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Comments on the Rittenhouse Verdict

I said I would eschew politics in this blog but events always confound our best intentions. By now most of you know that a jury exonerated Kyle Rittenhouse of all charges. House libertarian Megan McArdle of the Washington Post wrote a disgraceful pseudo-defense of that verdict with a number of preposterous claims.

 I’ll give you a few of the comments outraged readers made (8,000 and counting) about her piece instead of writing mine. Readers sometimes have more sense than writers.

    •  An almost all white jury picked in a day by a judge who insisted that the dead men could be called “rioters” and “looters” but not “victims.” That’s your benefit of the doubt, extended almost unilaterally to white men with guns, and no one else.
    • This is the sort of grandiose self deception that always leads to tragedy. Just like George Zimmerman playing cop killed Trayvon Martin, in the same way Rittenhouse wanted to play militiaman, and when it turned out that he was not invincible, as soon as he felt threatened, he panicked and shot over and over. Privelged White boys with deadly toys.
    • Bottom line: open carry vigilantism is now the law of the land.
    • What a delusional piece of garbage. This gives license to all the little Nazis out there to declare open season on protests.
    • Let’s not candy coat this. He should not have been there at all. He should not been allowed by police to roam around armed. When it looked like he might be in over his head he chose to use that weapon and shot to death two people severely injuring another. Why isn’t he accountable for at least something, anything? What a travesty.
    • McArdle really should have waited awhile before penning this post trial assessment. What this trial reveals is a clear example of white privilege, that’s what the article writer refers to as the “benefit of the doubt.” . . . The minute the foolish young man decided to grab his gun before leaving home for a protest out of state was the moment his fate and his victim’s fate were sealed.
    • Left or right, it doesn’t matter. The fact is two people died, and one was injured. The fact that these people couldn’t defend themselves, (they didn’t have a gun, Rittenhouse did) , they never made it to court, because a 17 year old boy decided to take a gun into a dangerous situation and decided to shoot. I didn’t buy his display of tears, all good defense attorneys coach such performances. Make him look like a choir boy, and the jury will forgive him. They did. But what message does that send to other 17 year old boys, who think carrying a loaded AR-15 rifle is “cool,” and are not trained to handle intense situations. Where were this boy’s parents? Who in their right mind would allow their kid to carry a loaded weapon into an inflammatory situation? If Rittenhouse wanted to give aid and put out fires, why did he bring the gun with him? Guns are only used for one reason, to kill. This verdict doesn’t surprise me, considering the behavior of the judge, who bent over backwards to help the defendant. Juries are keenly aware of when a judge consistently dresses down a lawyer, justified or not. Justice was not served today.
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Alcoholics Synonymous

Who could be surprised to learn that the pandemic has produced more heavy drinking? Recent studies tell us the obvious. The history of drinking in America has been fraught with ups and downs and ambivalence about booze, though for centuries drinking has been part of family life. It certainly was so in mine.

My parents seemed tacitly to approve of my drinking from about age fifteen—or at least were easy and permissive about it. Here’s how some of that culture came about.

One of my early memories is of my father mixing drinks at his opulent built-in bar, all stainless steel, mirrors and glasses, with a wet sink of course. I recall seeing in the cabinets below many fifths of Dewar’s White Label Scotch, a brand which I still like to this day. Dad used to take me to Bears football games in the dead of winter, and I learned the virtues of drinking out of a flask.

Scotch and gin were family staples, and my father had a six o’clock ritual of alternating Scotch on the rocks one night with Seagram’s yellow gin martinis the next. I once asked him what would happen if he drank martinis two nights in a row—a remark not wholly appreciated.

After my parents retired to Miami, that same alternating ritual continued. On a visit there which hadn’t gone too smoothly I poured myself a double Scotch one evening. Dad said, “John, you seem to be drinking a lot these days.” I got up and poured the drink out in the bar sink and he responded, “Well, you didn’t have to do that.”

But we also had our jolly times with booze. One such was the Boodles Gin incident, recounted in my book Jive-Colored Glasses (pp. 88-89). My mother and father had come to New York to celebrate the birth of my second son Ethan, and we celebrated, bombed out and jovial, with an afternoon of Boodles martinis.

My mother had her own preferences for drinking, which usually involved vodka and water with a squeeze of lime. She admitted that this was owing to vodka’s propensity to have no giveaway smell. After she died, her maid discovered a plain bottle labeled “DOUCHE” in the medicine cabinet. It contained you-know-what.

