Category Archives: Uncategorized

07.12.16
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A few thoughts on Mike Pence, Veep

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If you are quiet, you can hear the youth flocking!

So the speculation tonight is reaching a fever pitch that Donald Trump is going to go with Mike Pence, the Indiana governor, as his VP pick. They are having a joint rally tonight, but Trump isn’t announcing him. Honestly, I’ll believe it when I see, and that it isn’t happening tonight is, to me, a sign that it might not. It’s just too…Indiana for Trump. There’s not a lot of pizzazz here, is there?  A VP announcement of a boring Indiana dude in suburban Indianapolis? In Westfield, home of overpriced malls? I guess it’s tacky enough, and Trump should have some good feelings for Indiana, which is where his dark path became inevitable.

Of course, Pence is still what all the smart set is speculating, and with good cause. Pence is the choice to reassure people that Trump is on the straight and narrow, and will pick someone who knows Washington, and can get things done. He’s the guy to make Trump seem like a normal candidate, who can be trusted. A few thoughts on that.

  • I know that thinking Pence provides balance — in this case emotional and experiential balance — makes sense, but is that what makes anyone on the fence about Trump? Is there someone out there thinking “Well, I agree with everything Trump says about Mexicans being rapists and about how with him we’re going to start winning so much we’re gonna puke our friggin guts out, but I want someone with him who can be a solid congressional liaison.” I suppose that person exists, and that Luntz will find him, but still…
  • That said, the fear is that the media will start treating Trump like a normal candidate, even though they’ve made tentative steps toward showing that he is equal parts wildly unqualified and dangerously fascistic. They’ve been looking for an excuse to make this a normal race, god knows. And if there is one thing Trump knows, it is how the media works. He knows that this would be a great way to play them.
  • Still, not exciting, right?
  • And not exciting in a very exact way: the base likes Pence, because he hates taxes and gays with equal fervor, but the base isn’t leaning toward Hillary. You aren’t going to sway youth or immigrants with someone who has the grim mien of Palpatine’s dad.
  • Yeah, the gay thing. Pence is so anti-gay that he managed to make NASCAR anti-Indiana, and just avoided Wal-Mart’s wrath. NASCAR and Wal-Mart! They are both on the Indiana state flag!
  • Yes, I know, NASCAR vs Indy Car, etc. NASCAR is very big in Indiana now. You get my point.

So yeah, overall, I don’t think Pence is a particularly good pick. The people who it will sway are, I think, virtually non-existent. It won’t help him crossover very much. I don’t know if Pence has the chops to stand up to the national spotlight, anyway. It will just highlight the incredible anti-gay coalition, including James Dobson and Michelle Bachman, he’s assembled around him. It would be a dumb pick. So please don’t actually take this as a prediction that he won’t.

So, maybe, Marsha Blackburn? That would be outstanding.

07.07.16
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Response to Conor Friedersdorf on Stopping Trump

In The Atlantic yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf asked the question on everyone’s mind: is it legitimate to stop Donald Trump from getting the nomination. You can even take it a step further and ask if it is, indeed, incumbent upon GOP delegates to not let a wildly unqualified, know-nothing, hateful, tyrant-praising white-nationalist-courting giant dummy one step away from being the most powerful person in the world?

When you put it that way, the question kind of answers itself. But Conor is more fair than I am, and sketches out four possibilities.

Are you a democrat who believes that, regardless of Donald Trump’s fitness for office, the nomination is rightfully his, because he won the most primary votes and delegates?

Are you a republican who believes that delegates aren’t mere vestiges of an antiquated system, that they’re around for a reason, and that they have a moral obligation to vote their conscience, at least when it is in radical conflict with voter preferences?

Are you a formalist who believes in strict adherence to rules, whether their character is democratic or republican, and that any outcome consistent with the rules is legitimate?

Are you a consequentialist whose position is determined by comparing, say, the likely cost of a Trump presidency with the likely cost of the anti-democratic actions that would be required to deny him the nomination and any chance at victory?

