From the Times:
Correction: August 17, 2016
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the given name of an American swimmer. He is Townley Haas, not Tommy.
Come on, Times. Think for one second before printing. The hell kind of name for a swimmer is “Tommy”?
(Note: this is probably unfair, as I couldn’t identify Townley from Adam, except that the former is probably in way better shape and has dedicated his life to something impressive. But it just seems perfect)
Never quite as strategic as people think.
So, Russia is now using Iranian air bases to launch pro-Asad strikes in Syria, creating a triangle within which I can’t imagine Turkey is particularly pleased to be. This seems to be a solidification of an ad hoc alliance that has been growing tighter, even as Russia agreed to be part of the Obama-led sanctions which crumpled Iranian nuclear resistance. Russia is now firmly part of the Iran/Syria axis, which could be extended to include the Houthis in Yemen and of course Hezbollah in Iraq. This is like every nightmare enemy of the last 50 years, even if they are opposed to our other nightmare enemies of al-Qaeda and ISIS.
There is a lot to discuss about the Middle East, and the ramifications in that, but I think there is an important question to ask. The Soufan Group’s IntelBrief hints at it: “While there is clear military value in the use of an Iranian airbase to launch strikes in Syria, the real gain for Russia is further solidifying its increasing role in the region.”
This is cause, in some circles, for palpitations and hyperventilations. Russia is playing maybe the leading role in the region now, certainly in Syria, and is forcing the action in favor of Asad. So are they winning? And what does winning mean?
I think this is lunacy, honestly. This is madness for Russia. What is going to happen if they “win”? What does that even look like? Asad in power, and what, all the rebel groups agreeing to lay down arms? A stable and secure Syria where both ISIS and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham are gone? Is that even possible?
There can be no long-term good for Russia to get deeper and deeper into Syria, and into its endless war, and into the collapse of the modern Middle East. This transformation is just starting. Russia, which wanted to show strength to cover up fundamental weaknesses, has had success, but it is of the short-term variety. It is expanding its war involvement against any and all of the enemies of its new allies, which are literally everyone else in the region, in some combination or another. This is not going to play well within its own Muslim population. The borders of Russia are not settled and secure either. It could have dozens of its own little Syrias.
The idea that Russia is somehow winning in the Middle East is absurd. It’s flying right into turbulence, possibly of the historic, country-reshaping kind. The “great power” conflict between the US and Russia in the Middle East should be between who can do the most good without tying themselves in too much. You can argue that Obama has steered too close to the latter benchmark while largely avoiding the first one. I think it is silly to say that is weakness, or that it has cost us esteem, especially when there is just loss of esteem within the very same region from which he is trying to extricate us from. (It’s like being kicked out of a bar toward whose exit you’re strolling.) Russia isn’t playing that game at all: neither doing good, nor staying out of getting involved. It’s a series of moves, not a coherent strategy to make the country stronger in the long term. It’ll catch up. Russia, a country whose internal contradictions have never been resolved, is tying itself up in a century-long process of dissolution, one that could easily spread to that most impossible of nations.
You don’t actually need a paradox to understand Trump’s lies.
In an essay yesterday for The Atlantic, Connor Friedersdorf tackles the question of media bias against Trump, particularly in light of his “Obama founded ISIS” claims. The thrust is that some people are upset that the media was deliberately twisting his words to be their most literal, and therefore their most easily disprovable. I’ll readily admit that when I saw the headline last week during a brief moment of internet connectivity, I rolled my eyes a bit, assuming (oddly, I know) that this was an obvious bit of rhetoric and the palpitations were of the clickbait variety.
Friedersdorf does a good job demolishing that, showing how Trump doubled and tripled down on it, and, most importantly, how he’ll say anything at any given time, to inflame some audiences and then claim he was doing no such thing, and it’s frankly disgusting of you to think otherwise, ok? The basic thrust is that Trump says so many outrageous and insane things (Ted Cruz’s loathsome father killed JFK) that the media has to evaluate everything like a policy statement, and debunk it as such.
