ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
Short-term memory loss can be a horrendous pain in the ass that most of us, young and old, have endured. It gets worse as you age. I’ve written about this before, but it’s usually been in a partial, piecemeal way. I’ll give it another shot, while using some of my more brilliant former insights into how memory works―or breaks down for old people, as it did for Joe Biden. Continue reading “The Trials and Tricks of Memory”
Everyone has had it in for the media for a while now. It’s much worse with the polarization, and many now find the news irrelevant, especially the political news. That’s not true across the board, of course, but even some liberals, including me, have lost faith in the reporting we get. It’s tiresome, repetitive and frequently uninformed. Continue reading “Watching the News. Or Not?”
Well, I passed on Thanksgiving with friends this year because I had just endured a medical test and wasn’t up to an afternoon social affair. As always, there is the grand tradition to celebrate and gather with others, but there are plenty of good reasons―like mine―to stay home. Continue reading “Thanksgiving? Or Not?”
moment of silence for 9/11 victims
Despite the furor about his recent appointments, Trump hasn’t changed all that much. He still executes the same performance at rallies, peddling the same bullshit but more so. He feels invincible, I think, but many of us feel outrage fatigue. We are tired of his unpredictability and bored with his schtick.
It’s going to be neurotic and tense for gringo transplants. We probably have much the same reactions here as our U.S. counterparts, at least so far. The difference is that we have a partial refuge from the madness here. And most of us here are older, which may give us a different perspective. Continue reading “Living in Mexico under Trump”
I didn’t watch the Harris Town Hall on CNN. My friends and I were busy laughing to old George Carlin and Lenny Bruce records that likely proved much more enlightening. We heard George’s monologue about farting in school on Class Clown, which brought to mind Donald Trump’s farting in the courtroom.
Since I wrote this piece in 2018 the situation hasn’t really changed. The major mania for the Trump camp is still immigration and exclusion. Now it’s the Hatians who have displaced Latinos at the bottom of the immigrant barrel.
My great-grandfathers on both sides were German immigrants who came to America in the mid-late 19th century. You can be sure they were not as reviled as the Irish and Italians who came a bit later. Yet Trump and his father long denied their German ancestry, buying into the tradition of hate and exclusion that now extends to Latinos, the new vassals for the GOP.
Prejudice to me is the flip side of identity politics. And drawing immigration lines in the sand is like pulling up the drawbridge after the last good guys are inside. I’ve generally been thought of as one of the good guys (despite being Jewish) because of family, social class, education, and skin color. See Jive-Colored Glasses.
But you soon come to understand if you’re at all aware that the deck is unfairly stacked—even though (to mix the metaphor) you paid to sit in first class. Looking at the lives of the poor and the excluded, it’s hard to feel real empathy unless you have been there yourself. Sympathy is easier and more socially acceptable. Ultimately, I don’t aim to feel either: I want to change the politics of exclusion to one of inclusion.
Trump of course was the perfect GOP candidate to exploit fears of immigration, just as Stephen Miller became the perfect guy to push the policy of zero tolerance. Now Miller and his cohorts want to reduce the “refugee cap” to as low as 15,000 in 2019.
The recent separation of parents and children, and the chaos it caused, is in my view the most inhumane (if not the most politically stupid) thing that Trump has done. Now the administration compounds its culpability by telling the ACLU it should be the responsible agency for finding the separated and deported parents. One might call this wagging the dog or, better, weaseling out.
The White House thinks its stance will play well with the base because they will stick with anything. It will not play well with Hispanics, suburban women, resettlement groups, and the two-thirds of the country that opposes Trump’s immigration policy.
Separating kids from their parents is what the Nazis did. The consequence is trauma and severe long-term consequences for the kids. And what is to be done for those 463 parents already deported without their children? This sick series of government-provoked horrors ought to be the number-one focus for Democrats in November.
But immigration is surely the knottiest issue—politically and policy-wise—of all. Trump’s approach does violence to everyone. And so far, Democrats are all over the map on the issue. The one thing I can think of is to increase the number of judges so that the asylum seekers can be processed with some fairness and dispatch. This is more than a crisis in border security; it’s an ongoing political crisis.
