction of the bridesmaids. So this and sundry other deviations from decency noted, OK? Also, nothing like this level of popular outrage hereabouts when the victims in Africa and the Middle East are slain by other national actors, because They Don’t Look Like Us. Got it.

Nevertheless…

For a number of reasons not really important just now, I was fascinated with Russia/the USSR, first during my childhood in the first decade of the Cold War—I watched Khrushchev’s motorcade traverse my Southern California suburb in 1959—and particularly beginning in 1972 when over the course of a few months I discovered Nabokov (entry to come anon), read Edmund Wilson’s collection A Window on Russia, and acquired a sweetheart whose diction did not betray in the slightest that she was the daughter of émigrés who had herself grown up speaking the language of the Old Country, which was still in use at home.

I was disposed, in the seventies and eighties, to cut the Soviet Union a certain amount of slack. I always thought that Nikita Khrushchev was never granted sufficient credit either there or abroad for attempting to cut the USSR loose from Stalinism. Certainly in our domestic propaganda he was portrayed as the despot’s bloodthirsty successor (rather than blood-soaked inheritor—no one, at the end, in Stalin’s Præsediem had emerged from or survived his inner circle since the thirties with clean hands). There was little to admire in the corrupt and lazy Brezhnev, but he also wasn’t Stalin or even close to it. The Soviet Union’s lesser and greater black sins in the Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev eras are nicely described in Francis Spufford’s commentary here.

I entertained some hopes for a reformed USSR under Gorbachev. I never had high expectations of his successor, a feckless sot who rose to glory for a single moment when he mounted that tank in August 1991 and who, had some Red Army sniper put a slug in his heart on that occasion, would be justly remembered as a martyr today. Instead, he went on to break up the joint for a transient political advantage and spent the next ten years on an extended alcoholic binge before he surrendered the presidency to a successor who was apparently prepared as a condition of his elevation not to ask any awkward questions about the financial irregularities of Yeltsin’s family and cronies. And here we are.

Vladimir Putin, my near-contemporary—I have exactly two months on him—and I agree for different reasons that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a historical misfortune: I because, perhaps naïvely, I believed with Gorbachev that “socialism with a human face” was an achievable goal, that a reformed and relatively humane USSR with, perhaps, the Baltic bone removed from its throat, could join the broader human community while still maintaining a distinct social and economic model, a countervailing alternative to Capital not-Red in tooth and claw. The withdrawal of the Soviet alternative, however imperfectly(!) realized, has freed late-stage capitalism to indulge its bloodiest, most predatory and exploitive  instincts, with consequences the ends of which we have begun unhappily to descry. And on the Russian side, Putin now embodies a bitterly revanchist mindset, consumed with dreams of empire, yearning for the old days of global dread and respect: Oderint dum metuant!

So… for these and other reasons I’m a little reluctant to join in the latest spate of Russia-bashing, but you know, I’m going there anyway, notwithstanding our recent sins in Wogland, because Putin’s casus belli is even more preposterous than the Dauphin’s twenty years ago, and because the war aims, between the documented atrocities and what the country’s official news service has stated as its agenda, are nakedly genocidal (like “fascism,” this is a term that has been tossed around rather casually for a long time; like “fascism”—nakedly arisen in our own country’s diseased political ecosystem—the term is appropriate to what is in fact now Russian state policy).

I have, I repeat, been sympathetic toward Russia since childhood: it fascinated me then as the “evil” mirror image of our own polity. I have Russian friends—one actually returned to the Rodina last year after spending his childhood and young manhood stateside since the end of the former century—who I fear are all-in with the invasion: I’ve been at pains not to engage them since February. It’s accordingly painful to find myself leagued on this occasion with those who have always detested the Rooskies, and also with what I sense to be a kind of opportunistic moral outrage from certain quarters. But the outrage, wheresoever it proceeds, is well-deserved by its object. Whatever the merits or demerits of Russia’s historical grievances—and not every one of these is entirely unfounded—its conduct under Putin has placed the country outside even the most modest standards of civilized norms. Let it be, and let it remain, a pariah state, isolated and despised by the developed world. Let it rot confined within its barbaric imperial dreams. I hope that there’s a route back—Germany, after all, within living memory the very exemplar of evil, is now among the most humane and civilized countries in the world—but I’m not seeing it from here.

Life during wartime

On the basis of his, er, intemperate remarks today, Putin seems to be emotionally invested in this clusterfuck to an unhealthy degree. Not a good sign. You know, one thing about the commies was that they possessed a substrate of belief that history was on their side, that the triumph of the Marxist model was, so to say, preordained. IOW, they were going to win in the end, so why take unnecessary chances? Historian Stephen Kotkin, author of a massive biography of Stalin, once noted that when the Soviet archives were (briefly) made available to Western scholars, it was amusing how many of these researchers were surprised to discover that Stalin and his successors were actually…believing communists.

If Putin believes anything, it appears that he believes in Russian greatness and in the vindictiveness of a world that impedes the operation of this—by no means assured—destiny, and the referenced speech suggests that he takes this perceived insult, the threat, to Holy Russia personally. It’s difficult to see anything good coming of this.