Heavy drinking seems to be as American as apple pie. Kate Julian notes this in her valuable piece on the subject:

By 1830, the average American adult was consuming about three times the amount we drink today. An obsession with alcohol’s harms understandably followed, starting the country on the long road to Prohibition.

What’s distinctly American about this story is not alcohol’s prominent place in our history (that’s true of many societies), but the zeal with which we’ve swung between extremes.

After noting that close to 25 percent of Americans admit to drinking more in the pandemic, she wonders how bad this excessive drinking really is. It depends, she says, “not only on how much you drink, but on how and where and with whom you do it.” We drink “because it is fun” and most of us avoid the “dark side” of drinking alcohol.

Yet drinking has lately become less social and more solitary, a typically American propensity. Julian notes that anxious women have become the new class of sometime drunks:

A growing class of merchandise now helps women carry concealed alcohol: There are purses with secret pockets, and chunky bracelets that double as flasks, and—perhaps least likely of all to invite close investigation—flasks designed to look like tampons.

She adds to these “the Poland Spring bottle secretly filled with vodka.” Some things never change.

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Coltrane the Cultural Icon

I’m moved to write about the Great Jazz Messiah after reading what Ben Ratliff wrote in the Washington Post the other day. Ben, a good critic now somewhat retired from journalism, pokes and probes around the cultural goings-on of the early ‘60s to explain Coltrane’s evolution, from 1961 to be exact.

It’s a kind of “rambling, unfocused piece,” as one commenter put it. And it makes the usual generalizations about the era that can ring false to those who lived through it, as I did. His piece also testifies to why I don’t write jazz criticism anymore.

Ratliff focuses on 1961 because it was the time of Coltrane’s pathbreaking Live at the Village Vanguard recordings. Here’s part of his negative take on the culture of that time:

From my standpoint—I wasn’t born until seven years later—the culture of that period seems marked by tension, diffusion, doubt, repetition, foreboding, lengthiness, savviness, taut aggression, wary knowledge, inspired dread, disciplined joy. The music sounds post-heroic and pre-cynical; interestingly free from grandiosity; full of room for the listener to find a place within it and make up their own mind. I want to live in it—not necessarily in its material evidence (I am looking forward to the next Playboi Carti record, just like you), but in its sensitivity, its skepticism and refusals. I think I can.

(Whew! Some tortured language here. Just like you, I had to Google “Playboi Carti.”) Ben finds all this as a cornerstone to Coltrane’s music of the period. I heard it rather differently. As a college kid I had spent an evening hearing Coltrane live with the first Miles Davis Quintet, as recounted in Jive-Colored Glasses. In 1956-57 that marked a whole new sound from the hard bop noises we were used to.

When I came to New York in 1965 to teach at NYU I also found a quasi-career as a jazz writer. Coltrane’s music by then had moved on to its final phase, a sound of total feeling—formless, powerful, and to a degree ineffable. Ben Ratliff, it turns out, wrote one of the best critical books about this development—in Coltrane: The Story of a Sound).

If you came at the later Coltrane from a more analytical (and less cultural) point of view as I did, you’d find the music hard to get into, hard to move you musically. After A Love Supreme he just lost me. Ben’s book quotes trumpeter Don Ellis’s criticisms (p. 163). Here are a couple of things Ellis points up that also bothered me. One is Coltrane’s sense of time:

That is, he never really gets “inside” the pulse, but rather plays over it. He now has his whole group playing with this same feeling! This is a good device, but it would be even more effective if balanced by strong “inside time” sections. In fact contrast in general is one of the weaknesses of this group.

 . . . In the great bulk of Coltrane’s work we get a good deal of filigree or decoration (in the form of continuous scales and arpeggios performed at a rapid velocity) but very little “meat” or positive strong statements or ideas. It is like he is playing chorus after chorus, solo after solo on only one idea—that of continually varying scale patterns and arpeggios.

That is valid technical criticism, but it really got under the skin of all those who wanted to find echoes of Africa in all that Coltrane did, to the exclusion of other influences. A kind of reverse racism, it seemed to me, and I wrote a piece about it that generated some commentary.

There has been so much written about the ‘60s, the white-black polarizations, the push for new Black Art, the musical cries of cultural pain. Coltrane’s late music, especially in Meditations and after, values feeling over form and rapidly became part of how American culture came to view jazz as a whole.

In that sense Saint John was certainly a revolutionary. But, like so much in our cultural life, his late music was not really open to replication. For all its angry devotional power, I think its closed, hermetic appeal was one reason why jazz lost its way and became a music only for the committed few.

