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More Conversation Stoppers

Michigan Central Station before restoration
    • Your “Check Engine” light is on.
    • Do cat ladies wear cat suits?
    • She “all of a sudden decided to become a Black person.”
    • “Welcome to the ‘Underconsumption Core’ TikTok Trend—Dog Owner Edition” (Newsweek)
    • Next time you’re in Paris, go for a swim in the Seine.
    • Reporter Evan Gershkovich: “The food was really good.”
    • Mingus to a pushy nightclub patron: “Your breath stinks. Get away from me.”
    • If Trump had been wearing ear muffs. . .
    • Overheard: “Your midlife crisis don’t mean shit to me.”
    • A Jewish Vice President?. . . Talk to your doctor.
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Harris and Mingus

Maybe she looks a little looney here because this photo was cribbed from a video of her jazz-buying spree in DC last year. Kamala Harris and her husband are big jazz fans, as some of you may know. Husband Doug Emhoff was written up in The Atlantic last month:

The second gentleman, who might also be called the first jazz fan, is such a devotee that he named his children, Ella and Cole, for Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane, two of his favorite musicians. . . .He said, “Jazz isn’t constructed. It’s a little messy, like democracy can be at times.”

Anyhow, Kamala calls Mingus “really one of the greatest jazz performers ever.” Well, who is going to argue with that?

The fact that she bought Mingus’s most ambitious (and his favorite) album, Let My Children Hear Music, impresses me. She has good taste. The music is a little messy and a little disciplined, like democracy. Here is the opening number from the album, which has an almost classical feel to much of it, despite the title―“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.”

To accompany the album Mingus wrote a strong extended essay, which got some notoriety. Here’s part of what he said:

I think the music on this record is serious in every sense. I say, let my children have music. I said it earlier. For God’s sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don’t mean that today’s music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It’s as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It’s like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design. . . .

Sy Johnson―my good friend, now deceased―orchestrated, arranged and conducted much of the Children album. You can find his comments throughout my book Mingus Speaks. Here’s one such: Mingus’s “music is just full of earth and it’s always got its feet in the dirt. I mean it’s jazz, it has human cries in it, and it’s full of humanity.”

I’d like to think that may be what appealed to Kamala. Her humanity is the foundation of her appeal. It’s what people tune in to. And it’s more important than all the money she’s raised and all the memes that have taken hold online. That is what will beat Trump.

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“Let Me Get My Shoes”

That’s what he said three times while the Secret Service was hauling him off the stage. Wounded and bleeding, he was worrying about his shoes. Why haven’t people commented more about this strange fixation on his footwear? It may be one of his notable oddities, of which there are many.

One theory has it that he wears elevator shoes, which come off easy, and he didn’t want people to see him three inches shorter than normal. Sounds like Trump, doesn’t it?

You may remember the first gold sneakers he was hawking online. That first offering, as the NYMag informs us, was “the $399 gold Never Surrender high-tops, which the website indicated were limited to only 1,000 pairs and had sold out within a day of their release.” There were other designs like the Potus 45 and the T-Red Wave, all with highly inflated prices. A psychologist writes:

If you frequently wear high-top sneakers, you’re perceived as having an avoidant attachment style meaning that you care little for the opinions of others and are incredibly self-reliant [read self-absorbed].

The Trump Store is moving beyond sneakers to lots more Trump schlock, from bibles and coolers to Trump teddy bears

and kitchen essentials and even dog leashes.
But the fixation on shoes continues. Here we have the Trump Golf Shoe.

And now the Assassination Special, the Fight Sneaker.

A whole load of other stuff was being hawked to lovers of trumpdreck at the convention. He must be as broke as Rudy Giuliani. These things will serve as fond mementos of a defeated and demented candidate who barely avoided death. They appeal to women as well as men.

Gals of a certain age with prominent veins should avoid such displays. An addiction to shoes often applies to women. Some of us will remember Imelda Marcos and her 3,000 pairs of shoes. We will remember Trump far longer.

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President Quixote

Ron Klain as Sancho Panza

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.”

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Conversation Stoppers

Sarah Sze, Timekeeper

“Hey man, how ya doin’? How’s your life?”
“Fine. It will be over soon.”

National Library of Medicine on Aging (NIH): “The anterior-posterior, dorsal-ventral, and proximal-distal axes are sequentially specified and involve interactions between different compartments in the imaginal discs.”

“Rishi Sunak is coming to dinner.”

2025: President Harris could put Trump in jail.

2025: “President Trump paid me to kill you.”

Boeing Stock has “45% Upside, According to 1 Wall Street Analyst”

Jill Biden’s kindergarten tone after the debate: “You answered all the questions, you knew all the facts!”

Sean “Diddy” Combs

Tesla

Saks Fifth Avenue will acquire Neiman Marcus

One opinion in Newsweek: “Israel Must Target Iran at the Same Time as Hezbollah”

AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: “We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045.”

