Tag Archives: America

09.01.16
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Mexico Visit Shows Again That Trump Campaign is 100% Phony

 

Image result for trump casino bankrupt

I run the best casinos. Believe me. 

 

I’m not concerned– relative to my sweaty panic over the possibility that the worst person in America has a legitimate shot to become the next President– that Trump said one thing in Mexico, and then a completely different thing in his big immigration speech to an adoring crowd. The substance isn’t that interesting, and it was expected. After a solid week of people saying he had to “soften” his immigration approach, there is no way Trump wasn’t going to double down. That’s his personality: a dimwitted sociopathic 4th-grader. We know this.

No, what is much more interesting, and telling, is how he came out and said that the topic of who was going to pay for his big and beautiful wall didn’t come up when he met with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. I actually believed this, because I figured both men tacitly admitted that was an insane idea, only believable by the goons in his Leni Riefenstahl stag parties.

It turns out, of course, that it apparently did come up, first thing, in the form of Peña Nieto declaring that there is no way Mexico is going to pay for his wall. So who is lying? If you have to ask, you haven’t listened to a single word Trump has ever said. He lies as a matter of course, and habit, because the sell, and the con, are the only thing that matters.

Think of his Mexican presser as him going to talk to one group of suckers who want to invest in, say, the third casino he is building on one stretch of road in Atlantic City. He just met with some experts, and is ready to deliver the news: everything is fine. “Well”, say the nervous investors, “wouldn’t all three just suck revenue from one another and lead to a collapse?”  Trump would say

“Well”, say the nervous investors, “wouldn’t all three just suck revenue from one another and lead to a collapse? Did they say anything about that?”  Trump would say “You know what? It didn’t come up. Everyone says it is a great idea, and it’s going to make so much money.”  Trump lies because that’s how he sells things to gullible investors, including banks. He just makes up whatever he has to do to please an audience, to get them to buy his pitch. It’s different than what normal politicians

It’s different than what normal politicians do, because he has absolutely zero substance. The lie, the con, the sell, is the entirety of his approach. There’s nothing behind it. It’s why he lies with such ease and without hesitation. Behaving in this way is integral to his– and I use this word in the loosest possible sense– character.

Remember, even if he used to, Trump doesn’t build anything anymore. He doesn’t manage or run things in a real sense. He sells his name to people to use as some kind of stamp of authenticity. And that’s how he’s run his campaign. There is no actual policy, no substance. The campaign is just a way to keep the campaign going, to keep selling. It’s  alie created in order to tell more lies. It’s just another reason why, while his winning would be a disaster, the fact that it is working at all has exposed a Trump-shaped rot in the American character.

08.30.16
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Colson Whitehead’s Slavery Novel “The Underground Railroad”: A Ferocious History of the Present

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If you want to read a really insightful and incisive review of Colson Whitehead’s deeply disturbing and sneakily-complex new novel, The Underground Railroad, you could do a lot worse than reading Adam Gopnik’s review of a new book on the Attica uprising in last week’s New Yorker. In talking about the slaughter that ensued when the state police, national guard and (tellingly) other prison guards took back the jail from the nearly all-black inmates, Gopnik writes:

In a curious way, the psychology of the (almost exclusively white) troopers and guards, more than the ideology of the inmates, seems most haunting now, as part of the permanent picture of American fixations. The inmates were doing what anyone would do in their situation: having seen a protest turn unexpectedly into a revolt that was sure to be short-lived, they desperately improvised a way to keep their dignity and be heard, to avoid the worst punishment and get some small reforms. Their occasionally overblown rhetoric was the act of men who, stripped of dignity, try to reclaim it. But the troopers and guards retaking the prison were indulging an orgy of racist violence neither ordered nor wholly explicable. There was no need for them to conduct a massacre to reassert their authority. They had all the firepower; the prisoners were armed only with homemade knives; the guards had control of the yard within minutes. Nor were they, so far as anyone can detect, under direct commands to kill. In an American tale already known fully to Mark Twain, a white ethnic proletariat could distinguish itself as superior only by its ability to be brutal to a still more subordinate class of color. When its members were denied their exercise of this “right,” they turned crazy and violent.

If you want to learn more about the novel, look at any Blue Lives Matter Facebook group, flip to a Trump rally, or read some hot takes on Colin Kaepernick. These will tell you as much about Whitehead’s book as any discussion of the past, because, while it is meticulously detailed, and unflinching in its cruelty, Whitehead is describing an American obsession with race, with oppression, and with the assertion of might. The novel isn’t a metaphor for today– it isn’t secretly about Michael Brown or Garfield Park– but it is all the more harrowing because of that. It doesn’t need to be. The story barely changes.

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08.25.16
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Sins of the Fathers: East Chicago’s Poisoned Water and The Weight of History

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East Chicago, 1972, around when the present began to crumble. Image from blog.hemmings.com

East Chicago is one of those strange places that most of us only glimpse while driving past it, along its southern end, on a road trip that takes us through the rundown broken-factory grime of northwestern Indiana. If we’re going toward Chicago, it’s the last in a string of scary and polluted cities before you approach the rusted majesty of the Skyway, looming at imposing and strange angles, like a bridge out of Hell. More recently, East Chicago is the home of a booming casino. You get off 90 to get there, on what is essentially a designated highway, skirting the town itself. East Chicago just exists as a string of industrial lights and smoke glowing through the darkness.

