Trump tries lecturing Zelenskyy
The President of the United States is barking mad.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Tears for Fears
Monument to victims of Nazi massacre in St. Julien de CrempseThe Munich Security Conference may as well have been held in the infamous Berlin suburb of Wannsee given the way that our sterling Vice President stepped into the shoes of Reinhardt Heydrich as he told the assembled European security officials that his boss Donald Trump had come up with a solution to what he might as well have called the Ukraine Question: sell 40 million people off to Trump’s murderous pal, Vladimir Putin, let him order a great big Bucha and be done with them.
Reports from the conference said the attendees were in shock as Vance told them that they couldn’t count on the United States to stand by its NATO treaty obligations in defense of its European allies. Vance might just as well have called out “so long Article 5” to his stunned audience on his way out the door.
It was left to the Security Conference Chairman, Christophe Heusgen, to try to make sense of what had just happened. Calling what he had heard from United States spokesmen a “European nightmare,” Heusgen lamented that “This conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.” His voice breaking, the conference chairman could no longer continue. Beginning to cry, he walked away from the podium and embraced his wife in the front row of the audience. The conference attendees, who had begun applauding as Heugsen broke down in tears, fell silent.
Bob Dylan and the unfairness of genius
Bob Dylan puts on a song like a suit of clothes. He does it when he plays concerts, sings his old hits as if for the first time, frequently confounding his back up band with his changes. Through the magic of YouTube, we can listen to him in the studio, recording “Positively 4th Street” through 12 takes, each different from the other. You’re relieved when he hits the take that’s used on the record, but changing his approach, his tone, the attitude of his singing, doesn’t reveal any more about him than changing from a cashmere sweater into a plaid lumberjack shirt.
You can hear the deliberateness of the different takes. He is, and was, a professional musician, after all. He appeared to be trying to find himself inside the songs he wrote and sang, but maybe that was a put-on, like so much else he said for public consumption. In an interview for Newsweek done in February of 1968, Dylan said, “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s myself and there’s my song.”
An icy night of snow and blues
It was bitterly cold on a late December night, and snow was starting to blow when I went out to listen to Slim Harpo at Steve Paul’s Scene, a club on West 46th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City that was one of the hippest rock and roll joints the city has ever seen. Hendrix played there in ’67, it was the first place the Doors ever played in New York, and it was a home-away-from-home for touring British acts like Traffic and Jeff Beck. Most of all, it was the premier blues venue in the city.
On this night, with the wind howling and the temperature hovering somewhere in single digits and Slim Harpo playing, I went early. He was supposed to go on at 10:00, and me, I’m thinking it’s fucking Slim Harpo and the place is going to be packed, so I arrived around 8:00. Steve sat me down right in front of the stage at this little table about the size of a dinner plate. There was a one-drink minimum, and I figured I could afford one beer. That was it. I was determined to nurse it through the entire show.
Well, I waited and waited, and I was nursing my beer and checking the door for the crowds I thought would show up any minute, but nobody did. Around 9:30, Steve opened the door and stepped outside, checking up and down the street. Snow was blowing through the open door, and finally Steve came back inside and sat down across from me at the table and introduced himself. Other than the bartender and a couple of waitresses, we were the only two people in the place.
“I guess the blizzard kept everyone at home,” Steve said. “You’re my only customer. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re going to have a show tonight. Let me get you another beer. I’m going to go and talk to Slim.”
He came back about five minutes later, followed by Slim and a guy who played a snare drum and a guy who played an old Fender Telecaster. Steve sat down next to me and said, “Slim told me if there’s a paying customer out there, we’re putting on a show.”
Did they ever! They played all of his hits, like “I’m a King Bee,” “Baby Scratch My Back,” “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and “I Got Love If You Want it,” plus covering half the blues canon of the time. All three of them were sitting on stools. They were in their 40s, but to me they looked like Moses coming down from the Mount. Slim wasn’t well, health-wise — he would die two years later — but he wailed on that harmonica and barked out his songs, and between songs, they chatted with Steve and me from the bandstand, which was about a foot high and two feet away. An hour or so later they were still playing when Steve said, “Let’s call it a night.”
We stood there talking while Slim and his guys packed up their instruments — no roadies needed for one electric guitar case, the smallest Fender amp you ever saw, and one snare drum case and a stand. Slim stuck his harmonicas in his pockets and we all headed out the door. Outside, more than a foot of snow had fallen. Steve said good night and tromped off into the blowing snow. Slim turned to me and asked, “You got any plans?” I said no. “Why don’t you come on along with us?” Why not?
The Delaware River is not running backwards
The author posted this before the assassination attempt. It’s still on time…
Photo by Tracy Harris
I have been reporting on and writing about politics for 55 years, and I have never in all those years seen people so depressed about the state of our union, as they say.
Fathers of Our Country (A Truscott Twofer)
This is the “law and order” Donald Trump is running on
May 24, 2024
Donald Trump invited two rappers who are members of the 8 Trey Crips gang onstage with him at his rally in the Bronx yesterday. Tegan “Sleepy Hallow” Chambers did eight months in prison on charges of gun possession and criminal conspiracy. Michael “Sheff G” Williams served two years in prison for criminal possession of a firearm. Both men were arrested last year along with 32 other gang members in a 140-count indictment for gang activity, murder, and conspiracy.