I don’t know if I fall into any of those camps, though if I did it would be more of the “republican” side (as hard as it was to type that). I don’t even know about voting their conscience, even though that plays a role. It’s more about wanting to win, which I think is the right thing for the party to do. The lack of a party establishment, having been reformed away, was one of Conor’s colleague John Rauch’s arguments about why we’re in the mess we’re in. Or, as I argued back in April when talking about superdelegates and “Stop Trump”:

Because that’s the thing with superdelegates, or the Daley/Meany branch. They are very, very concerned with winning elections, which means putting their support behind the candidate they think gives them the best shot. Of course there is corruption and incest and greed in the selection, and they aren’t going to be right all of the time, either. But that’s part of having a party system. The party wants to pick a candidate it thinks can win, and the primary process is designed to give them an idea of how to do that. It isn’t designed to bind them to the passion of a minority. It makes it incumbent upon the lesser-known candidate prove they can appeal to the most people, which is what Obama did in 2008, and Howard Dean failed to do in 2004.

So I think I am a structuralist. There is a moral reason to not want Trump to be President, but the delegates should also think of the best interest of the Party (which to them is the best interest of the nation, even though I wildly disagree and wouldn’t mind seeing them broke into a thousand pieces on the shores of Lake Erie, like the wreck of the PS Atlantic). Thinking of the best interest of the party isn’t cynical; parties exist,or they should, because they represent the interests of the most people. They are unwieldy, cobbled-together nightmares, and they should be. That can cause problems — like the hideous moral compromises inherent in the Democratic Coalition before the Civil Rights Bill — but at its heart it is about trying to do what’s best for the most people.

Even though I do believe that a lot of GOP office-holders are true believers, they balk at a ravening white nationalist taking over the party by empowering a minority of voters, even if they have benefited from the passionate intensity of the worst. That’s why I think “Stop Trump” is ok. Convention laws aren’t written from on high; they are chosen by the party in a way that benefits them. That’s good. They have a right to alter them to stop Trump.

Trump says the system is rigged. It might be. But it is rigged by the parties to try to win elections, which you can’t do if you are rightfully hated by women, Latinos, gays, youth, blacks, the educated, etc, and which you shouldn’t do if you are only loved by tyrants and by terrorists for recruiting purposes. The system is rigged to try to pick a winner, and you pick a winner by choosing someone who can appeal to the most voters. That person isn’t always the best choice, and is frequently a rotten one. But delegates blocking a sure loser isn’t anti-democratic. In a system where votes are the final currency, it is the bulwark of democracy.

07.05.16
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Joni Ernst for VP Is Actually A Pretty Good Pick

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So Donald Trump is fawning over Joni Ernst, which is getting the right people excited about his picking her to be his Vice President. And honestly, compared to a lot of other choices (Newt!) she might be the best pick.

Politically, I mean. Certainly not in terms of being good for the country, or being anywhere near the Oval Office. But given that, if she is Vice-President, her one boss is the single most dangerously-unqualified person to ever “serve” (a term that would lose all meaning in the Age of Trump), she might seem ready to go just by dint of comparison.

The Junior Senator from Iowa made her rise to right-wing prominence by releasing a pro-castration ad where she threatened to make big pork-barrel spenders “squeal”, the way she used to do with hogs. This mix of anti-PC bingo and juvenile sexuality made hearts stir, nethers tingle, and launched her into talk-radio superstardom (she remains, as far as I can tell, the only sitting senator for whom “castration” is a google autofill, though I could recommend some others).

She’s pretty, with a nice smile. She is a 20-yr veteran. She’s a hog farmer. If we want to compare her to her most obvious antecedents, she’s smarter and more polished than Sarah Palin and less of a loon than Michelle Bachman. That may seem like small beer, but it matters. She’s a pretty good talker, and most importantly, she’s amazing at lying about just how incredibly conservative she is. Let’s go over some hits.