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The Mad Craziness

Ralph Steadman, Police Convention 1971

To honor the memory of Hunter S. Thompson we’ve assembled some factoids regarding the mental health of the U.S. population. As one who follows such things, I’ll note that it has gotten considerably more hopeless since Hunter’s time.

    • Thirty-nine percent of them believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Forty percent trust far-right news.
    • “In the hours following the Arizona call [for Biden], a paranoid conspiracy theory spread rapidly on Parler and in other right-wing online forums: Voters in conservative counties had been given felt-tip pens that supposedly made vote-counting machines reject the ballots that they marked for Trump.”
    • “It was at a Turning Point USA event at Boise State University Monday that a member of the audience asked organizer Charlie Kirk, ‘How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?’”
    • A US senator [Ted Cruz] loudly defended a man who gave a Nazi salute as a protest at a school board meeting.
    • The unconstitutional Texas law that effectively bans all abortions is now being heard by the Supreme Court. The Court has agreed to duck the constitutional issue and to decide only procedural questions.
  • And we could go on—about Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and the other loonies—but you get the drift, and it’s all historical, of course. Hunter Thompson was our political harbinger, and what he had to say about Nixon goes double for Trump:

Writing about the final days as president of his nemesis Richard Nixon, Mr. Thompson observed, “The slow-rising central horror of ‘Watergate’ is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.”

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By the Time I Retrieved My Fly Swatter,
the Fly Had Flown Off

Our concept of time constrains, to one degree or another, everything we do. Delay frustrates the best-laid plans, stresses every outcome, and makes for bad decisions. Look at the climate crisis. We still can’t comprehend the magnitude of its unfolding. The remedies proposed are insufficient and politically impossible, even if we had the time and will to impose them.

Democrats keep struggling to agree on their social spending plan, and the results look worse and worse. Biden wants an agreement before he goes to the Glasgow conference to avoid looking like a climate blowhard. But the pressure of time won’t make for a better deal. To link an event like Glasgow to drafting major legislation is typical of how we lock ourselves into political and social deceptions.

And yet I think we all function better with deadlines. Channeling the pressure of time to an agreed-upon outcome produces results, especially when dodging the deadline has serious consequences. But this only works on the mundane level of things to do. How does Nancy Pelosi enforce her legislative deadlines? Out of necessity she fudges them.

Political impotence is the result and has been for years. Anything short of major political reform won’t change things, and so we’ll keep trying to swat flies like Sinema and Manchin because we’re not going to see major political reform, are we?

My outlook is gloomy because real political reform seems more than ever a pipedream, and the world is enmeshed in a capitalistic system with deep historical and social roots. Amitav Ghosh has written a new book about this which I’ll be reviewing shortly.

Our concept of time has led to the great divorce from nature that has finally resulted in massive climate change. We still see time as something linear, progressing, moving always forward. But in fact, as I’ve said before, “progress is the spurious idea behind modernity, which fostered the separation of mankind from nature.”

The way we perceive time is basically an illusion. So says physicist Carlo Rovelli in a wonderful book, The Order of Time, which I’ve read. “Perhaps, therefore, the flow of time is not a characteristic of the universe: like the rotation of the heavens, it is due to the particular perspective that we have from our corner of it.”

Still, our awareness of time passing “contains all the ambrosia and all the gall of life.”

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Travel Broadens the Mind?

Maybe so, when you’re younger. Travel did that for me long ago in trips to Europe and South America, later to the Caribbean and Mexico. Living in France for a summer I think changed my outlook more radically than my years growing up in Chicago. One reason is that you are compelled to adapt to new values and lifestyles.

The appeal of travel has waned as I’ve aged. The world has become a lot less engaging as its problems have escalated. Better communications have brought distant peoples (and their predicaments) closer. The hassles with air travel, Covid, and crowds of tourists don’t seem worth it.

Becoming an expat has forced me to look at travel differently from how my fellow expats view it. They have ties and needs that I do not. My family is small, dispersed, and I feel somewhat dislocated from them.

One friend is now on a trip to the East Coast, nominally to get her Covid shots but also to visit an old school friend, family, and rediscover the U.S. after an 11-year absence. A couple just returned from a hectic trip to Philadelphia, seeing doctors and friends and rushing to three other cities. Another couple flew to Minneapolis for a week to finalize the purchase of a condo.

I view these activities with a sense of wonderment. There but for the grace of God don’t go I. Studying French literature years ago I encountered a wonderful decadent novel, À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) by J.K. Huysmans, which contains a remarkable interlude with its hero, Des Esseintes. This reinforced the notion that travel is, of course, a mental as well as a physical act.