I’ve been…not dismayed, really, but a little nonplussed to observe, in some of my internet hangouts, the intemperate responses from participants who do not ordinarily raise their voices. I can understand this, and do not fault their responses, being concerned merely that it partakes a bit of 12/7 or 9/11 war hysteria. Certainly I share the outrage, even if I am disposed by temperament not to shout.

A great many internet generals have sprung from their armchairs demanding vigorous action against the beastly foe, beginning with a no-fly zone, proceeding to NATO troops in Ukraine, and all the way up to nuke them before they nuke us. Myself, I recognize that I’m neither a military nor a foreign policy expert, and have some confidence—as I certainly would not have two years ago—that there are competent, if fallible, people making decisions on the basis of information to which I am not privy.

It does seem to me, though, that the West has reached an inflection point, if you will pardon the expression, with respect to its relations with a viciously revanchist Russia that has now begun, in Martin Amis’s memorable phrase, to fizz with rabies. Short of war, and even—even—at risk of war, we need to isolate and strangle the regime which, even though we helped midwife it thirty years ago, has figuratively and literally spread poison among its perceived foes for most of the present century, and the leader of which has proclaimed his hostile intent in unmistakable language.

None of what I say here is by means of excusing the USA’s sundry moral atrocities times past, but if we are not to live going forward in Putin’s world, Putin needs to be, in his own translated phraseology, canceled, one way or another.

 

Parallel Lives

I was reminded just now that Fidel Castro died four years ago yesterday, and this put me in mind of some odd parallels with another twentieth century statesman, that swashbuckling, drunken old imperialist and orator nonpareil Winston Churchill.

Castro and Churchill probably had in common few points of philosophy, but there are some intriguing career parallels: each died at ninety after a decade out of public life; they will both of them be remembered as political leaders who successfully fended off ruthless continent-spanning predatory empires bent on subjugating their respective islands. Also, the two men pursued strategic partnerships with the Soviet Union for defensive purposes, and both were fond of cigars. Churchill lived to see Germany laid in ruins; Castro lived to see Donald Trump elected president. Eerie, no?

‘People Like Us” (they don’t, actually)

Almost twenty years ago I caught a documentary “People Like Us” on the local PBS station, that treated the subject, often elided in our public discourse, of class in America. Spoiler: it exists. One segment in particular (“Tammy’s Story”) was heartbreaking: the filmmakers cover a working single mother in Ohio attempting to raise her family in circumstances that might charitably be described as “benighted.” I identified with the elder son, about fourteen, an age at which I was myself rapidly going feral in marginally better circumstances, an alternate reality from which I was abruptly plucked by what came down to the accident of a spilled drink in a coffee shop (long story, which I do not propose to relate here). The boy is ill-educated, melancholy, more than intelligent enough to descry his almost inevitably bleak future. Watching this, I thought at the time: he could be saved. Take him away from this material and cultural privation, feed him wholesome food and wholesome education, and the kid could amount to something. Alas, as a sequel segment makes clear, his adulthood followed the trajectory upon which the boy had been launched. His potential has died; the squalor of his formative years thrives to blight another generation.

Did he vote for the Orange Man in 2016 and again last month? I don’t know, but who could blame him in that event? What stake do people like these have in a “meritocracy” that views them, when they are contemplated at all, as collateral damage in the long march to the shining upland of a cosmopolitan global future? They’re not even being considered for a place at the table: why wouldn’t they be receptive to a “burn it all down” populist appeal? What’s in it for them, the maintenance of the current order—and Clinton in 2016 was selling “more of the same”—when that has so signally neglected them? What do they have to lose if the existing order is torched (Spoiler: probably more than they think, but they are scarcely to be blamed for failing to take the long view)? Had I been raised among these people, or even had my own destiny kinked the other way in 1966, I might have shared their bitter nihilism.

Anyway, although the documentary can’t be had on optical media for the price the average consumer would contemplate parting with, I see that the Tube of You features the individual chapters, and I link to the playlist here. It is worth an hour to contemplate what our increasingly steeper class divisions portend for the Republic. Nothing good, I wot.

Waving the bloody shirt

 

God-fucking damnit, I get so tired of the bleating every year at this time: never has so blameless a nation, so virtuous a people, ever been subjected to so inhumane, so vile an atrocity. Why, innocent people died!

Break me a fucking give. Measured against the number of noncombatants this country has slain from the air during the past seventy-five years, the butcher’s bill nineteen years ago was a rounding error. To the side that has the cruise missiles, asymmetric warfare will always appear an unsportsmanlike proposition.

How far we have come

 

There was a time—this period would elude the comprehension of my younger readers, if I had any—when the notion of policemen shooting fleeing suspects in the back was presumed to be a characteristic of totalitarian foreign regimes: the Gestapo, of course, in the service of the Third Reich. The East German border guards popping citizens attempting to flee over the wall. Even the Vichy French constabulary in Casablanca as depicted in this piece of popular entertainment in a scene that domestic theatre audiences presumably did not then applaud.

Today? The guy into whose back a Kenosha cop emptied seven rounds is deplored by about forty percent of the electorate as having had it coming for resisting police commands. We’ve come along way since 1942, have we not?