  1.  She’s anti-Agenda 21, which means she believes that the UN is going to come in and take our vital fluids. That’s garden-level wackadoodleness, but it is pretty damning for a grownup to believe.
  2. It’s not really needed to say, but she’s fairly pro-gun.
  3. She believes strongly that the states should decide minimum wage. That isn’t a “state vs feds” issue, solely. Or rather it is, but it is one that gets right to the heart of the issue. She thinks that states should be able to do whatever they want to people, with no Constitutional oversight, and no protection. It’s a mentality that encourages a race to the bottom, allowing states like Mississippi to become “business friendly” by removing all workers’ rights.
  4. More to the point, she believes strongly in nullification. It’s not incidental; it’s the core of her beliefs. She wants to essentially make the federal government subservient to the states. That’s the whole damn project. If you do so, you can strip any environmental protection, any workers’ rights, sell off all the public land, and impose whatever racial theocracy you want. That’s key to Ernst. You might think it a strange position for a senior member of the Executive Branch to have (that is, that the executive branch shouldn’t do anything), but here we are.
  5. I guess it isn’t that she doesn’t believe the Executive should do anything. She very strongly supports a Personhood amendment. And this is why I think she’s a good pick. During her Senate campaign, she was very clear about being very muddled on the issue, saying time and time again that such an Amendment was merely definitional, and wouldn’t change anything, so what’s the big deal. It was merely a “statement of support for Life.” It raised the question: if it didn’t do anything, why did she care? It’s a strange idea for an Amendment. Most Amendments aren’t just statements. But she was excellent about obfuscating what for the far right are important totems, but for low-information voters are confusing.

But it worked! And what’s more, though I can’t find any links now, the media was happy to let her get away with it, praising her for tacking to the middle without alienating the base (in other words, totally lying). She’s smart like that, and better at it than most Republicans.

She’s someone the media likes because they know they shouldn’t but it makes them feel very catholic to do so. Yes, if Trump picks her, her record will be taken apart, but not as much as with Newt or Sessions, for god’s sake. We’ll hear how Trump is softening his image with women, and how it’s a smart strategy to fire up the conservative base (as if they needed it). I don’t know if it’ll get him more votes. But I don’t think she’ll be a Palin-level disaster, and it might help with some extremely-low-information voters. He’ll still lose, but what the hell. It’s not like he’s going to get some steady hand on the till of the state. He’s not going to drag, say, Dick Lugar into this mess. Shit, the next best choice is Mike Pence, and he managed to make NASCAR and Wal-Mart slap down Indiana. Ernst might be the best possible pick, and that says everything you need to know.

07.01.16
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VP Wanted: Must Have Experience in Government, Jowls

 

Trump/Gingrich 2016: Vitality!

 

WaPo: Donald Trump’s campaign has begun formally vetting possible running mates, with former House speaker Newt Gingrich emerging as the leading candidate, followed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. But there are more than a half dozen others being discussed as possibilities, according to several people with knowledge of the process.

Let’s see: a disgraced former Speaker who, when running against the avatar of pure charisma that is Mitt Romney managed to win all of South Carolina, and who if anything is even more of a fabulist than Donald Trump, or a blustering East Coast Soprano-wannabe who is hated in his state, with looming scandals and a complete lack of knowledge about anything happening outside Bayonne?

Gingrich has been a top Trump toady throughout most of the campaign, and to be fair, he deserves some credit for recognizing quickly that Trump is the apotheosis of the white anger that Gingrich weaponized in 1994. In his lizard heart, he realized that Trump had what it took to exploit that wave, made even angrier in the last 20 years (and especially the last eight). Newt, while amoral, is smart enough to know that Trump isn’t actually a leader or a good pick to be President. I assume his thinking is that if he is Veep, Trump will mostly delegate to him, and he can have one last shot at remaking America.

That’s quite a calculation, and it is dependent upon Trump being ok with someone so ambitious and outspoken being on the ticket. Chances are Trump will pick Newt just to put him in his place, because he like humiliating people. I’m sure Gingrich thinks he can be invaluable, and will be respected by Trump, but the clash of their world-historic egos will be fascinating, as well as nauseating.

Christie’s calculation is easier: he has nowhere to go. He’s termed out, and it isn’t like he could (or would) run for Senator. It’s VP, AG, or a radio show. All his money is on Trump.