In another episode, he decides to visit London after reading the novels of Charles Dickens. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. He then cancels his trip and returns home, convinced that only disillusion would await him if he were to follow through with his plans.

I’m not an aesthetic recluse, at least not yet, and I surely don’t reject nature and normal life in favor of artifice, as Des Esseintes did. But I’ve discovered that by not having to resort to travel I can keep alive some of the illusions and discoveries that it brought to me long ago.

Now celebrities and people like Bezos are going into space—in search of new sensations perhaps. For me, travel is just a short circuit for living extensively in another place. A typical article on the benefits of travel finds seven:

      1. Travel Makes You Happier
      2. Travel Lets You Disconnect & Recharge
      3. Traveling Relieves Stress and Anxiety
      4. Travel Exposes You to New Things
      5. Travel Exposes Others to New Things
      6. Travel Makes You Physically Healthier
      7. Traveling Can Boost Your Creativity.

I submit that none of these are really true. They may happen or they may not.

In a way, becoming an expat is the ultimate travel experience because it implies committing to a place rather than just sampling it. Your perspective changes totally, and you see the follies of your home country, for instance, more clearly when you’re detached from them.

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The Obsession with Sinema

Well, to put it simply, she violates a lot of norms.

She will not negotiate on Biden’s most important legislation. She jets off to Paris while her party experiences a legislative crisis. She fundraises and runs marathons when she should be working. She upholds the filibuster. She won’t talk with her supporters. She dresses like a tart, offending effete Washington standards. She wears a ring that says “Fuck off.”

One could go on, but the media have covered all of this. Let me offer some cheap analysis.

Sinema seems drunk with the power of her position. She has the pride of a person with no fixed values, like a character out of Dostoevsky. This can only end badly. Republicans like McConnell profess to love her, while progressives are organizing against her. Politically she has burned her bridges.

She and Joe Manchin, another egotist, may well torpedo the Biden agenda approved by a majority of the public. That might just end their political careers. Party loyalty has now been transformed into partisanship, and partisans brook no apostasy. A Yale study “found that just 3.5% of respondents would vote against their partisan interests to protect democratic principles.” Biden’s unforced errors won’t torpedo his program, but partisanship surely could.

If she continues to offend Democratic (and indeed democratic) values, Sinema will either have to become an Independent or find a new career as a lobbyist. She seems to be positioning for the latter. In 2003 she ran a campaign against the hawkish and waspish Joe Lieberman. Now she’s become a Lieberman and he defends her.

Sinema appears to have become a product of her own periodic whims, which is maybe why she refuses to explain herself. She’s in danger of becoming a rebel without a cause.

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Old Jazz Posts Never Die

Some of you will remember jazzinsideandout.com, my old blogging hangout and the ancestor of Goodmanspeaks.com. I’m now reposting several of JI&O’s better pieces on All About Jazz, one of the longest lasting and most comprehensive jazz websites. This, courtesy of AAJ founder/publisher Michael Ricci.

The posts cover everything from a Louis Armstrong party to Miguel Zenón and can be read here. I hope you jazz lovers will check them out and, if the spirit moves you, leave a comment or two.

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Living Here, Not There

Oaxaca, where I live, is a very transient community. Of the Americans living here, many visit for a few months a year or less, then move back in the summer to enjoy the heat, humidity, and dementia of U.S. culture. Snowbirds, we call them. They come from Canada too.

The transiency of this place also affects Oaxacanians. Over the past twelve years I’ve been here, two of my best Mexican friends decamped to the U.S. and it’s been hard to replace them. Some go there to work and support their local families. Others give up on the basically tourist economy. The pull of family draws others, gringo and Mexican.

For Americans, learning Spanish may just be too big a challenge. Some feel (rightly) that they will never really identify with Mexican culture and mores. Asking gringos why they choose to give up on living here—and how long they might stay—elicits many responses: Mexican culture doesn’t work for them; it’s too remote here, too different; they love the beach but it’s too hot in summertime; medical care is too erratic.

Some can’t stand the frequent bloqueos, where aggrieved social groups halt traffic on major thoroughfares for hours. Or the contrasts between poverty and wealth that abound. Living well here requires at least a modicum of wealth and a sense of history.

But the big draws are the rate of exchange (it’s cheap to live here), the food, and the climate. These can mean a lot. The small talk in my group usually covers all of the above, though conversation with the many resident foodies can get a little tedious—for instance, babbling on about the newest restaurant or the grand molé at Le Catedral.

Personal responses to living here vary considerably. One resident couple I know splits up frequently because she likes her time in the U.S. and he enjoys more time here. Another has a house at the beach but they also want to spend half time at the house in Arizona they are building. Another couple will be moving back to Virginia for better medical care and a more congenial social atmosphere.

