Once again, the polls got it wrong, and so did the media, unable to accurately capture an electorate that included so many “shy” Trump voters. None of the pros predicted the breadth of his victory. It was a dark comedy to watch them be bolloxed by the results. They were prepared for a nail-biter, but the election wasn’t even close.
Nation
“It All Started at the Border”
Back in May, Radley Balko spelled out the details of Stephen Miller et al.’s monstrous plans for a deportation army, (cholera) camps and “efficient” airlifts. (Per Miller: “So you build these facilities where then you’re able to say, you know, hypothetically, three times a day are the flights back to Mexico. Two times a day are the flights back to the Northern Triangle, right. On Monday and Friday are the flights back to different African countries, right.”)
A swatch from the opening of Balko’s piece:
Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted.
But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan.
“You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”
Choosy Beggars (Election 2024)
By David Aaronovitch, Bishop William J Barber II & Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Susan Bergeron, Carol Cooper, Stanley Corngold, Kristi Coulter, Benj DeMott, Mark Dudzic (with Katherine Isaacs & Adolph Reed), Bruce Hartford, Ty Geltmaker, Bruce Jackson, Bob Ingram, Dennis Kaplan, Eric Laursen, Queenie Lawrence, Bob Levin, Leslie Lopez, Addy Malinowski, Greil Marcus, Richard Meltzer, Dennis Myers, Zuzu Myers, Ron Primeau, John Podhorzer, Jim Rising, Aram Saroyan, George Scialabba, Micah L. Sifry, Emily Simon, Tom Smucker, Alison Stone, Scott Spencer, William Svelmoe, Lucian Truscott IV, and Leila Zalokar…
I Write What I Like: Thinking About “What Nails It” and a Few Nice Things
“A Mile from the Bus Stop,” 1955, By Jess Collins
Why start a piece on Greil Marcus’s What Nails It with Jess’s painting of Pauline Kael and her daughter in a Berkeley park?
Not only because I want its greens. Marcus devotes the second of the three chapters in his short new book to Kael who taught him what criticism could be. His felt tribute to his friend (and fellow Californian) lies at the heart of his book.
Marcus hasn’t been a confessional writer in the past, but What Nails It goes inward, probing what’s behind his drive to surprise himself with his own words. Composed fast—after seasons when he couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs and nearly a year of silence due to personal health crises—Marcus’s comeback is freewheelin’ fun.
“Vey iz mir, I Am in a Commercial for Trump, Talking Like Mine Grandmother.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition’s commercial is really bad for the Jews.
Three Jewish women discussing their decision to support Trump and their inability to find decent depilatories under the current administration.
Amber Nicole Thurman
What is the sound of desire –
heart reaching toward nursing school,
time with her six-year-old son?
Pieces of the unchosen future
rot inside her,
turn septic.
Barry Lynn’s Anti-Monopoly Jeremiad
In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois, in “Black Reconstruction,” assailed the American system of racism. Key both to his indictment of America and his dream for it, Du Bois provided perhaps the most perfect distillation of the American ideal of liberty:
“America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men.”
Du Bois ended with a quiet exclamation: “What an idea.”
What a piece by Barry Lynn in the September Harpers where he quotes from Black Reconstruction (and underscores Du Bois’s wonder-ender). Lynn’s “The Anti-trust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech”—is a sharp yet rangy polemic.
Adams Chronicle
Every fall semester, as I did again last week, I have the privilege of showing my students episode 2 in HBO’s marvelous dramatization of the life of John Adams. Episode 2 covers the debate in the Continental Congress over declaring independence from Great Britain.
RIP The Voice and the Vibe (James Earl Jones & Frankie Beverly)
Two African Americans who represented the dreams of their community made their transition this week, and I’m taking a moment to celebrate how they embody the apex, diversity, and massive creativity of blackness.
Emergent
Thanks to the Harris-Walz campaign, The Democracy is a deep far from where we were six weeks ago. There are countertruths implicit in this transition—lasting lessons about continuity and change that might even turn around exit leftists. (The breed who avowed earlier this summer: “We’re leaving the USA when Trump wins.”)
The Wind from the Midwest
We made it home. I’m sitting on the deck in 90-degree heat worrying that the 103 degrees we drove through in Nebraska might be on its way here. Uh-oh.
At any rate, a few random thoughts while driving across the West.
The Uses of the Rothermans
Originally published in “New Mexico Quarterly” in 1953.