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Joe Must Go. Politics Ain’t Beanbag.

Some of us remember Lyndon Johnson renouncing the presidency in 1968, one of his finest moments. Some of us remember Nixon being forced out under pressure. Now we hold our collective breaths to see what Joe Biden will do. If he doesn’t resign, there is no hope of beating Trump in the next election. The results of which we leave to your imagination.

In one sense his decision will rest in the hands of his family, his wife Jill and his longtime followers. The more senile Joe has become, the more they have protected him. He offers us few press conferences, infrequent unstaged interviews, clichéd speeches, and the same old downhome Scranton working class bullshit. Senile people forever keep on referencing the past.

As someone who has done debate prep, it appeared to me that he likely had no professional coaching and relied solely on his White House cronies (Ron Klain, Bob Bauer et al.). James Carville said it too: “He doesn’t have advisers. He has employees.” Odds are they stuffed him with the obvious issues and canned responses. No professional coach would have let him appear as he did. Pee in your pants, call in sick, for God’s sake.

Presidential debates generally are more style than substance, and they are a perfect vehicle for a convincing conman.  Trump rapidly floats his same (or worse) whoppers and gets away with it uncontested. He paralyzes our analytical powers and takes obvious joy in manipulating people. Many want to believe him because it’s their form of heroin. In the flood of this the truth cannot prevail; people like Truthful Joe cannot prevail.

Part of the problem is that Biden has usually wanted to avoid being in the public eye―and the public hasn’t been crazy about seeing him either. Lili Loofbourow in the WaPo nicely put it this way: “Biden’s unwillingness and inability to court attention has, for example, made it difficult for him to sell the public on his achievements.”

There have been many comments urging Biden to quit—and many urging the opposite. Among the best and most forthright of the former is Tom Friedman’s. He urges his friend Joe Biden to step aside.

I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, he should preserve his dignity and leave the stage at the end of this term.

Finally, it’s not overly dramatic to say that the state of the nation is at stake and we face a  drastic challenge to democratic rule. Your decision, like it or not, is a political one―to win the election. You can discount everything else: the mess that will be wrought on the Democratic convention if Biden drops out, loyalty to the party and the president, the shortcomings of other challengers. Trump made it this way. He cannot survive.

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Debate Prep: A Remembrance

On Thursday evening comes CNN’s ballyhooed clown show with two unsympathetic candidates. Neither of them is very good at debating, and one has eschewed all preparation. Many will watch to see who stumbles the most, not who wins.

The attraction of a political debate is more than seeing who scores the most points. It’s to discover whom we finally can identify with. The Kennedy-Nixon televised debates in 1960 set the pattern: JFK was relaxed, prepared, and showed some style. Nixon’s presentation was cold-blooded and his tense body language gave him away. TV made all the difference, this for the first time. Though we know political media is very different now, the visual truth remains, despite AI.

When I was teaching presentation skills, I got a great mashup video cassette of those debates from a friend at American Express, where we were coaching some execs. I wish I still had it. Let’s hope that whoever is coaching Biden shows them that tape.

Biden is a hard man to identify with, while Trump is just a bomb-thrower. And debate prep is more than bringing your client up to speed on the issues and your opponent’s weaknesses. You must enable him to show his character, his realness, that he’s not just the guy you could have a beer with but someone you could warm to and respect. Reagan sets the example here.

I worked with two Rhode Island governors in the 1980s, Ed DiPrete, a Republican who later went to jail, and Bruce Sundlun, a Democrat. They battled each other several times for the governorship, and finally Bruce won in 1990 with a landslide 74% of the vote. I coached him in his presentations (speeches and press conferences, etc.) and prepared him for his first debate in 1986. He was not an easy person to work with.

Besides being irascible and unpredictable, Sundlun had had an incredible career as a WWII bomber pilot flying B-17s over Germany, getting shot down and surviving with the French Resistance, then postwar becoming a very successful businessman, which led him into a life of public service and, finally, politics.

I worked with him on the contentious issues, of course, but the main thrust was to get him to relax and open up about his present life―and his goal to make Rhode Island a destination for tourism and business. It was challenging to convince him to talk openly about himself without being pompous. “Captain Blowhard” the Providence Journal called him. Well, the man had a lot to be pompous about. His wife-to-be Susie was sometimes present in our sessions and she hassled him about that.

There are some techniques to get a client to open up and reveal who he really is. One is getting him to tell stories about growing up and remember being a kid again. Bruce finally got the message to humanize himself, I think, even though he lost that race to DiPrete.

Our sessions were also a real lesson to me about what moves people and how persuasion works on television. You’ll see once again on Thursday whether debate prep matters.