Borne in the USA

At the kind suggestion and arrangement of my younger brother I spent a fortnight in London and environs last summer, my first time across the pond since Tony Blair was PM, and Lina’s first time ever farther than a mile off the US East Coast. A pleasant time was had by all, not least because we secured transatlantic passage via somewhat costly “business” class, which provided us with something approximating beds, and with in-flight fare a cut above the pretzels and peanuts grudgingly provided those in steerage.

Upon our return from that green and pleasant land, we disembarked at the airport in San Francisco, dodging the 350 passengers awaiting Customs clearance—three international flights had arrived within a quarter-hour of one another—by means of our “Global Entry” passes, a system that permits Real People who can afford the tariff to bypass the hoi polloi as they trudge sullenly through the lines.

The filth and squalor on the train back to our neighborhood, and visible on the streets, were striking: nothing much changed from our departure the previous month, but a shock upon seeing this with the impressions of a civilized country fresh in memory. Indeed, returning earlier from a daytrip to Oxford, I looked at the comfortable, tidy villages from the train and thought “they wouldn’t let me live here if I asked.” And for the first time, belatedly, I realized that I was a prisoner in my own land, a grim and grimy police state.

Bummer.

From the presidential nightstand

Journal of the Plague Year: Waiting for Corona

(Above: the goddamn thing appears to be made out of yarn!)

We’ve known this would happen eventually, although most of the scenarios were based on a “gene shift” of the influenza family of viruses (“Nobody expects the Spanish Influenza!”). Instead, COVID-19 has flown from the Celestial Kingdom on the leathery wings of bats, and is busy replicating itself all around our global village, abetted by a certain amount of global village idiocy.

Well, let’s leave politics aside. The genie is out of the bottle, and coming to a theatre, and a supermarket, and a subway, and a workplace and—OK, one little bit of politics—a nominating convention or two near you. I think kissing babies and shaking hands may go out of style this election cycle.

As Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows the plague is coming/Everybody knows it’s moving fast,” although he was referring to an STD which, while lethal, was far more readily containable. This one…well, if it proceeds even according to the median-case scenarios, 2020 is shaping up to be a rough ride. The disease, to which it appears no one enjoys even legacy immunity, is going to go through humanity like a pitbull in a playground. A year from now many people we know (I am pretending for a moment that this blog has readers other than its author, who has been diffident about promoting it over the years) may well have died of this, even if they do not die well. I have had pneumonia a couple of times. It has been called “the old man’s friend,” and I gotta say that any “friend” like that would go right off the Christmas card list. Indeed, I might die myself, being close to the upward end of the mortality curve, and bringing to the party some cardiac complications. Oh, well.

Well, as to that, not much I can do. It’s fairly certain that, absent isolating myself in The Crumbling Manse™, I can’t avoid infection, and after all, my demographic tranche puts the chances of my death from COVID-19 at a little under ten percent. Look on the bright side: if someone handed you a Powerball ticket with the assurance that you had a 90% chance of bringing home the big jackpot, would you not already be scanning the tonier real estate ads—or, if you’re a better human being than I am, weighing the merits of sundry charities?

This feels from here as though we’re waiting for a tsunami. We’re trapped more or less near the beach. Will we be drowned? Impossible to know as the wave builds offshore. If I’m not here at year’s end, well, this remote atoll will endure for a while, an echo in dead coral of my former presence, as the poison tide recedes.

Bothsiderism

I’ve had the New York Times bookmarked for a couple of decades, and followed it behind the paywall long ago, but I’ve detested its political reporting since its cheerleading for the Cheney Shogunate’s warmongering, and particularly for its Clintophobia. I take particular exception to the paper’s pious pose of “objectivity,” which requires it, apparently, to report upon the criminal cabal now holding office as though this was just one more administration.

The graphic posted here consists of a screengrab from this morning, and my own imagined webpage depicting how the NYT might have reported D Day, by its current editorial standards, in 1944.

Living in still another future

Welcome to “The Twenties.” It’s a relief getting back to a decade naming convention that rolls off the tongue, unlike the last two. On the other hand, it appears likely to be a dire one content-wise, and there’s a not-inconsiderable possibility, at my age, that I won’t feature in the opening credits for “The Thirties.”

“Science fiction” has historically tended to be blinkered by the era in which it’s written, so that, for example, descriptions of spacecraft controls used to feature a lot of buttons, switches, and needle gauges. Sociologically, likewise, there wasn’t much thought—making the honorable exceptions stand out that much more vividly—given to, say, how gender roles might evolve. But even a blind squirrel, et cetera, and I’m struck by the prescience of Year of Consent, an otherwise unmemorable mass-market paperback in which the implications of applying modern advertising techniques to politics, pioneered just two years earlier by the Eisenhower campaign (I like Ike, but we’re still living with the consequences of a lot of questionable decisions made in his name, starting with that year’s VP pick and, most recently, with the 1953 interference in Iran) are pondered.