Just imagine Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Mike Ditka, Bobby Knight, and Chris Christie standing on a Cleveland stage, laughing wildly while patting each other on the back. That’s your vision of the next four years: fat, angry, old white guys, simultaneously shouting “not politically correct” at each other, sizing up each other’s wealth and pretending that they’ll never die, while a ragtag group of Myrtle Beach refugees in Confederate Flag Looney Tunes shirts howls “we’re the Silent Majority” behind them, casting murder-eyes at the janitor.

If that’s too grim for a holiday weekend, I hope this part will cheer you up. It made me laugh to beat the bank, that’s for sure.

Culvahouse, a former White House counsel who is managing the vetting for Trump, was the lawyer who vetted then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for the GOP vice-presidential nomination during the 2008 campaign.

Trump only hires the best.

 

06.29.16
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The Confederate Flag and Zika: They Know It’s Hitting the South First, Right?

 

Yeah, but you know in this case those are the same things, right? 

 

You know when you hear politicians say things like “Washington is broken- and I’m the man to fix it!” It’s pretty common in both parties, of course, but there is a certain strand of Republicanism that is more likely than others. It’s the whole “I was successful at business, so I clearly can be great at foreign policy. Just knock some heads together!” One might even say that such a theory is the driving impetus of the Trump campaign, if one wanted to ignore the racism. The Onion, of course, captured this perfectly many years ago. “Millionaire Vows To Do For Government What He Did For Turkey Ranches.”

Anyway, it works really well, because there is a lot broken in Washington. To wit:

House Republican lawmakers sought to reverse previously passed legislation restricting the display of the Confederate flag in federal cemeteries by slipping a provision stripping the legislation into a larger appropriations bill that included Zika funding. The House bill passed last week on largely partisan lines, but was blocked in the Senate Tuesday by a Democratic filibuster.

The Confederate flag language was just one of a number controversial provisions included in the bill, which also included an amendment cutting Planned Parenthood funding and other swipes at the Obama administration’s public health initiatives.

Republican lawmakers are warning that the American public will now blame Democrats if Zika becomes a full-blown health crisis.

I don’t know. It seems like they maybe wanted this to fail? By maybe putting in pretty un-Zika-y provisions, such as the flag of racism, slavery, and treason and also cutting women’s health? And then were pretty open about their reasons? Just maybe?

The GOP, of course, knows how to play this game perfectly. Block anything good and reasonable from happening in the most cynical way possible, sit back and let terrible things happen, and have both sides take the blame. But because they run on “government can’t work!” and Democrats on “let’s make government work!” it is a winning strategy, except at the national level, where the radicals and dimwits they parade can’t stand the light of day.

Oddly, the reason why they can’t deal with the national scrutiny is the reason why this is so scary. The new generation of Republicans have completely internalized this behavior. They grew up with it. There is nothing strange or cynical to them about it. This is simply how it is done. This is how you destroy the enemy, which is the government, and by extension, the Democrats. The whole point is to destroy the government so you can get more of your people elected so you can continue to destroy the government, and make it just a vessel for wars and for punishing internal enemies (Mexicans, ovaries, rappers, etc).

It’s fitting that the Confederate flag got involved. It’s not just because that is poison to decent-thinking humans. The entire GOP strategy is an extension of the Civil War by other means.

People could be very ill because of this. Babies could have their entire lives irrevocably changed. That shit like this isn’t front page news is a tragedy.

06.28.16
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Breaking! Benghazi Was Dangerous Nonsense, Designed to Further Iraq Amnesia

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“Now, I may just be a simple southern lawyer…”

What happened at Benghazi on the night of September 11th, 2012, was a tragedy, one borne of the impossible gravitational pull the Middle East has on US politics, an inability not to intervene. There were errors and mistakes, confusion in the fog of a new kind of war, one in which soldiers and civilians dance across a blurred line, and one that the US has not yet learned to fight. Four men, who were dedicated to making the world a better place– to making a land that was not their home a freer and more just place, after the grotesque misrule of Qadaffi– died that terrible night.