Being and Somethingness
Here in Northeast Pennsylvania, we have entered that time of the year when yellow blossoms are coming to life on the forsythia and daffodils, and the dead limbs of trees are falling to the ground on the wind. It is one of the rites of spring that the flowers catch your eye, and the dead branches catch your feet.
Donald Trump and the Machinery of Fame
Let’s take a trip back to June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump announced he was running for president the first time. I’m taking you back that far because I want to see if I can find something…anything…normal about it. Not normal psychologically – we all know how that search would go – but normal politically.
Ghosts of Christmas past: Aspen, 1967
Christmas vacation when you were a cadet at West Point was all about how you got there. You could fly space available in uniform for half price, but even that was too much if you had to fly halfway across the country, so it was pretty common for cadets to look for “hops,” a free ride on an Air Force cargo plane that was going your way.
A friend of mine and fellow ski patrolman at West Point, we’ll call him Alex, discovered that his father’s former roommate at West Point had retired from the Army as a Colonel and took a job as the manager and groundskeeper at the Aspen School of Music. The main hall at the school, about 200 feet long and 20 feet wide was used for chamber music concerts in the summer and had two offices at one end of the building with convertible sofas. The School of Music was closed, and they were ours over Christmas, the Colonel said, if we could get out there. A lift ticket that year was $6.50. We could manage that. We found an Air Force hop and rode in some spare web-seats on a C-141 loaded with cargo headed for McConnell Air Force Base near Wichita.
The terrible option
My brother Frank
If you’ve known someone who died by their own hand, you walk around for the rest of your life with a question mark so real, you can see it with your eyes and feel it on your skin. Why? What drove them to do it? Even though people commit suicide all the time, no one wants to confront that darkness or our resentment that they have left us with the terrible knowledge that death is not just a reality, it’s an option.
I’ve known several people who have taken their own lives, but the two I miss most dearly are my brother, Frank, and my friend the folksinger, Phil Ochs. They were very different people, and their suicides were very different.
And now for something a bit lighter: The great Garfinkel’s caper
If this were a perfect world, to be a boy and 18-years-old would be banned, or somehow made illegal, anyway. I say this from experience, some of which is outlined in this story.
It was the early winter of 1964 in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. when I and three friends, who were all long on energy and short on some essential brain cells, decided it would be a fantastic idea to pull off the greatest shoplifting caper in our young lives.
The mainstream media completely missed the story when reporting on Trump’s visit to the South Carolina gun store
Candidate Trump’s stop at a gun store in South Carolina on Monday wasn’t just an offhand visit: His eight SUV convoy doesn’t do anything without advance planning days or even weeks ahead of any event Trump attends or location he visits. He made a decision to stop at Palmetto State Armory in Summerville, South Carolina, because he knew that that specific gun store was where the racist shooter in Jacksonville, Florida bought the guns he used to kill three Black people at a Dollar General store in late August.
Seventy-five cents okay with you?
Green Street in 1969
The first loft I lived in was on the north side of Broome Street, between Crosby and Lafayette. I sublet it for the summer of 1969 from an artist by the name of Jack Whitten.
Yet more evidence that this Supreme Court is the most corrupt in history
In his egregiously wrong Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, Chief Justice Roberts appended a sneaky little footnote exempting the nation’s service academies — West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy. Roberts doubtlessly thought he was being crafty when he noted that there are “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present” that necessitates exempting them from the decision. Earlier in his opinion, Roberts wrote that because the 14th Amendment affords citizens “equal protection under the laws,” it forbids discriminating between them on the basis of race. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote.
Notes on the State of Whiteness
Truscott wrote this column at the beginning of May, but his piece remains on time. “Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it.” [1]
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Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has, with the recent exposure of an unredacted text message to one of his producers, done the American people a grand favor. He has unleashed for all to see the truth behind his, and racists’ like him, devotion to white supremacy.
On this and every Memorial Day, my family and I remember Grandpa
This is the way CNN commemorated Memorial Day in 2015, with a story they called, “The General Who Apologized to the Dead Soldiers on Memorial Day.”
“At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, Memorial Day 1945 was an elegiac occasion. Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., who had led the U. S. Sixth Corps through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy and now commanded the Fifth Army, gave a speech that is particularly relevant for today when the trauma of our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to haunt so many vets.
I wish they would show the pictures of the dead
This is the news photo used to illustrate the mass killing of five in Texas. AP photo.
Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m. shooting his rifle in his front yard. There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, and this is the 19th shooting that killed more than four people, not including the shooter.
There were things that happened
Jackie Curtis
In 1970, my apartment, four rooms on the 6th floor of a building on 12th Street and Avenue B overlooking a fried chicken joint everyone called Nodders, because junkies, whose habits made them crave sugar and salt, would hang out there during the day, nodding out over paper plates of fried chicken and cups of Coke. The place didn’t have a bathroom because the owner, an old Greek guy who wore a white shirt and a white apron and a chef’s toque, got tired of dragging overdose cases out of the single stall and calling the cops. He didn’t get rid of the nodders, however. They made up more than half his business.
I furnished the place completely off the street.
With These Hands
I was going to start with a question, whether it’s possible to be self-conscious about your hands, but of course the answer is yes.