I picked this up for fifteen cents under its original purchase price when a small bookstore went out of business a few years ago (the proprietor was a good guy, but perhaps temperamentally unsuited for retail: when I’d place my pile of purchases on the counter he would spontaneously discount them: “Seven dollars?…I dunno, maybe four?” “No,” I’d explain, “that’s the way it works when you’re buying”). Published in 1954, Year of Consent depicted the dire world of 1990, when the seventy-four United States of America are governed by marketers, psychologists and “social engineers”:

The administration wanted to know as much as possible about what everyone thought and felt. What people ate, where they spent their vacations, what they talked about—all of these things were added up and passed through SOCIAC to produce complete pictures of individuals and groups. Thus, when the administration wanted to make a new move, they knew exactly how to condition the people so that it would be backed. Or they knew exactly what sort of man to put up to win a popular election. This, then, was government by consent.

Remarkably, this apparatus of manufactured consent is coordinated by a massive computer with approximately the horsepower of a first-generation “IBM PC.”:

Even in the elevator I was conscious of the vibrations, like an inaudible hum, of SOCIAC at work. The giant electronic brain filled up the first ten floors of our building. There were additional memory banks in several subcellars and in another nearby building. It was impossible not to be in awe of it [Try me —Ed.] Just as an example, it contained about 500,000 electronic tubes and about 860,000 relays. Not counting the extra memory banks, it had 400 registers totaling 6,400 decimal digits of very rapid memory in electronic tubes and about 6,000 registers totaling 120,000 digits of less rapid memory in relays.

Needless to say, punched cards are involved. Well, even Vannevar Bush’s remarkable “memex,” which was envisaged as having something like the capabilities of a modern personal computer with the Wikipedia homepage open, was conceived, in his 1945 essay “As We May Think,” in terms of microfilm and conventional projection. The hardware of Year of Consent’s dystopia is anaemic, of course, and its political environment monolithic, with a single governing authority wielding these powers of mass manipulation rather than the anarchic struggle for influence that rages around us today—although see modern China for something closer to Crossen’s vision and, perhaps, our future.

Kendell Foster Crossen worked in a number of genres over the course of his career, and also created the “Green Lama,” a Buddhist(!) superhero who was featured in stories, comics and radio programs (“The Green Lama is an alias of Jethro Dumont, a rich resident of New York City, born July 25, 1903, to millionaires John Pierre Dumont and Janet Lansing. He received his A.B. from Harvard University, M.A. from Oxford, and Ph.D. from the Sorbonne; he also attended Drepung College in Tibet. He inherited his father’s fortune, estimated at ten million dollars, when his parents were both killed in an accident while he was still at Harvard; he then spent ten years in Tibet studying to be a lama, acquiring many mystical powers in the process. He returned to America intending to spread the doctrines of Tibetan Buddhism, but realized that he could accomplish more by fighting crime, since Americans were not ready to receive spiritual teachings”). Crossen lived long enough to see the Eisenhower campaign’s crude techniques refined and deployed by Roger Ailes on Nixon’s behalf in 1968, and further extended to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. One feels that he might not have greeted our “social media” world with unalloyed enthusiasm.

Living in the (alternate) future

I have dwelt in coastal Northern California for going on half a century, in Oakland since 1977, and worked in San Francisco for forty years prior to my retirement. The region (in terms, specifically, of my place within it) is in certain respects an enclave. Had I been born in Appalachia to parents less determined to secure an upward cultural mobility for their children, had I skipped college and mined coal, I might in retirement—assuming I’d been able to retire at this point in my life; assuming the mine hadn’t closed or that I hadn’t succumbed to a respiratory ailment by now—have a different and considerably more bitter take on the hand I’d been dealt.

But I’m a “coastal elite,” as my West Virginia doppelgänger might regard me, and well pleased with the station in life to which circumstances have summoned me. Nevertheless, it behooves us to recognize the hopelessness that informs the lives of many among Trump’s “base.” I have long been irritated by the pious trope, uttered by presidents of both parties, that “America’s best days are yet to come.” Broadly speaking (I exclude from consideration sundry demographics who then existed with the boot of cultural hegemony hard upon their necks; hence “broadly”), America’s best days were the decades during which it held global economic primacy, its industrial competitors having been bombed flat during the unpleasantness of 1939-45. The jobs aren’t coming back. The plant won’t reopen. Late-stage capitalism will follow the money, and that includes lands where the cheapest labor is to be had. Part of the genius of late-stage capitalism (nobody said it would be pretty) lies in its ability to point the proles’ resentments downward, and not toward their betters.

What will we do with them, these feral voters who yearn for a Herrenvolk democracy that will acknowledge them as “real” Americans—sodomites, foreigners, dusky folk, coastal elites need not apply—even as it squeezes the last dime from their desiccated carcasses? Fuck if I know, but this demographic will be with us for a long time, and frankly, their plight should be addressed, somehow. Leaving them to stew in desperate poverty, ignorance, resentment and opioids is not good for anyone, not for the disenfranchised proles, not for the plutocrats, not for the coastal enclaves. Because if these people are left to continue as the seed crystal of a fascist movement, this will not end well for them or for us.

I don’t pretend to have a solution. In bleaker moments I am put in mind of Mark Ames’ pessimistic take on things from eight years ago:

If the left wants to understand American voters, it needs to once and for all stop sentimentalizing them as inherently decent, well-meaning people being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs—because the awful truth is that they’re mean, spiteful jerks being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs.

More light verse

Do not throw Rudy under that big bus,
Old fools should dodge and weave and softly say:
“Evade, evade all this impeachment fuss.”