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Alice in Bump Stock Land

Down the rabbit hole into the dreary land of SCOTUS came Alice, looking for clarity and judgment and finding none. She simply wanted to know if those things they called bump stocks―devices to make those nasty guns they called assault rifles―could be modified to kill even more people. Her White Rabbit was the ATF which had banned the stocks after a gun nut shot and killed 60 people out of a hotel window in Las Vegas.

Years had passed since then and Alice, like quite a few others, thought killing people at random should not be for fun or made-up revenge. The Mad Hatter told her that deer don’t shoot back. He maintained that firing off 30 rounds in 11 seconds would be sufficient to assault a school or Walmart with no problem. Who needs a bump stock? Maybe the justices were smoking some shit?

At the Mad Tea Party the jaundiced justices promoted the theory that you had to keep pulling the trigger to activate more firing. This entirely incorrect notion presented by Clarence the Cheshire Cat concluded the bogus trial, while three justices loudly dissented and the cat kept grinning.

Alice finally recognized that the whole thing was a house of cards.

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Diplomacy by Other Means

Korean food is really good; I ordered some the other night. Yet for years we have read tales of scarcity and even famine in the North. Now the Dear Leader, with his legendary sense of humor (like executing his uncle), chooses to drop nearly a thousand poop-and-trash filled balloons on his neighbors to the South, causing world-wide scorn and laughter. There must be plenty of digested food to stock those shit bags so now we can stop worrying about starvation in the DPRK.

What’s really at stake here is a new mode of diplomacy. Kim is still provoking the world with his missile tests and bluster, repression and power purges, forced labor, and who knows what else. Besides outraging the West with his nuclear posturing, Kim is also a big jokester. Thus the poop bags, designed to bolster his endless campaign against the South, were a masterstroke of diplomatic insult.

The South weakly responded with its own balloons containing thumb drives of K-pop music and propaganda leaflets. It also suspended an agreement with the North to cease tensions and hostilities. Their back-and-forth has been going on for years; the poop balloons brought this to a new, almost frivolous, height.

You may think of the balloon as an object of lightness, freedom, celebration, anti-gravity perhaps. It can convey all kinds of meanings: politics, ads, frivolity and sport are all part of the balloon gestalt. The wonderfully loose gloss we put on balloons makes them great expressive vehicles, something Donald Barthelme explored in his bizarre tale of “The Balloon.”

In that story an enormous balloon moves over and covers Manhattan. People project their own fantasies and interpretations onto it as it shifts its shape and meaning, finally mystifying all but the narrator who somehow controls it. It ultimately means (“excessive discussion was pointless”) whatever we want it to mean. Ann Beattie contrasts it to the Chinese spy balloon shot down a while back. But Barthelme’s balloon is mystical and involving―and the poop balloons are anything but. Still, they are better than bullets and bombs.

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Sam and Martha-Ann Talk It Over

“The liberal media is after my ass once again, Martha. They can’t even understand the simple explanations I gave to the Wall Street Journal. These assholes have it ass-backwards; they are braying like jackasses in the wilderness and the fog of democrat donkey-land. Lord, if I didn’t have my faith to sustain me. . . .”

“Listen to me: you and Clarence have been playing fast and loose with Roberts and the media. Putting the blame for the flags on me I can accept. But then saying you wanted them taken down but couldn’t because of my ‘property rights’. . . sweet Jesus, Sam, what were you thinking? Yes, I bought the Virginia house with inherited money, but you are half-owner because we were dumb enough to get married. I’ve kept a private life since you got appointed to the Court. I’ve also kept the family together, as you know.

“But you looked like a complete jerk for trying to throw me under the bus.”

“My dear, I was merely trying to explain that the law gives me no power to impinge on your—my spouse’s―behavior, and that of course limits my power to apologize. I recognize that your feelings may have been hurt, but we shall stand together on this, I hope. The main issue was my total rejection of the argument to recuse myself, fully in accordance with the Court’s adopted code of ethics. Justice Roberts will stand by me, I’m sure.”

“You’ve been talking like Elon Musk, like nobody can touch you. How about a little humility for a change? I’ve seen how angry you get at home.”

“I’m angry because the world is turning against all my values. Roberts and my conservative colleagues will stand by me. The Court’s ethics code has no enforcement mechanism, and besides it says that justices are obligated not to recuse themselves. Raskin’s proposal about the due process clause will never fly with this Court. The furor about the gifts and my ties to the wealthy is just more political assassination, as I noted in my first paragraph.

“And Biden will do nothing. Even the partisan Politico knows this: ‘He has essentially stood idly by while the court has upended key aspects of American life—from abortion to affirmative action—and angered huge swaths of the country, likely contributing to the widespread national discontent that threatens his reelection.’”

“We must stick by our Christian values, Sam. I’ll never regret flying the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag and I know we both believe in its moral code. Onward Christian soldiers. Now that Trump has been crucified in that corrupt New York court, I will join with you in the battle.”

Update: For the realities behind these events, please read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/04/opinion/columnists/supreme-court-alito-flag.html