Twelve years ago I decided to change my life, live more cheaply, and flee American politics and culture, with which I had been too involved. I told friends I was broke and needed a total change. I’ve explained some of the causes behind my move in a post here last July entitled “Expats Exposed.” Take a look if you are curious about my motivations.

My move here accomplished all I had hoped for. After living in many places in the U.S. and traveling abroad in my younger days, I can’t conceive of a better place to flop and face the bizarre, often desperate world we live in.

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Finally, Some Sense on Climate

The discussion on how to control the out-of-control climate has always seemed to me somehow out of whack. Climate doctors invariably focus on changing our energy sources, but pay little attention to how to cool this rapidly overheating planet. And that is the presenting problem.

Dr. David Keith, a professor of applied physics and of public policy at Harvard, finally addresses this crucial issue in “What’s the Least Bad Way to Cool the Planet?” He offers what will be to many a new framework for addressing our most immediate urgency.

Eliminating emissions by about 2050 is a difficult but doable goal. Suppose it is achieved. Average temperatures will stop increasing when emissions stop, but cooling will take thousands of years as greenhouse gases slowly dissipate from the atmosphere. Because the world will be a lot hotter by the time emissions reach zero, heat waves and storms will be worse than they are today. And while the heat will stop getting worse, sea level will continue to rise for centuries as polar ice melts in a warmer world.

Keith’s conclusion is that we need both to stop carbon emissions and find ways to cool the planet. To do the latter we need some form of social geoengineering, likely in the form of reflecting sunlight. As another report notes, such technologies will likely involve “adding small reflective particles to the upper atmosphere, by increasing reflective cloud cover in the lower atmosphere, or by thinning high-altitude clouds that can absorb heat.” The report acknowledges that there may be “an array of unknown or negative consequences.” And many critics have focused on these. Others have tried to account for them.

The other way to reduce heat is by using carbon removal (capturing it from the air) technologies. This, it seems to Keith, is far less feasible, considering the scale and time required to bring it about.

Planting sufficient trees would require a lengthy and immense transformative effort. Industrial removal methods must confront the challenge that there is just too much carbon to remove from the air in too short a time. The technology is nowhere in place.

The challenge is that a carbon removal operation—industrial or biological—achieves nothing the day it starts, but only cumulatively, year upon year. So, the faster one seeks that one degree of cooling, the faster one must build the removal industry, and the higher the social costs and environmental impacts per degree of cooling.

Geoengineeering—e.g., putting sulfur particles into the stratosphere—sounds “reckless,” says Keith, and will surely exacerbate some climate changes, but

the harms that would result by shaving a degree off global temperatures would be small compared with the benefits. Air pollution deaths from the added sulfur in the air would be more than offset by declines in the number of deaths from extreme heat, which would be 10 to 100 times larger.

And, of course, the “grand challenge is geopolitical.” What countries would get to decide on such a course and execute it? And for how long? Carbon removal is the safest path, but “solar geoengineering may well be able to cool the world this century with less environmental impacts and less social and economic disruption. Yet no one knows, because the question is not being asked.”

More research, and there is very little now, is essential. “Cooling the planet to reduce human suffering in this century will require carbon removal or solar geoengineering or both.”

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A Warning to the Sheep

If you were thinking Trumpism was a passing phenomenon, the work of a nitwit showman, then you thought wrong. The strongest indictment came Thursday in a Washington Post opinion piece, “Our constitutional crisis is already here.” I urge you to read the full piece. For those without a subscription I’ll give some excerpts below.

Author Robert Kagan is one of those pundits who has walked both sides of the street. He’s been both a prominent neoconservative and a vigorous opponent of Trump. He was a longtime advocate for global intervention, yet in 2016 he endorsed Hillary Clinton and loudly called Trump a fascist. Here he has outlined a fearsome yet possible scenario, beginning this way:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial.

Trump will no doubt be the candidate in 2024, says Kagan, and the majority of Republicans will try to “ensure his victory by whatever means necessary.” They will do this by controlling state and local officials who certify elections. The stage is “being set for chaos” and partisan warfare.

The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way—if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.

The framers of the constitution never imagined such a breakdown of the three branches of government or the rise of such power in a national political party.

Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom—such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson.

What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. . . . His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. . . .

For Trump supporters, the “error” is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump.

 . . . Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms.

 . . . To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and insecurities that make up the human psyche.

 . . . This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party—out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear—falling into line behind him.

More on this issue:  “What If 2020 Was Just a Rehearsal?”