Though bagmen, caught, are scarcely beauteous
Who go on CNN unwisely, they
Should not go gentle under that big bus.

Such men, enablers all, surround us, thus,
Why sacrifice one pitiful roué?
Evade, evade all this impeachment fuss.

A clown who sought to suborn Kievan Rus’
To make of “Sleepy Joe” Trump’s lawful prey
Should not go gentle under that big bus.

Lawyers, high-paid, will warn their client, “Just
Stonewall, or plead the Fifth, and then you may
Evade, evade all this impeachment fuss.

“And on the news, Mayor G., do not discuss,
But merely hint at pardon, and you’ll stay
Far from the path of that advancing bus
And thus elude all this impeachment fuss.”

Aftermath

Regular readers of this blog—that would be me—know that I’m of a sunny and optimistic disposition, but even with some auspicious signs and portents lately, I’m having a tough time believing that we get out of this fix without some grave and irreparable harm, beyond what’s already been inflicted, to the polity. Well, “oceans rise, empires fall.” Houses burn and are rebuilt, even as heirlooms are forever lost.

Let’s proceed as though we exit this administration in some plausible best-case scenario, that Trump is removed or resigns, and that Pence runs and is defeated, or that Trump hangs on for another thirteen months, is soundly defeated, and actually leaves office without fomenting insurrection. It’s 20 January 2021 and Chief Justice Roberts, audibly gritting his teeth, swears in President-elect Warren, who took the election along with House and Senate Democratic majorities. We’re not talking filibuster-proof in the Senate—I said “plausible”—but timid institutionalist Senators who might hesitate to abolish the practice would do well to reflect that the GOP will, in a heartbeat, should Mitch McConnell or some future Majority Leader conclude that it’s to their significant advantage.

So: two branches of out tripartite system—in this vision, that may not be quite the lollipops-and-unicorns model that the BernieBros or the Steiniacs would want—which nevertheless constitutes (heh, heh) a marked advance over the chaotic and malignant misrule we presently endure.

But are we talking actual reform here, or merely a reprieve? Because Donald Trump did not spring full-formed from Murdoch’s brow. By the time he leaves the stage, pelted with produce and dragged off with a hook, influential voices will be raised insisting that the man was an aberration, and not the culmination, of poisonous currents in the Republican party going back for decades. Unless the next administration and the 117th Congress understand what has been burned down and what structural changes must be made in the rebuilding, a Democratic victory next year will grant us only a stay of execution. McConnell, or another “grim reaper” as he has proudly called himself, will presently be back, and pissed off. We ought to have learned this with the Obama presidency, and he ought to have learned it from Iran-Contra: “Let’s look forward, not back,” is bullshit when you’re dealing with these people, because they’ll bank the proceeds from their theft and set about stealing more. And we-the-people bear a share of that blame, because Democratic voters routinely exhale after prevailing in the general election, sigh “Well, thank heaven we’ve finally fixed that mess,” and let lapse their attention from the distracting and dirty business of politics. Pro tip: that doesn’t work, and the Republicans figured this out half a century ago.

We as a nation have been sleepwalking into this swamp of Caesarism for decades, and some people are only just waking up to discover our collective selves sternum-deep in fetid waters, with alligators eyeing us meaningfully. Successive slothful Congresses have yielded their powers incrementally to the Executive Branch, and now that branch, in the person of a jumped-up criminal developer from Queens, has quite clearly declared that it intends to take and to keep all such powers as remain, in which case, if he succeeds, self-government endures only as a brittle shell enclosing a near-vacuum, its former essence, such as this ever was, having been first poisoned and then leached away. And while the knuckle-dragging Dominionist Trump-enablers in the House of Representatives may for the moment be ignored, the Washington Post reports that thirty-nine Republican Senators are, as of today, solidly behind him.

But my scenario is supposed to be a ’appy occasion! Somehow the forces of righteousness prevail next year against gerrymandering, against Russian and domestic ratfucking on social media, against hacking of e-votes. The witch is dead! Do I hear a ding? Do I hear a dong? (We’ve been hearing the dung for years.)

Yes, and speaking of witches, Paul Campos made this point over at the “Lawyers, Guns and Money” blog earlier today as I write this:

I suspect, by the way…that it’s going to be OK to treat Trump differently, because it may well prove very convenient to everyone to rehabilitate the Republican party by burning this particular witch. 

If Trump is driven out of office before next November — which at the moment still seems very unlikely but suddenly no longer impossible — it will be precisely for this reason. Suppose next summer rolls around and it becomes blindingly obvious that Trump is going to get routed, and that he’s likely to take the Republican majority in the Senate with him. Under those circumstances, the fantastically powerful lust among the great and the good to get back to “normal’ — to pretending that Trump is some sort of inexplicable aberration, and that we can all get back to enjoying our nachos in Jerry Jones’s box if we just rid ourselves of this turbulent parvenu — is going to be truly overwhelming. Can you imagine the day Trump is ejected from the sacred precincts of the White House, and civility returns to America? David Brooks will have to write his column with one hand.

