ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
We forget how bad things were in 2016 before Trump’s inaugural. Blacks were strongly behind Clinton but some, like Don King, were stumping for her opponent. The dialogue that follows will be part of my new book. Continue reading “Ugly People, Ugly Language”
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.
There is no way to ignore Trump, but you can work around him. This seems to be what the world is finding. A personal answer might be: rediscovering connections to the significant people and circumstances that were part of one’s life history, reaffirming your values. For me this meant recognizing how I sustained myself for 91 years in this strange world. I tried various roads to avoid the sinkholes. Continue reading “After Trump, Making Connections”
Well, I’m giving you another reprise of my stuff, this one from 2017. It demonstrates how little has changed for the Democrats over these 7-plus years. Today these very same issues are being debated after a withering election. The years have brought us myopia, hibernation, and head in the sand denial of political realities. Sadly, the Dems are still fumbling with their insularity. What’s now emerging are the compromisers.
I should say it used to be my party. The Democrats lost me even before the [2017] election: I thought both Sanders and Clinton were bad candidates and said so here, among other places.
Elections in America are built on fraud in its various forms. People accept that they have to buy in because as both parties are structured voters have no truly democratic choices. Or a Hobson’s choice as in 2016 for the Democrats. With Clinton they have a candidate who has been on the wrong side (by my standards) of many issues. But her political life was enabled by the transformation of the Democratic party to one that cultivates money and elitism in its many forms. The party abandoned the working classes, its real constituency, many years ago—yes, even before Bill Clinton, who put the cap on it.
Bernie’s ideals would seem to be at great variance with those of the neoliberal Democrats. Yet he is now one of them. That in itself is a kind of hypocrisy. His calls for a revolution are ridiculous: this guy is no Che Guevara. If he truly wants a revolution, let him start speaking out to black people, the immigrants, and the white working (i.e., nonworking) classes who have been sold out of the action for years.
I spent years working for the party at the local, state and national level. In Washington I did a stint at the DNC working on the Clinton healthcare campaign in ’93-’94, producing a series of videoconferences for Hillary. You can read about that here. It was important, hard work even if we lost the battle.
Now we are getting a slew of articles with nostrums and correctives about the chaos in the Democratic party, and here am I adding to the clutter. Donna Brazile, who caused some of the problems, chimes in, telling how the DNC was in the tank for Hillary all along. Which was pretty obvious from the start.
The issues for advocacy facing the Democrats are both social and economic in the broad perspective of electoral politics. Yet they seem to prefer debating issues of ideal politics and identity politics. They still don’t understand how to deal with the kind of economic populism that got Trump elected. Nancy Pelosi and the old guard have not yet proposed any kind of message that might conceivably attract voters of all stripes. It would be trite but true to say that the party needs to rebrand. But so far the best message they have come up with is “A Better Deal”—like something you’d get from Walmart.
Practical (not ideal) politics is about winning elections, and the Democrats need younger candidates who focus on issues that are real and vital to a majority of people. A number of fresh-faced challengers, like Kelly Mazeski in Chicago, are in the field but they need a driving message and the backing that only the national party can provide. Healthcare, which affects everybody, is the obvious issue for the party in 2018—that is, a fiscally sound universal program perhaps like the German system, not the unaffordable Medicare for All that has been proposed.
In other words, the best hope for Democrats is to speak intelligently to a real and comprehensive need.
The only path to success for the Dems is to offer up a vision of the future that will include, well, everybody—as Pope Francis said in his recent TED talk. There are two proposals that have been in the air for years that would be key not to just winning the next election but to serving the wants and needs of all the people. (Which in fact should be the key to winning elections—the reverse of identity politics.)
One idea is to develop a viable scheme to provide universal basic income (UBI) and make it available to everyone who votes. The other is universal health care. Before you laugh me out of the room, consider that the major controversy over both these ideas is not over whether they are needed but how to implement them.
The party has also failed to explain just what and whom it stands for. And they have called for litmus tests on things like abortion, opening up an old wound. There are too many whiners and not enough killers, according to David Krone, Harry Reid’s ex chief of staff. The Dems have few trained attack dogs or counter-punchers. . . .