What it was not was a political scandal. I’ve been following politics since, at the age of 5, I tried to convince my parents that Mondale was a better choice than Reagan (and I was right, goddammit). Even counting the impeachement trial, and even counting Reagan’s lack of impeachment for Iran/Contra, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an exercise in politics so cynical, so craven, and so full of errant hypocritical nonsense. The proof?

Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued itsfinal report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.

It’s hard to imagine anything more outrageous than some of the top cheerleaders for the war in Iraq suddenly being brought to tearful anger over the pointless loss of American lives in the Middle East. These men and women gave high-flung flag-drowned speeches about the bravery of Chris Stevens and the other three, and how Obama, (and then Hillary, once it became clear she was running) betrayed that bravery. Suddenly, US lives, slaughtered in a distant land, meant something. Many of these were the same people who objected vociferously, with insinuations of fifth-column perfidy, at showing soldiers’ coffins arriving at Andrews. But these corpses had to be dragged to the roof, rattled by hoarse screaming and soaked in crocodile tears.

Not for nothing, but I think the Venn diagram of “thinks it was tragic what happened in Libya” and “angry at Obama for not invading Syria” has a lot of overlap.

What do these people think will happen? What do they think is the price of intervening around the world?

The answer is they really don’t think about it at all. In a way, I don’t even think this was purposefully cynical, for some of them. They are so hardwired to believe whatever is the most talk-radiofied nonsense possible that they probably honestly think being misleading on a Sunday show after the fact is a capital crime. I know anecdotal Facebook posts are the worst kind of analysis, but I saw people who were asking if this was the “biggest scandal in American history. After all, no one died at Watergate.” The representatives, who have the same sources of misinformation, are little different. Some are cynics. Many are just slickly-packaged balls of hippie-punching anger and cognitive dissonance.

That doesn’t make it better, nor does it excuse the horrible outcome of their actions. Because while it seems that this craven exercise in nonsense is just pointless, it is much worse. Not because it hurt Hillary vis a vis Trump, although it might have. But the cynicism and anger matters.

As the Times said, this investigation took longer and cost more than Congressional investigations in 9/11, into Katrina, into Pearl Harbor, into the freaking assassination of JFK, and certainly than into the colossal lies and idiocy that led us not just into Iraq, but that led to such a bloody disaster.

That matters. It’s an attempt to erase history, to put up such a wall of bullshit over the single greatest US foreign policy disaster of my lifetime, and possibly in US history, given the enveloping chaos that spread over the region in the wake of the invasion (the impact of which can be felt as far away as the Brexit). It’s all part of what Pierce calls “the great mulligan”, the idea that US history restarted on Jan 20th, 2009, and everything that happened afterwards is the fault of Obama.

It’s how craven warhounds like John McCain can say that, in Iraq, Obama “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.” Because having a country that is so unstable that the only way to prevent its collapse is to keep and indefinite number of troops there an indefinite length of time is, certainly, to be considered a victory. But the facts don’t matter. All that matters is to throw up a smokescreen, pinning all the blame on Obama, the one politician who learned (belatedly, and even then only partially) to resist the Middle East.

That the investigation took so long and turned up so, so little wasn’t a bug. It was a feature. It was the goddamn point. The point was to throw up an impenetrable barrage of lies so thick that we couldn’t see back beyond 2009, couldn’t peer into the wreckage of the early millennium. It’s part of the collective amnesia that the right has been trying, with much success, to inflict on us for almost eight years. They’ve been beating us over the head until we’re too numb to fight back. They know that Benghazi, for impossible and insane reasons, has more political resonance than Iraq. We’re to Never Forget what happened in Libya, and never speak of 2003.

06.25.16
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Trump Backs Down on Muslim Ban, Is A Tremendous Liar

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Pictured: Well-decided terror countries. Look at them!

Donald Trump, whose major foreign policy trip was to promote his golf course (which will do very well if the markets collapse, so pretty sweet, right?), today seemed to back down on his insane and racist and unworkable plan to ban all Muslim immigrants. He didn’t mean all of them. Just the ones from “terror countries.”