That’s going to be a problem, the reflexive impulse to declare that the Trump presidency was a “black swan” event—who could ever have predicted such a thing, really?—and that nothing in the soil from which he sprang could possibly account for the toxic blossom that unfurled its garish and deadly petals in 2016. Error! Error!

We have to acknowledge the structural weaknesses in our ancient Constitutional system that have permitted a mad king to assume and abuse the office referred to by the Founders as “Chief Magistrate,” because while Trump is erratic and barely sane, there are surely other, colder, more rational, more calculating authoritarians-in-embryo watching his regime, mapping the rot running through the norms, institutions, barriers, recording what works and what does not. What remains of the Constitutional order is ripe for overthrow, and such a coup will have the enthusiastic support of something like forty percent of those who turn out at the polls—“feral voters.” Absent significant reform—which, it should be noted, the Federalist Society-stacked courts at every level will do their best to thwart—any Democratic presidency will be at best an interregnum, a Weimar administration, before the virus of fascism lays waste at last to the society.

Geez, I appear to have talked myself down from optimism.

Rich and strange

I have not compiled an impressive record, political prognostication-wise. In 1976, after Ronald Reagan failed to wrest his party’s nomination from Gerald Ford, I remarked to friends, “Thank god we’ve seen the last of that clown.” Four years later I still could not believe that this genial fraud could ever make it to the White House, and the late John Anderson’s well-intentioned vanity candidacy received my vote, a self-indulgent fecklessness I would cheerfully take back. I have kept in mind ever since that it is never a good idea to underestimate the potential folly and depravity of the American electorate. Also: to spurn the perceived “lesser of two evils” serves only, under our system, to engorge the greater. And you know, one of the appeals of the lesser evil is that it’s less evil. I’ve seen enough greater evil since the beginning of 2017 to find that notion rather seductive.

Although three years ago I could not quite bring myself to believe that the GOP would actually open its thighs to Trump and yield up the nomination, I did at least contemplate the possibility of this happening, and even of the candidate prevailing in the general (see “Fidgeting in the Cheap Seats”). On the way to dining out on election night in November, I checked a news feed on my phone, and saw that the Senate was not tending our way. During dinner, to my wife’s irritation, I looked in on the coverage with mounting horror. And here we are.

In the aftermath I gloomily predicted that the Trump regime would prove worse than we could imagine. I will amend that: it has been worse than I imagined we couldn’t imagine.

Keeping in mind my mediocre win-loss record in these matters, just now, a week into October 2019, I sense a great disturbance in the Farce, as if dozens of complacent officeholders suddenly became uneasy and were suddenly disposed to support impeachment, if only tacitly. Trump’s latest erratic international behavior, tossing the Kurds to the sharks (what is it with the Kurds? Everyone fucks them over), has alarmed even some of his hitherto complacent allies in Congress and the tame media, and even the execrable god-botherer Pat Robertson warns that the short-fingered vulgarian risks forfeiting the “mandate of heaven” over this (has someone told the Rev that the mandate of heaven is of Chinese origin, and subject to a punitive tariff these days?).

Certainly there will remain among the public a hard core (apparently about 27% of voters) of Trump supporters who would not merely excuse but cheer his shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Hell, Trump could rape and strangle an entire daycare center on Fox & Friends while setting alight a basket of kittens and knocking the crutch out from under a disabled war veteran without worrying about what this lot would think. But somehow I think, hope, that a sea change might be in prospect, that the Republic’s immune system, after much prodding, may actually be kicking in. Events are moving fast, and this entry is a mere photograph, and my political intuition may prove faulty for the nth time. But I do think, today, that the quicksand is shifting beneath 45’s feet, and that when the end comes—will the rats conclude that it’s better to toss the captain off the ship?—it may be sudden.

For the rest, though, the damage that has been done to the polity, to the country’s international relations, to the entire postwar order—we will none of us live to see all this redeemed. The USA is never coming back from this, even in any plausible best-case scenario.

The Tweetstorm of Donald J. Trumprook

Scusate i perdenti e gli odiatori, ma il mio I.Q. è uno dei più alti e lo sapete tutti! Per favore, non sentirti così stupido o insicuro, non è colpa tua.

      Let us go then, me and you,
As the scandals crowd out all the other news
Like a porn star paid and splayed upon a mattress;
Let us read, within these rumpled crumb-strewn sheets,
The incoherent tweets
Of sleepless nights upon the throne of ease
While pinching out my message by degrees:
Tweets with which I push and pull the government
With criminal intent
But I’m not capable of much reflection...

I don’t regret, or still less rue it—
When you’re a star, they let you do it.

In the House the members congregate
Thinking back on Watergate.

      The Democrats will try to stop construction of my wall,
So beautiful, so perfect, so unclimbable, my wall,
That keeps the rapists, gangs and dealers out of here,
The border camps where wetback babies crawl...
Babies. Yeah, that Epstein guy—a loser, that’s for sure
Nabbed at the airport, made his last farewell,
And once the prison guards had fallen fast asleep,
Was left (who knew?) to hang around his cell.

      And indeed they will serve time,
The yellow cowards who still ignore my tweets,
Copping their pleas like Cohen in open court;
They will serve time, they will serve time
Or if they play it safe and decide to be discreet;
There will be time to perjure and negate,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That go into a first-class license plate;
Time for thee but not for me,
And time yet for a hundred indiscretions,
And to evade another hundred questions,
Like in the days of Sarah Huckabee.