The problem was not so much with Dana Bash, though she let Kamala off the hook too often. The problem was that the Vice President kept hiding behind Biden’s coattails and spoke mostly in generalities. She kept saying, “My values haven’t changed.” Dana should have asked, “Well then, what are your policies for carrying them out?” It would have been telling if Dana had used a few hard-hitting questions instead of the puffballs she tossed out.
Kamala gave up on the Green New Deal, she said, because Biden’s new climate plans coopted most of it. Well, in fact they didn’t, and a good interviewer would have questioned that. The whole point of the exercise seemed to reinforce what she had already established at the DNC—her good-guy, middle-class likeability. There she did make an excellent acceptance speech, hitting all the right notes. But personally she blew it for me when she reinforced the Biden arms for Israel policy while calling blandly for a cease-fire. And sadly, there was nothing on abortion.
So thanks for an hour of apple-polishing and raising questions that got pro-forma answers. CNN is more disgusting by the day; how many inane commercials kept interrupting this unproductive show? Kamala couldn’t even give straightforward answers to her role in the border security mess. She babbled on about price gouging and giving first-time home buyers $25,000 in down payment support. How’s that going to help lower inflation? She sometimes sounded like Tim Walz who when challenged about his DUI arrest appeared evasive. And what was he doing there at all?
The Harris campaign has to do better than this.
Let me borrow the words of a favorite author, Saul Bellow. He opened his novel Augie March this way: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city―and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
Unlike Augie, I grew up in a wealthy Chicago and its suburbs, living a pretty innocent life, finding it hard to knock on doors and understand a world delimited by stern Republican boundaries. It took the McCarthy era to open my eyes to the incontestable conservative authority that then moved the world. Chicago was its capitol. Trump is its debased inheritor who puts the old party to shame.
The history of Chicago political conventions will not be lost on some of you. Now we have the “Happy Days Are Here Again” Kamala revelry which we can’t help but treasure and enjoy. Yet, for us oldsters, 1968 won’t go away. Vietnam split the party irrevocably, and there are still echoes of that in the dissent over the war in Gaza, which simmers in the background. Thousands of protesters are kept under wraps by Chicago’s good cops.
Party heavyweights have rightly kept the celebration going but there will have to be a reckoning. How Kamala handles this knottiest of issues, whether and how she will break with Biden’s wretched policy of arming Israel will be her biggest challenge. I have a hunch she will be up for it. Everything in her history predicts it.
this Jell-O apricot salad.
I had written this satirical piece about President Biden, and then suddenly last night the Former President endured an assassination attempt. Another horrible indictment of the violence in this country. So it might not be in good taste to publish the piece right now, but the political battles will go on and Trump will survive.
Fintan O’Toole may have written one of the sharpest and saddest takedowns of President Biden, our current Don Quixote. In his NYR piece Savior Complex he explained it this way: “Biden’s tragedy is that he has come to feel that he alone can rescue America.”
As Biden sees it, his destiny is to defeat Trump, his magic dragon, his doppelganger, his antithesis and nemesis. Like Don Q, Biden is obsessed with his honor, here it’s the notion of “finishing the job.” Unfortunately, like the Don, the disconnect from his own reality has become palpable for all to see.
As I write this, we’re on the cusp of discovering whether a grand council of Democratic sages (Pelosi, Schumer, Obama et al.) might prevail on Joe to step aside and get off his high horse. They don’t have a lot of time. If I were able to consult with Joe, I might render it this way:
“Look, man, here’s the deal. Let me put it to you from one aged American to another. You seem to think you can outrun Father Time. You’re also fond of quoting your father: “Joey, don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” You keep trying to beat the devil, and nobody’s buying it. In fact, what you need is simply to face the discordant music of getting old.
“Getting old means relinquishing a lot of things, and not just your car keys. You have a history of communication failures―lapses, gaffes and solecisms―all compounded because of the complexity and uncertainty of issues you must deal with daily. Your tasks get more difficult, and aging makes them more formidable. Your delivery gets worse, and sound bites are hard to package, as you should have learned. You’ve been a good president, Joe. But now the signs of senility are hard to miss, and you don’t want to end up like Dianne Feinstein, do you?
“I’ve been retired for fifteen or more years, my friend. Of course we all hate the word and the concept behind it. But you don’t have to sit on the front porch of your Rehoboth beach house. If it’s honor that moves you, let it come to you as a highly revered figure of U.S. politics, not as the man who tried to beat the devil.”