I was eleven when my uncle closed with the Rothermans. This was 1933, in a village on the south shore of Long Island that is now pure metropolis and that was then becoming a suburb. My uncle’s family and my sister and I (our parents were killed in an auto accident in the mid-twenties) had moved shortly before from a great, white-pillared, Georgian house that faced the new golf course. The vicissitudes of a stock called Vanadium were the cause of the move: the house, the Lincolns, Robb (the former dumptruck driver who chauffeured them), Anna and Maria, illiterate German housemaids in their teens, help that had been pressed a year before from “The Daisy Huggub Agency” in Hempstead, and some other ill-chosen earnests of marginal gain — all were let go at once. The Georgian house, a product of my uncle’s massive pride, was sold to the Jewish owner of a chain of retail jewelry stores.
The Morning Crowd
(an homage to/adaptation of/improvisation upon Lydia Davis’s “Old Men Around Town”)
The customer who had been coming to Espresso Bongo the longest had been a magician. He had white hair and blue eyes which were alert and bright. He arrived when the café opened and sat at a corner table opposite the rest room and told people if it was occupied and, if they had never known or had but had forgotten the lock’s combination, he clicked the remote he palmed and opened it. If a small child arrived, he bowed, introduced himself to its parent and, with their permission, pulled a quarter from the child’s ear.
Each rainy season, he left for San Miguel de Allende. This spring he did not return. He has an ex-wife and adult son but no one at the café knew how to reach them. His usual seat has been taken by a 95-year-old, former Pilates instructor, who can still raise one foot above her head while standing on the other foot but can not keep from offering books she has brought from home to people who declined them the previous day or, sometimes, the previous hour.
Ten Things to Expect If Trump Wins
1. JFK to be renamed Trump International. By the time this takes effect, other airports will have been similarly renamed, along with their associated IATA codes. As this may create an elevated risk of baggage transport errors, carry-ons are recommended.
An Encroaching Evil: Anne Applebaum Confronts Autocracy, Inc.
Franz Kafka, a spiritual guide in these trying times, thought that there might be “a certain truth in a chorus (or choir)” of voices. For this choir, I propose vox populi and will draw counsel from readers of Anne Applebaum and listeners to Anne Applebaum who have written their reactions into the Web. After Applebaum spoke in London on “‘Putinism’: The Ideology,” one listener commented, quite simply, “Brilliant mind! Very articulate!” On another occasion, an admirer wrote, “Always, always great to hear Anne Applebaum speak. So deeply informed, humane and articulate.” I cite these voices because they speak to my own. True, another listener to her London talk complained about her very articulateness, since “being articulate like Ribbentrop or Beria (sic) is not a highly prized point of honor” (this is also what vox populi gets you); but readers of her latest book, Autocracy, Inc. aren’t likely to mind the clarity and force of her every word.
The Dispossessed (An excerpt from “The Miracle of the Black Leg”)
Patricia Williams’ The Miracle of the Black Leg, ends aptly (and elegantly) with a survey of the familial photo archive she recently deposited in a Harvard university library. She muses about “archiving as a social process” in her book’s final paragraph:
I yearn to have future beings see me and my wonderful forefathers and -mothers. We were all here! I wish them to live in social imagination more fully than many of them were able to while on the planet. And so I need to explain, I am constantly explaining. I am always looking for the right words, the right accent, the perfect analogy, the smoothest homology, the felt connection, the link that sparks a mental orgasm of humanizing recognition.
Williams squeezes out sparks in her chapter on her family and throughout The Miracle of the Black Leg. Try this extended excerpt from a passage on NOLA in a chapter titled, “The Dispossessed.” I think you’ll experience a kind of drawn-out “mental orgasm.” You may also cheer for Ms. Williams as she bites a hand that’s fed her.
Kamala Harris and the testicle deficit
A slightly adapted/compacted version of this Brit’s Substack commentary.
July 24
In our heart of hearts we all know what will decide this election. It won’t be debates or speeches or experience or fitness to serve. Saving external catastrophe it’ll be whether a critical part of the US electorate can really imagine — even almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century — a woman being president. If they manage that hurdle, Harris ought to win. But if they can’t and find enough excuses for not liking her, then she may well lose.
Donald Trump’s Very Secret Short List for VP
(Now that JD Vance has been selected, the full list can be revealed.)
The candidates (commentary by Donald Trump):
Death of a Salesman
File under #Grabembythebigotry. [Copyright to John Haas.]
So, Donald “George Wallace” Trump enlightened us all on his racial views yesterday before a group of black journalists.