It’s an interesting question about the role of the press, and to dig into it, I think it is helpful to look at Chicago politics in the 60s and 70s, at another straight-shooting authoritarian who frequently made no sense: Da Mare, Richard Daley.
Earl Bush, the long-serving press secretary for Richard J. Daley, wasn’t like most of the people surrounding the old man. He wasn’t a Bridgeport crony brought up in the rough-and-tumble world of South Side Irish politics, where loyalty and cunning were prized over book smarts. He was well-educated, and was considered to be “Daley’s translator.” He’s probably best remembered for chiding reporters who covered the mayor to play fair, in a way: “Don’t print what he said. Print what he meant.”
It is a line that’s easy to mock, but it actually raises some interesting questions. Daley was far from dumb, and was himself educated (putting himself through law school while climbing the machine ranks and raising a brood), but he had a tortured relationship with the language. What he meant to say often came out garbled, and nonsensical. So, for reporters covering him, what was there to do? On the one hand, they had a duty to convey the policies and politics of City Hall, and not just get a cheap laugh over a syntactical slip, the kind we all make when speaking, some more so than others. Reading the unedited transcript of nearly anyone can be cringeworthy. On the other hand, seeing the unvarnished mind of our political leaders is a service.
On the other hand, seeing the unvarnished mind of our political leaders is a service. We get to see how their minds work, or don’t, and how much they struggle to connect their talking points with any actual thought (think Marco Rubio here). Sometimes, you get a great quote out of it, one that seems more Freudian than Kinseyian. The best example of this is when Daley said of reports of police brutality in the city: “The policeman is not here to create disorder; he’s here to preserve disorder.” That seemed to encapsulate the role of the police in the racial powderkegs of the 1960s.
On the other hand…you know what he meant. Should reporters gleefully transcribe something that is the opposite of what he meant? The above quote seems to reveal a hidden truth, but that is metaphorical, and not legalistic. If Daley had said “I ordered the police to beat the hell out of the Negro” and then Earl Bush said “no no- he clearly meant to say ‘treat them well, the Negro'”, you print the former, for sure. But when it is just a slipup? Is making it clear what a subject means a distortion, or is it observance of the truth?
I personally think it is the duty of any reporter to make sure that they print what is meant, even if they report what is said. But what happens when you have a man like Trump? To say he’s a liar is far too faint. All politicians lie (especially when they say they will never lie to you). It’s part of the job. By definition, you have to please far too many competing constituencies to always tell the truth 100% of the time. It’s impossible. And to an extent, we all know that’s acceptable.
But with Trump is is a different thing altogether. He isn’t so much lying as running an entirely 100% truthless campaign. The entire campaign is a fake, of course, an attempt to make someone who couldn’t pass a basic civics test and who can’t be bothered to learn anything about the world into a President. He himself is entirely truthless, as he sees everything in the world in relationship to himself, and interprets it to how it will benefit him and how he can use it as self-aggrandizement. That’s why he can’t go two sentences without bringing it back to himself; his own empty ego is the sole basis of his knowledge.
So the media should do what Connor was getting at: print what he says, and ignore what he pretends to mean. Or, report that too, and show how it is in direct contradiction with what he just said, and repeated. Trump is a man who thinks that being rich alchemizes his idiot proclamations into truth, so run with that. If he says “Obama probably killed MLK”, investigate it, and show how wrong and idiotic Donald Trump is. Don’t let him get away with saying “I never said that, and anyway, when I said it, it was a joke, ok, but I never said it.” He thinks his off-the-cuff lies are correct when he says them (because he says them) as much as he believes it is correct when he later claims to have never said anything. He gets away with this because he’s been surrounded by flunkies his entire adult life. Every statement is timeless and unalterable truth, until he decides to alter it, and then it was never said. Evaluate them like that. Don’t give him any room. Don’t treat this like normal. Print everything the way it was meant.