In the House the staff attorneys huddle
Plotting further trouble.

      And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do U care?’
Time to descend the escalator,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “What’s that thing upon his head?
Some animal, some possum, must have crawled there: is it dead?”)
My necktie, made in China, polyester, red and shiny—
(They will say: “How is it that his fingers are so tiny?”)
Is it fair
My press is so adverse?
It’s called executive time.
For decisions and rescissions which a court will soon reverse.

But I have blown them off already, blown them all—
The courts, the Congress...enablers and buffoons!
I have measured out my life with cofveve spoons;
I’ve heard the voices leaking, leaking with an eye
Upon the main chance there in the green room.
            So how dare they presume?

      And I’ve denounced the spies and traitors, slammed them all—
The whistleblowers trilling with their same old songs,
And when I’m called upon it, called on CNN,
When Fake News flacks will not excuse my gall,
Then how—heaven forfend—
To spin all of the revelations of my wrongs?
            And can we just assume

      That I have sold the Russians secrets, let them pick?—
As I am perfectly entitled to
(It says so right there in Article Two!)
Is it semen on a dress
That makes me such a mess?
No, that was what’s-her-face, that Monica Lewinski chick.
      And should I cop a plea?
            And what’s in it for me?

      Shall I say, I have golfed all day on well-mown greens
The only thing that makes my putter rise
And dropped the ball routinely some two feet from the hole?...

I should have stayed a star on pay TV
Hustling my brand to easy dimwit marks.

      And the rubes who watch the news, they take it placidly! Soothed by Fox TV,
Tucker Carlson...or Hannity
Always dependable, always for me.
Should I, having satisfied my vices,
Rouse myself to instigate another crisis?
But though I have gorged and bloated, binged and purged,
Though I have seen my pate (grotesquely bald) the object of some laughter
I am no statesman—not now nor hereafter;
I have seen the needle of my ratings wiggle,
And I have seen the Secret Service roll their eyes, and giggle,
            And in short, I was betrayed.

      And would it have been worth it, do you think,
After Moscow, the prostitutes, the pee,
The commentariat, who’ve been routinely mean to me,
Would I have gone too far
Once I’d given DOJ to William Barr
And made it just another arm of Trump, Inc.,
To kick the Constitution into flinders,
To say: “I’m the Donald, you’re the Apprentice,
I’m here to tell you that you’re fired, you’re fired”—
Yet, Stormy paused before she gave me head,
      And said: “That is not what I want at all.
            That’s not it, Sir, at all.”

      And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the hearings and the subpoenas and the sprinkled sheets,
After the scandals, after the phone calls, after the House decides to vote me out—
What the hell is that about?—
It is impossible to know just what I knew!
But as if a TV camera spewed some hacks to blather on the tube:
Would it have been worth while
If one, waking up at three and tossing off a tweet,
And turning toward the TV, should say:
“Lock up Crooked Hillary,
      Lock her up for good and all!”

      Yes! I’m a stable genius, clear for all to see;
Am a compliant dunce, one that will do
To pack the courts, pass a tax bill or two
And serve the rich; no doubt, I’m always down,
Presidential, glad to be on board,
Impulsive, reckless, occasionally profane;
Abused, insulted, frequently ignored;
At times, indeed, almost insane—
Almost, at times, the Clown.

I’m senile…infantile…
I shall serve my sentence stably in denial.

Shall I leave my hair behind? Do I dare to join a gang?
I shall wear a bright orange jumpsuit, and walk along the yard.
I have heard the inmates singing to the guards.
I do not think that Pence will pardon me.

I have seen the prosecutors on the case
Looking for backups on the White House LAN:
It won’t be good when all this hits the fan.

We have frolicked on a mattress soaked with pee
In opulent hotel rooms trimmed in gold—
Until we face indictment, and we fold. 

Little things

This. These.

Class in America: a Superficial Meditation

The late Soviet Union used to pride itself on being a “classless society.” This notion, not unlike the USSR’s implementation of socialism, was imperfectly realized*, but it was sufficiently seductive that for many decades, including those of my formative years, it was considered poor form in the United States to dwell too much on class stratification. That “the poor” existed (with the subtext that it was in most cases their own damned fault) was aknowledged, but alongside this there was the vision of great fluidity—essentially an upwelling current—between the strata. Why shouldn’t the shop foreman, having risen that far on grit and initiative, finish up as a Captain of Industry? Although no shop foreman actually ever rose to be the Chairman of General Motors, there was at one time enough social mobility to permit the foreman plausibly to imagine that his son (his son, of course, in that era) would work in the office rather than on the shop floor, and that his grandson might even rise to the professional class: lawyer, doctor, architect. Good times. Today, of course, the USA ranks fairly low in social mobility measured against the other remaining industrialized democracies (and who knows how much longer we will qualify for that cohort?).

But class in America and elsewhere is surely informed by metrics other than tax brackets, isn’t it? We are advised, these latter decades, that a category—class?—of people known as “coastal elites” looks down upon the honest yeomanry, the “real Americans” who live in “flyover country” (I used to think of them as “those funny little rectangular states”). And yet, there are folks in, say, Oklahoma or Indiana who, with three or four times my household income, would regard me as “elite,” so surely that makes us upper class here at The Crumbling Manse™, aren’t we?