Slate!

The day began with the presumptive Republican nominee appearing to contradict his vow to fully ban Muslims from entering the United States, telling reporters on a golf course in Scotland that he wants to restrict entry by people from a number of “terror countries.” That came after he said that it “wouldn’t bother me” if a Scottish Muslim entered the United States. Which countries would he consider to be “terror countries”? Trump didn’t specify. “They’re pretty well-decided. All you have to do is look!”

Even then though it didn’t sound like Trump was saying citizens from certain countries should be fully banned, suggesting there could be a vetting process that would allow exceptions. “I don’t want people coming in from the terror countries. You have terror countries! I don’t want them, unless they’re very, very strongly vetted.”

WaPo!

Afterward, Hicks said in an email that Trump’s ban would now just apply to Muslims in terror states, but she would not confirm that the ban would not apply to non-Muslims from those countries or to Muslims living in peaceful countries.

This is obviously a very interesting and well-thought-out policy! It’s pretty well-decided which ones are. Just look. Probably Yemen, and Syria and Iraq for sure, and let’s not count out Somalia. Iran, yeah. Saudia Arabia, and maybe the Gulf States. Not Qatar, I like Qatar, I have some very quality people who I did business with. Oman? Eh, better safe than sorry. Mauritius? Never heard of it. But yeah. Morocco, Libya, of course. Indonesia, I remember Bali, so yeah. Malaysia? Are they Muslims? It sounds Asia-y, not Muslim-y. They’re in. Muslims from India? Only if they are from the very terror parts.

Look, you’re going to hear about this, and his promise that he won’t deport every Mexican because “people are going to find that I have not only the best policies, but I will have the biggest heart of anybody” (actual quote!), and you might hear that he is pivoting toward the general. Being all Presidential. He’s backing down from the very keys to his success, and his sworn promises. Presidential!

But what this confirms, once again, is that he’s making everything up as he goes along, because he has literally no idea about anything in the world. “The terror countries” is a perfect example. He can’t be assed to think of anything, so he just makes up a phrase and demands it into meaning. His spokesperson, Hope Hicks (turn out to vote), has to pretend this is an actual policy with actual meaning, because, remember, in Trump world, what he says, no matter how dumb (“until we figure out what’s going on!“)  is contorted into gospel by his surrounding sycophants.

The media might say this is pivoting. It is just another sign of how deeply unserious a man this is.

06.24.16
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“Make America White Again” Landmarks On The Road To Hell

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2016!

The story of Rick Tyler, running for Congress in Tennessee’s 3rd, is a few days old already, which I know is eternity in internet time. But we’d be remiss not to mention it. It seems like most of the commentary, understandably, is of the “christ, what an asshole” variety. And he is! He’s one of those hateful flakes who keeps running and losing (unlike hateful Jeff Flake, who keeps winning), and amping up his message every time to make himself more known. No such thing as bad press, right?

But Jesus…

“For these reasons we are confident that a widespread and creative billboard advertising game plan could go a long way toward making the Rick Tyler For Congress candidacy both viable and a force to be reckoned with. Clearly we are in uncharted waters, in that there has never been a candidacy like this in modern political history. Of great significance, as well, is the reality of the Trump phenomenon and the manner in which he has loosened up the overall spectrum of political discourse.”

“The Make America White Again billboard advertisement will cut to the very core and marrow of what plagues us as a nation. As Anne Coulter so effectively elucidates in her book, Adios America, the overhaul of America’s immigration law in the 1960’s has placed us on an inevitable course of demise and destruction. Yes the cunning globalist/Marxist social engineers have succeeded in destroying that great bulwark against statist tyranny the white American super majority. Without its expedited restoration little hope remains for the nation as a whole.”