You know what makes for the best vacation? Not seeing this guy’s face for a solid week.
Getting back into the swing of things with some low-hanging fruit….
One of the most maddening aspects of our politics is the “style over substance” component; roughly, the “who is saying things better”, as opposed to the “what are they saying” aspect of elections. This dovetails with the obsessive Politico-style horse-race coverage that people have been denouncing for decades, with limited (though not entirely nonexistent) success.
This has ben magnified in the age of Trump, where you have a candidate who spouts wildly-contradictory mumbo-jumbo, and has a relationship with the truth about as solid as one of his marriages. He is someone who feels truth is what he wants it to be, because he’s a spoiled fancylad who surrounds himself with family and grubbing sycophants. So what to do when covering him? For the Wall Street Journal, as with every grasping Republican pol who has tied themselves to him (Paul Ryan), it’s to double down on the style issue, a breathtakingly cynical admission that this is a man completely unqualified to be President.
A Sunday editorial in the Wall Street Journal is the perfect example of this. In what is being praised as a sober and serious consideration of his candidacy, the Journal outlines the problem many supporters have.
They think he should make the election a referendum on Hillary Clinton, not on himself. And they’d like him to spend a little time each day—a half hour even—studying the issues he’ll need to understand if he becomes President.
Is that so hard? Apparently so. Mr. Trump prefers to watch the cable shows rather than read a briefing paper. He thinks the same shoot-from-the-lip style that won over a plurality of GOP primary voters can persuade other Republicans and independents who worry if he has the temperament to be Commander in Chief.
There’s more in this vein, but that’s enough. The Journal then goes on to say this is a winnable race, using math from a political scientist with a great track record, to show that Trump should be winning.
No model is perfect, but Mr. Abramowitz’s has predicted the winner of the major-party popular vote in every presidential election since 1988. His model predicts that Mr. Trump should win a narrow victory with 51.4%. A mainstream GOP candidate who runs a reasonably competent campaign would have about a 66% chance of victory.
(It unfortunately forgets to ask who that mainstream candidate would be: Ted Cruz?)
Then comes the big ask:
If they can’t get Mr. Trump to change his act by Labor Day, the GOP will have no choice but to write off the nominee as hopeless and focus on salvaging the Senate and House and other down-ballot races. As for Mr. Trump, he needs to stop blaming everyone else and decide if he wants to behave like someone who wants to be President—or turn the nomination over to Mike Pence.
There’s a major tell buried in here, a desperate and craven one, and it’s the word “behave”. You see it in every politician, from Mitch to Paul, who have pegged their dreams of a right-wing walkover on this wildly unqualified man. They don’t think he will be a good President. By their own reckoning, as the Journal points out, he’s a shallow, ill-informed, narcissistic disaster, a walking calamity. They aren’t asking him to change; they recognize that’s an impossibility. The man is 70 years old: you think he’s going to suddenly now start being mature?
So that’s the thing. No one thinks that Donald Trump can become a different person. They are saying “Your behavior shows that you are 100% incapable of being the President, but can you, for three months, pretend to be someone different to trick people into voting for you?” That’s far beyond normal political image-burnishing, and a huge step beyond pandering. This isn’t lipstick on a pig. It’s not even making a Potemkin village. A pig has lips (maybe?), and even a Potemkin village has real people. They are distortions of reality, to hide something ugly. But at their heart, they acknowledge reality, at least enough to try to hide it.
The cynicism behind the “behave better” push is of a different stripe. It’s trying to create a new reality altogether. It isn’t putting lipstick on a pig; it’s saying “here’s a good dinner” while holding up a tray laden only with air. It’s pushing a car full of screaming passengers off a cliff while claiming you are building a new city of the future, right on this spot. This is trying to scrawl out the words “real water” into the rock of the barrenest desert and hope people try to drink it.