Well of course, by Bay Area standards, we’re only getting by, although we have the incomparable advantage, accounts payable-wise, of no children, no carried-over consumer debt, no student loans (at last!) and a mortgage that should be retired within another thirty months, leaving us with a property that has appreciated considerably since its purchase late in the last century. And I am startled to see that our household income puts us slightly north of the ninety-fifth percentile, national median-wise. But again, let’s leave money aside.

In my twenties I was a guest at a suburban manse owned by a friend’s father, a self-made millionaire. “Millionaire” counted for a great deal more in the mid-seventies than it does today. The place was tricked out with ghastly vulgarity: not unlike (although in fairness to my friend, nothing like as over-the-top) Donald Trump’s decorating schemes. During the preceding years I had been received in the homes of other college friends who, by no means as prosperous in terms of fungible assets, rested comfortably on nest eggs of cultural and intellectual attainments. They were, what, upper-middle class, if that? The millionaire was probably worth a dozen or more of these households, but culturally, had they been his neighbors, he would have been the Tony Soprano (I do not mean to impute an organized crime connection, although in the case of the paterfamilias’ line of work the possibility cannot be excluded) on the block.

So about that: the, let us say, solid-waste management guy brings in $x each year, and has rebuilt and remodeled his home in McMansion style on steroids. Across the street the retired Stanford associate professor (household income closer to $.05x of Tony Soprano’s), who purchased his considerably more modest bungalow back when Bay Area houses were affordable, holds state in his comfortable premises, perhaps a tad shabby, perhaps a tad deficient when it comes to gilded faux-Louis XIV furniture. Professor Poor can comfortably discourse about a range of topics that would leave Tony Soprano tongue-tied, although in fairness Tony Soprano knows much about disposing of corpses in municipal landfills, a discipline that would leave Professor Poor utterly bewildered. Tony dismisses Poor because he is, by Soprano standards, well, poor, while the academic regards the solid-waste mogul, his vast, gaudy house, his dreadful decorating scheme (in particular his “library,” consisting of buckram-bound volumes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, purchased by the yard), his indifference to scholarship, with boundless contempt. Each man regards himself as dwelling in the superior “class.”

So how do we evaluate them? Does it matter?

I have connections—I will not say more than that I am obliged not to sunder these—with a couple of individuals, both of them probably in percentile 99.5 (and ardent Trump supporters, natch), who share in addition to considerable personal wealth, an indifference—nay, an outright contempt—toward the “cultural elite,” whom they likely believe personified by “Hollywood celebrities” (so Barbra Streisand claims to care for the poor, but she lives in a Malibu mansion! Hyuck, hyuck, checkmate, libtards!), and also toward erudition and intellectual attainment generally, particularly those that come under the rubric of “liberal arts.” I might have asserted that they would indignantly deny “elite” status until the God-Emperor Trump said this a year ago:

“They always call the other side ‘the elite’. Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do,” the US president said. “I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are. I became president and they didn’t. And I’m representing the greatest, smartest, most loyal best people [sic] on Earth — the deplorables, remember that?”

So perhaps they’ll embrace the label after all.

But class: I did not come myself from an educated family—neither of my parents continued their studies past high school—but they were cultural strivers after the fashion of their cohort in the Fifties. Both of them regretted skipping college; both were, I think, keenly conscious of their deficits, and endeavored to better themselves: they subscribed, for example, to a service that mailed the household LPs of “classical” music, not because they actually liked this—their tastes ran more toward Broadway musicals and the “Great American Songbook,”—but because they admired, and aspired to, the stratum of society that did. I owe to them, in part, my own enjoyment of all of these genres. Now might be a good time, incidentally, for the occasional reader to refer to my long-ago entry on “Mid-Century Middlebrow.” Go ahead. I’ll wait. And they aspired for better things for their children in terms of standard of living and culture.

Obviously I come down on the side of class-as-culture rather than class-as-income-bracket, but of course, when it comes time to draw a charmed circle, most of us will devise one with ourselves at the center, as the short-fingered vulgarian so tellingly contrived to do in his 2018 remarks. There is no need, to be sure, for the two categories not to overlap: indeed, at one time they were very nearly congruent, and as the striving, presumptuous middle class that emerged following the New Deal and the postwar reforms is gradually squeezed out of existence—hanging on by its fingertips to the hem of privilege, or cast down to the upper proletariat to be milked by the rentier class—it may be that the “elites” will reunite, with perhaps a significantly larger percentage of semiliterate vulgarian thugs in their ranks. I can hardly wait.

*The existence of the USSR as a countervailing economic and political system, its horrific moral deficits notwithstanding, served as a brake on some of capitalism’s direst impulses, and we are living through some of the consequences of its absence—but this is properly the topic of another entry.

Drainward the Course of Empire

Ben Franklin’s remarks delivered near the close of the Constitutional Convention. For a wonder, the words are not modern fabrications devised as ventriloquism:

“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

As impatient children are wont to ask from the back seat: “Are we there yet?” I fear we are.