It isn’t that, of course. It is a real city, where people live. It’s still a fairly-thriving Lake Michigan port, a beneficiary of this vast body of water, so crucial to the American experiment. It’s proximity to the lake, and to the Calumet and Chicago rivers, gave East Chicago some prominence in the steel industry, and its factories provided jobs and a living, even if a dirty and difficult one. Other industries bloomed in the area, in the days where Gary was a town to behold. But that legacy crumbled, leaving poison in its wake. This poison is metaphorical, but also terribly literal: East Chicago is facing a massive crisis in its drinking water, the weight of the past seeping into the present and darkening the future. It’s a reckoning with which we all have to deal.

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08.23.16
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Baton Rouge is Not Obama’s Katrina

 

Waters will always rise. Will we? 

 

For almost eight years, conservatives and Republicans have been desperate to try to use the phrase “Obama’s Katrina”, knowing that the actual Katrina destroyed the tattered remains of George Bush’s credibility. It was, remember, a catastrophic failure, symbolized by Bush’s clueless flyover, where he glanced at the devastation from 30,000 feet, as well as his chuckleheaded praise for his dimwitted FEMA head. “Heckuva job, Brownie”, became emblematic of all the venality, incompetence, and cronyish destruction of his administration.

So it stands to reason that the GOP has been looking for the same thing in Obama, finding his Katrina in every tornado, every cop killing, every hurricane (one of the reasons they were so, so mad at Chris Christie following Sandy). Nothing has ever stuck, which is why they were so excited at the flooding in Baton Rouge.

After all, the President remained on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, of all places, and didn’t visit until today. That the governor, John Bel Edwards, asked him not to do so due to distractions, is merely beside the point. Obama is aloof while a city floods and people drown. This is, finally, his Katrina.

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08.22.16
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“Unskewed Polls” and the Violent Endgame of Trump’s Unreality


 Musical accompainment.

In Salon yesterday, Bob Cesca reminded us of Dean Chambers, the non-entity whose candle burned brightly but briefly by making Republicans think that Mitt Romney was going to win. He did this by “unskewing” the polls, which, he believed were tilted unfairly in the direction of Barack Obama. The scientific method with which he managed this unskewing was to say “eh, I’ll just subtract seven, I guess.” In doing so, a 4-point Obama lead magically became a 3-point Romney lead. It was based on essentially nothing except feelings, but for the people who wanted to listen to him, that was a feature, not a bug.

This was very different from normal spin and cheerleading. Every pro says that the polls may say one thing, but we think as our message gets out, as we get closer to the election day, as our terribly unfair coverage changes, etc, we’re for sure going to win. Saying so keeps money flowing in and keeps supporters from getting too demoralized. It’s normal.

But this is a different beast. It’s not saying that the polls would be wrong, or that they will turn eventually: it’s saying that they are deliberately tilting the field. Chambers’s main target was media sweetheart Nate Silver, but the real target was, essentially, reality. It was saying that this new Democratic/progressive coalition couldn’t possibly be real, and that Americans couldn’t possibly like this hated Kenyan Muslim autocratic weak and feckless usurper. After all, we don’t like him, and no one we listen to on the radio or read on the internet likes him, so any media that says differently is clearly lying. They just want to protect Obama and trick Americans into voting for him.

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08.18.16
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#AmericasMerkel: Trump Talks White Nationalism

 

Pictured: Trump Towers

 

Confused by Trump’s insistence that Hillary Clinton will be “America’s Merkel”, someone who is generally considered a pretty strong and resolute leader, easily the most powerful in all of Europe? It’s not just because her and Putin don’t get along (although it’s probably a bit of that), and it isn’t just because of rank misogyny (though it’s also very much that). It’s because he gets his talking points directly from white nationalist sites like Stormfront and VDare.com!

Think Progress has the scoop.

To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump, Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” “Anti-White Traitor,” and “patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked in articles about her, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”

This is not a coincidence. You don’t hire the Breitbart guy and parrot an obscure line of attack about a leader Americans generally like, if they even know at all, without being intimately linked to white nationalism. Trump’s campaign grows more and more openly and flagrantly racist. What he’s stirred up won’t go away for a long, long time, and will deeply poison our politics for many years, but a unified front against him and a huge election defeat will help to tamp it down. It is literally the only moral duty we have as voters.

08.12.16
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Good Books Friday: The Rivers of America Series

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)

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08.09.16
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Talking Turkey: Donald Trump, the Military, and The Coming Constitutional Crisis

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. 

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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.

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08.08.16
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Trump, The 21st-Century American Fascist

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. 

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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.

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08.02.16
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“Gonna Be Rigged”: The Next Stage of the Con Steps Toward Violence

 

Classy! Big success. 

 

Donald Trump’s entire career has been a testament to the chicken-in-the-rain stupidity people get when surrounded by money, or at least the trappings of money. Despite being a serial failure, he’s been able to get investors in his bankrupt casinos and optimistic gulls to enroll in his phony school, because he seems really rich. One of the tricks to pulling this off is supreme confidence. People love to see that, and get sucked in. They feel that if this person, who seems rich, is saying “we’re all going to make so much money and we’re going to win” then by gum, we are. It’s seductive.

To say he’s run his campaign as a long con should be a cliche by now (it is on this blog). It’s carried on entirely by brazen lies and force of personality, which, amazingly, many millions of people don’t find ungodly repellant. But what happens when the casinos go bankrupt? What happens when the con is exposed? That’s easy: blame everyone else. Oh, this would have worked if it wasn’t for these people getting in the way or gumming it up. And I’ll tell you what: it’s no accident. They’re jealous, ok? Of our success. But we’ll get them next time. “The game was rigged” is always the cry of the conman when he isn’t able to properly rig it himself. It is absolution and conspiracy, and if successful, draws the mark even closer in.

If it is successful in an election, though, it could lead to violence and discontent like few of us have seen in our lifetimes. That’s the game Trump is playing now, and we’re all on the board.

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