The only solace here is that their incredible cynicism is rooted in a laughable and pathetic stupidity. Many (including the WSJ) pin their hopes on something he said in April, a variant on a theme he’s been spinning the whole campaign.
However, they insisted that once voters got to know the real Trump, as opposed to the public face he has presented while campaigning and while hosting the NBC reality show The Apprentice, they will warm to him. He said that person was just an act.
Or, as the Journal quoted:
“At some point I’ll be so presidential that you people will be so bored, and I’ll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people I’ll have about 150 people and they’ll say, boy, he really looks presidential,”
This has always been the strategy in everything Trump has done: pretend that he can be someone else and hope people fall for it. “I’m a great businessman”; “I can run the casino business so good”; “I can be Presidential when I want to be.” For his whole life, he’s convinced people that the obnoxious idiot was an act. It isn’t: the attempt to convince people is the whole act itself, it’s literally all he is good at. It’s worked breathtakingly well, and the desperate in the GOP and its media wing are its latest marks. They don’t believe he’s actually Presidential. They just think that he can fool other people into thinking he is. In doing that, in trying to perpetuate his con, they are its most foolish-looking victims.
Note: I’ll be out of town between the 4th and the 15th, in a wilderness repast, with little to absolutely zero connection to the internet or my phone. Posts during this time, written in advance, will be bigger-picture, or more idiosyncratic, rather than directly pegged to the news. If events happen that supersede or negate anything I say, think of these as a more innocent time capsule. Try not to let the country burn down while I’m gone.
A few years ago I was doing a periodic dive into Chicago history, as will frequently happen, and was perusing the relevant section at the local library. Over the preceding few years, I had gotten more and more interested in Chicago as a city built on a lake and river, which we all know, but tend to take for granted. While Chicago is a major port city, for most residents, that takes places completely out of sight. The river and the jawdropping lakefront are for recreation and beauty; they are no longer the economic engine.
So an old book called “The Chicago” caught my eye. It was plain blue, no jacket, but you could tell it was going to have that musty and delicious old book smell, with pages that hadn’t taken a breath in years, if not decades. It was by an author named Harry Hansen, and not knowing too much about it, I put it on the pile. How bad could it be?
It turned out to be a thing of wonder. Hansen was an old-time Chicago journalist, originally from Iowa, who loved the city but looked at it skeptically. The book blended history and the present- or, rather, Hansen’s present, as it came out in 1942, but was clearly written before the outbreak of war. He took us up and down the still dirty and gritty river, which still had grimy industrial buildings and warehouses and factories on most of its grim banks.
But he also took the reader through time. He had the history of exploration, the Kinzies and Du Sable, and the earlier French explorers who found the portage. It was amazing to read, as he’d talk about a place at, say the 31st and Western, on the south branch, and talk about what was there when he had come to the city some 40 years beforehand, when the smoke from the fire could still be detected in memory and the city had yet to celebrate its first century. And, reading it some 80 years later, both waves of history have been lapped, but both are still present in any given spot.
This journey, it turned out, was part of the Rivers of America series, a huge, sprawling, ambitious piece of Americana that spanned nearly 40 years and three publishers. The idea was to tell the history of America through its rivers, those first highways, along which all cities were built. It is a 50-book series, with the first being The Kennebec in 1937, and the final one The American in 1974. It’s also instructive to think of how much America itself changed over the years. The series takes you from Panama to Alaska, and from Maine to California. It is, fully, American. (Towns End Books and Wikipedia have complete lists)
Note: I’ll be out of town between the 4th and the 15th, in a wilderness repast, with little to absolutely zero connection to the internet or my phone. Posts during this time, written in advance, will be bigger-picture, or more idiosyncratic, rather than directly pegged to the news. If events happen that supersede or negate anything I say, think of these as a more innocent time capsule. Try not to let the country burn down while I’m gone.