Now, stipulating that:

  1. It’s northeastern Tennessee, and not totally representative of America
  2. He doesn’t have a chance of winning
  3. The second paragraph is winger word salad, seemingly engineered from the snatches of talk radio that he picks from the gaping ether of his mountainous home

This is still scary stuff. Even in that 2nd paragraph, he gives ultimate lie to the conservative movement, not injecting racism into its normal language, but making plain that’s what has always been its animating force. It was a comforting story Trump laid bare as myth. And that’s the point of this.

He’s encouraged to lay out a nakedly racist billboard by the Trump campaign, and its success. That he won’t be successful doing so isn’t a contradiction of the awesome forces Trump, and Trumpism, have unleashed in our uncertain world.  (Don’t think this wasn’t essentially the Brexit slogan.)  If he tried to pull this shit in the 50s or 60s, there’d be a lot of people telling him it was pretty tacky, and no one would have tried it after at least the early 70s. Even naked racists like Helms and Thurmond knew they had to pretend there were other motivations to their salivating hate.

He won’t win. He won’t come close. And he has been condemned, in all quarters (though if Trump has been asked about it I haven’t seen). He’s a sideshow, after all, right? It’s just a slight stone rolling down a hill. But they all are, until it’s an avalanche. It’s always a sideshow, until the carnival has taken over the town, barkers running madly in the streets and the clanging sirens and blinking lights of the decaying midway blare through your window every night, exposing you to the nightmares of your soul.

06.23.16
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Brexit Quote of the Night: Labour and Immigration

Via The Guardian

Chuka Umunna, the London Labour MP, said that the referendum result highlighted “particular issues” for the Labour Party adding:

I don’t actually think for a lot of our supporters and voters sovereignty was quite the issue that immigration became. Why did it become such an overwhelming issue in spite of all the warnings of the experts? A lot of people said that you are saying this about the economy but we don’t actually feel we have a lot from that economy for the moment.

This is something, I think, we’re all learning not to underestimate. Economic issues matter enormously, but they matter this year, to an extent, in how they can reframed in an “us vs them” sort of way. The EU has been rent asunder by immigration, especially the Syrian crisis. This is a 100-yr fallout that isn’t just redefining the Middle East, but redefining Europe for a generation. America’s massive annexations in the 1840s are becoming the turning point of today’s politics. The world as we knew it for all of most our lives isn’t falling apart, but it is changing quickly, and when that happens, scapegoats are to be found, and demagogues can rally the dislocated.

I don’t think what happens there is what happens here. Too many differences. But the same issues are coming to ugly play in much of the “developed” world.  We live in the flicker.

06.15.16
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The Borges Retrospective: Borges the Film Critic

The Borges Retrospective:

To make the claim that Borges is well-read is like walking up to a stranger, preparing to brandish your dueling gloves, and proclaiming that water is wet. His vast and endless erudition is, along with his blindness and fascination with Angl-Saxon lore, one of those most striking things about him. There seems to have been little he hadn’t read, and little he didn’t remember. Even after blindness overcame him, he still had the library in his head, and if he didn’t recall a line exactly, could get someone to read it to him by remembering the book, and where it was located on his vast shelves (Hitchens, who has written many times and movingly about meeting Borges, spoke in Hitch-22 about having the honor of reading to him).

(Sidenote: one of the limitation of this series is not being able to talk about everything, so I do want to share his quote on blindness, from “The Other”, in which the old Borges meets his younger self. “When you reach my age, you’ll have almost totally lost your eyesight. You’ll be able to see the color yellow, and light and shadow. But don’t worry. Gradual blindness is not tragic. It’s like the slowly growing darkness of a summer evening.” Has a more beautiful and aching line about the enveloping process of decay ever been written?)

So, given his incredible range of reading, it stands to reason that he’d be a fine literary critic, being able to weave the vast tapestry of the human story into all his writing. What might strike readers as surprising is his proficiency as a film critic in the early days of cinema, as silent movies turned into talkies, and as the medium grew up. It is hard to imagine him as taking time away from his books, but he did, and often. I confess it delights me to imagine the young Borges, sitting in a darkened theater, in the cool the juxtaposes the Buenos Aries summer, head filled with ancient myths and knife-fights, and watching a giant ape palm a screaming blond.

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