Goodman Speaks

I wrote a blog called jazzinsideandout (now defunct) from 2013 to 2024, the ancestor to goodmanspeaks. The idea was to take some new perspectives on jazz music and discuss its various permutations over time. This worked fine for the first 2-3 years, and readership grew.

But then with the advent of Trump, my old political passions took hold and jazz was facing a rather moribund period. I began to write about Trump and the political furor that was brewing. Some of these pieces were edgy, even funny, and attracted new readers.

I recently looked at them again and thought there might be a book here. With all the recent chaos that Trump 2 has caused, we have mostly forgotten what happened in and before the first term with the political turmoil that surrounded it. The striking thing is how much of this antecedent stuff, which was new and alarming then, we overlook. It is totally relevant still. I’m beginning to put these short blog pieces into a book, Ten Years of Trumpshit (a working title).

Books don’t get written overnight, but I’ll give you a couple of examples.

Scalia and Trump: the Bloviators
2/14/2016

One should not speak ill of the dead, and I did think Antonin Scalia’s informal remarks were sometimes funny and sharp. His legal opinions were another matter. Scalia’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and his dissents on guns, gays, healthcare and the reproductive rights of women are an affront to what the USA should stand for. His arguments about originalism and the Constitution are a fraud. His duplicitous remarks about not legislating from the bench were hypocritical since that’s just what he did.

More than any one person, Scalia was the architect of the polarization that now infects every part of our politics. His death will produce another grand schism between Obama and the Congress as to appointing a successor. The consequences of changing the Court’s balance of power “would be seismic,” says the NY Times, and the forthcoming battle over the appointment will be a stepped-up stage of the rancor this election has already stirred up.

The cretin on track to win the Republican nomination is, as you know, Donald “Donzy” Trump. A part of me wants to see him win because with the other cretins you know exactly what you’re going to get. With Trump you never know what he’s going to blurt out. He improvises everything, like some demented jazz musician. He’s taken so many positions over the years that one of his debate opponents last Saturday called him a liberal, the most insulting charge of all.

The first debate with Hillary, incidentally, was a kind of grand guignol farce, a stage show of how far the Republican party has approached the condition of suicide. Still, Trump is winning. He even shows flashes of being rational—as when he called out George W. Bush for getting the US into the Iraq quagmire and being responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Of course he touched the third rail of Republican dogma but he was right about that, and the audience booed him.

Trump’s changing facial color from orange to magenta to purple (the anger barometer) reminded me of Guardian writer Sam Thielman’s comment that Trump has a face like a Christmas ham. Trump is winning not just because he “tells people what they want to hear,” as Sam would have it. He’s winning because of his “fuck you” attitude to everything and everybody, his supercilious defiance.

Americans would rather be angry than try to fix the complex mess the country is in. We have no candidates—and that includes Sanders and Clinton whose debate last Thursday was boring beyond belief—who can both inspire people with their passion and offer practical solutions. Both parties have failed to produce acceptable candidates. Scalia and Trump, in their different ways, are the cause and effect of that breakdown.

Quietly Tuning Out Trump
4/21/2018

A group of us retirees convenes at a local restaurant on Wednesdays for martinis and oysters (very good ones flown in from Baja). It’s a convivial bunch, and the conversation often follows a pattern. After the usual chitchat about restaurants and food, the subject turned, as it frequently does, to each person’s upcoming world travel plans.

No one was planning to visit interesting places like Afghanistan or Syria, and since yours truly has given over extended jaunts for a variety of reasons, including the cost, he discreetly tuned out—a tactic the wider world has now broadly adopted for dealing with Trump.

The conversation then predictably turned to politics, covering the usual subjects: the foibles of the Democrats, Mueller’s progress, Comey’s flaws, Cohen’s connections, Trump’s durability and so on. At this point one person got up and left—a rather abrupt tune-out.

I’ve written before about this sort of news neurosis on a personal basis, but now the world at large is rapidly coming to a general tune-out of Trump, his bizarre tweets, reversals, policy changes and obsessive flip-flops. The latest flip-flops have been on TPP (the fraught Trans-Pacific Partnership deal), the Russian sanctions, and a feud he generated with Amazon.

All of this has led investors, executives and diplomats to the conclusion that trying to act on any single thing Trump says or tweets is a fool’s game. The more effective strategy, these people say, is to look for trends in the broad sweep of Trump’s approach to governance and ignore all the noise.

Looking for trends? Good luck with that. His U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, however, was not going to tolerate being made the scapegoat for the president’s latest U-turn on the sanctions and she said so dramatically. We’ll see how far that gets her.

For months now Big Money has focused on what it always focuses on: economic conditions and corporate “fundamentals.” Trump’s bluster and noise don’t move markets, but the Street likes many of his policies. For the rest of us they are part of the elaborate system of gaslighting and lies that brought him to power in the first place.

We are now seeing deeper into the cesspool that he has brought to government. Comey accurately portrayed him as a Mafia Don, morally unfit to serve and demanding loyalty above all else. We can tune him out but, like the high-school blowhards and bullies we all once knew, he’s still going to be a presence.

Everyone at the table last Wednesday recognized this in one way or another, but we’ll all graduate from Trump High one of these days. Yet with perhaps forty percent of Americans either supporting him or not caring what he does, tuning out becomes less of an option. Maybe we should seriously listen to and report on that forty percent. Or have another martini.