(All posts about Yemen have been, almost be definition, depressing. And they’ve been depressing because this means something. These are real people, in a real country, which was and is filled with beauty. I’m going to reprint an essay I wrote about the Old City of San’a, way back in 2004. It was for a book I helped The Yemen Observer publish, to commemorate San’a. I honestly don’t know if I have the permission to run this, but will anyway, because I think it matters. I want people to know that this was real and living city, wrecked by idiot ideologies. I apologize for the youthful Orientalism– I wince every time I see “nameless” in the 2nd paragraph– but I’m going to leave it intact. Please don’t think this is an attempt to define San’a; that isn’t in me, and I’m not arrogant and misguided enough to believe that it was. I urge you to read Abdel Aziz al-Maqaleh. It is just my impressions at the time, and they are now a terrible reflection of the broken and shattered present. The talk of permanence has brought bitter tears. If you read this, please know it was written with love, love for people and a place. And think of them as you read it. I want to thank Greg Johnsen for providing the image that opens the piece).
The brown and white cupolas of the AL-Mahdi Abbas Mosque loom above the dry banks of a stone river. Inside is a tomb; outside is a magician. The tomb is of the man whose mosque bears his name. A ruled of Yemen who twice had to put down revolts led by the sorcerers of his day, he lies uneasy as another one has come back to haunt his restless nights. The magician is a teamaker, a timeless resident of Sana’a, who operates at night in a dirty and noisy little hole carved into the side of the silent mosque.
It is here, at the nameless stand operated by a nameless stranger that you can get the best cup of tea in town. The magician doesn’t pour milk into the black tea– he makes it all at the same time, a long procedure that is worth the wait, the noise, and the screaming silence of its creator. The sweetness of his alchemy is matched only by the grandeur of the view from the uncomfortable metal chairs that are set up haphazardly outside. You sit and sip and gaze out over the paved levy that used to carry water and raiders into Sana’a. On the other side the Old City sits in its nighttime silence. Frontlit from the street, it seems unreal, a movie prop, a gingerbread backdrop that would topple on you if a strong wind came roaring off Jebel Nuqum.
Note: I’ll be out of town between the 4th and the 15th, in a wilderness repast, with little to absolutely zero connection to the internet or my phone. Posts during this time, written in advance, will be bigger-picture, or more idiosyncratic, rather than directly pegged to the news. If events happen that supersede or negate anything I say, think of these as a more innocent time capsule. Try not to let the country burn down while I’m gone, ok?
ISIS appears in Yemen in 2015. Image from al-Arabiya English.
A little more than 10 years ago, in early February of 2006, there was a massive jailbreak in from a Yemeni prison, in which 23 Islamic militant tunneled out of their cells and into the women’s bathroom of a nearby mosque, from which they disappeared into the San’a morning (for a detailed look at this, buy Greg Johnsen’s The Last Refuge). Among the 23 were old militants, like Jamal al-Badawi, one of the masterminds of the USS Cole bombing. He was the big name. Others, like the al-Raymi brothers, weren’t as known.
That was soon to change. What we didn’t realize immediately was that the jailbreak wouldn’t be seen as part of the old battle against al-Qaeda in Yemen, but a new phase with a new group. Over the next few years, and through various names, the younger generation of jihadists took over the organization, before unveiling, the day of the Obama inauguration in 2009, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. They had shown themselves to be a patient, smart, and to-the-vest group, and that paid off by becoming the dominant al-Qaeda branch in the heartland of Islam.
For years, people in the know were warning about how dangerous they were, because they were patient and smart, because they kept it close to the vest. They saw the carnage of al-Zarqawi in Iraq and realized you couldn’t build a coalition like that. Their whole goal was to build coalitions, attract foreign fighters through audacious but targeted strikes agaisnt the far enemy, defeat the near enemy (Salih, secular southerners), and eventually have enough land where they could expand unmolested.
That was then. Now they are the old guard, fighting off the ravening, cannibalistic tide of ISIS, which has brought their particular brand of violence to a land destroyed by war, ravaged by poverty, and stalked by hunger. What is happening between the groups is a battle for the very idea of the future of Islamic militancy. It is the horrible past versus the unimaginable future.
Note: I’ll be out of town between the 4th and the 15th, in a wilderness repast, with little to absolutely zero connection to the internet or my phone. Posts during this time, written in advance, will be bigger-picture, or more idiosyncratic, rather than directly pegged to the news. If events happen that supersede or negate anything I say, think of these as a more innocent time capsule. Try not to let the country burn down while I’m gone.
Pictured: Trump Tower
One of the phrases that you hear most often when people talk about the possibility of Donald Trump, that calamitous baby, that reject from a frat house treasurer race, is “constitutional crisis.” The idea behind the threat is that our system, with its checks and balances, and respect for the rule of law, can’t handle such a dingbat authoritarian, someone guided entirely by his fascistic whims. This has been argued in many ways, by the ACLU, by the New York Times, and many others.
The argument about him provoking this crisis isn’t just about his repellent personality, of course, but about the ways in which that personality manifest itself. His “plans”, which are really just the knee-jerk impulses of a dimwit child, include expanding libel laws to crush opposition press, rounding up illegal immigrants, building enormous walls, and reestablishing our immigration policy to discriminate explicitly on the basis of faith.
All of these go against the basic idea of the rule of law, but the argument isn’t always legal. Certainly, lawyers like in the Times and the ACLU make perfectly convincing arguments that his ideas are so blatantly illegal that they will set up the Executive Branch in a state of open warfare with the Judicial Branch, with the Legislative in between, either facilitating his madness or trying tentatively to stop it. It will force us to see how powerful we’ve made the Executive, if a President can truly ride roughshod over anyone in his way. It will be a literal test of the power of the Constitution, to see if it the institutions are strong enough to resist the phony populist strongman.
Note: I’ll be out of town between the 4th and the 15th, in a wilderness repast, with little to absolutely zero connection to the internet or my phone. Posts during this time, written in advance, will be bigger-picture, or more idiosyncratic, rather than directly pegged to the news. If events happen that supersede or negate anything I say, think of these as a more innocent time capsule. Try not to let the country burn down while I’m gone.
American fascism will not drape itself in glory.
Writing in the New Yorker last month, Adam Gopnik laid to rest the academic debates as to whether or not Donald Trump embodied or promoted fascism.
As I have written before, to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.
What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners.
This is, to me, inarguable. After all, we don’t generally have the same quibbles about communism. It took a different form in the Soviet Union than it did in China than it did in Vietnam than it did in Cuba or Angola. Time and place– which is to say contemporary culture, and the weight of history, and a million other factors– give it shape and form, but everyone agrees roughly what it is (and yes, I am sure that in some academic or leftist circles, there are huge debates about what is authentically communist, and I’d love to read them, but the point stands).
The reluctance to call it what it is springs, I think, from the hideous evils of 20th-century European fascism, and the knowledge that Trump isn’t that bad. It’s also a reluctance to make the Godwin argument. But neither of those are really relevant. If we agree that there is no one definition of fascism, and that it is more a collection of characteristics than a rule book, and that Hitler does not have a monopoly on it, then we should be able to agree that it can, in fact, spring up from anywhere. Even America, even in the 21st-century, and even from someone as singularly inept as Donald Trump. In fact, that’s sort of the point.
I’ll be traveling the next week and a half, with almost no internet (and virtually none after Saturday). There won’t be any posts tomorrow or Friday, but I have some scheduled for next week. These are longer (how?), more big-picture posts on American fascism, Constitutional crises, AQAP vs ISIS, and more. Hope you enjoy. Try not to let Trump take the lead, ok?
Bold prediction: by the time I’m blogging again on the 15th Trump will have said something stupid. You can take it to the bank. The money bank!
Selah,
brian
Shooting Irrelevance 