“The Human Comedy” is something you watch, and if you’re nice and mature and secure, you watch yourself being part of it.
But how can you view Trump as a part of a comedy?
Nation
Patriotism of the Scream
Re: The Torture Report Must Be Saved. (See the New York Times, p. A23, December 10).
Historians will increasingly find much to admire in the Obama presidency, but not the fact that in the years of his first administration he failed openly to review the mendacity and nationally inflicted deludedness of the Bush years. A struggle for the truth was at that moment urgently needed. Wherever that inquiry might have led, it would have been a moment past that would now calmingly come to the support of the present. For we face the increasingly bewildering question of how to parry the dislocation of mind—a reign of disinformation—that a president-elect with an impinged sense of reality now uses to keep in turmoil and uproar a nation that has itself for decades dodged knowing its own reality. It is sickening to say, but however everyday everyday life continues to seem from a sidewalk view, we are in the midst of a struggle for the truth that is propelling us to the edge of what is felt as impulses for self-preservation where any comprehension of what is actually occurring could be lost for good.
My Path to Perdition
That craggy-faced master of the art, Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill Jr., famously pointed out that all politics are local.
I’m here to tell you about that.
It began for me in mid-summer this year when I was taking my usual morning walk on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, and a bunch of young teenage punks on bikes came busting by, and the nearest one yelled at me, “Hey, buddy — vote for Trump!”
Silence = Trump
As they say in the corridors of officialdom, mistakes were made. Enough of them to go around––and I guess it’s always like that. You see your mistakes when you fail, and overlook them when you succeed. Well, we failed. Not just some sect, race, or gender, but everyone who didn’t vote. Their silence gave us Trump.
Where the Heart Is
They [Mexicans] brought their third-world ****hole here and while it’s a little bit better than what they had in the process of doing it they dragged us into the gutter with them.
What’s one more racist projection now when Alt Rightists give Nazi salutes and the President-elect’s consiglieres are (brutish or kinder/gentler) white supremacists? Acts speak louder than spew. Still, the line above jumped out at me because of where I came across it. Not at an Alt Right conclave or website, not in a bar or…locker-room, but in an email by a distinguished D.C. cardiologist, Dr. Oskoui, to a group who read and sometimes respond to William Greider’s Nation articles.
It’s Time for the Stone to Flower
On the Anniversary of Kristallnacht, Donald Trump is Elected President
It starts with breaking glass,
a brick thrown,
Jewish storefront shattered.
Businesses destroyed.
The vile Other punished.
(All that has been worked for
in ruins.)
If I didn’t know,
the German word sounds pretty,
tinkles, conjures flutes of champagne
raised in toast.
If we didn’t know.
Choosy Beggars (Election 2016)
By Michael Brod, Robert Chametzky, Benj DeMott, Joel DeMott, Ty Geltmaker, Eugene Goodheart, Casey Hayden, George Held, Adam Hochschild, Wesley Hogan, Ben Kessler, Brian Kinstler, Bob Levin, Greil Marcus, Scott McLemee, Dennis Myers (x2), Yasmin Nair, Nathan Osborne, George Scialabba, Budd Shenkin, Fredric Smoler & Alison Stone
Trow, Trump and Truman’s (Imaginary) Pussy Diary
I flashed on George Trow’s exit from The New Yorker when I scrolled through Roseanne Barr’s tweets for Trump. (“If you support HRC who stayed married to a rapist, funded ISIS, robbed starving Haitian children, you deserve xtreme horrors of her globalism”) Back in the day, when Roseanne was a phenomenon not a has-been, Trow resigned in protest from The New Yorker after celeb-mongering Tina Brown had Barr guest-edit an issue of the magazine. At the time, Trow’s gesture seemed locked into a class-bound, liberal artsy terrarium. And there’s a risk of making too much of his elite dudgeon. (I’m not putting him on a pedestal with Tommie Smith and John Carlos!) Looking back, though, Trow’s protest hints at how he was always alive to sketchy alliances that threatened to pollute the American air. As per John Irving:
More than [Trow’s] words, it is his face I remember from Exeter. As I was a slow and struggling student, I used to feel that there was something arrogant or smug in George’s smile; I occasionally felt that George Trow was smirking at me. Now I realize that he was simply more alert and more aware than I was. What I mistook for smirking was instead something prescient in his smile; it was as if the unfathomable powers of precognition were already alive within him.
The satiric movie scenario posted below provides further confirmation of George Trow’s power of precognition.
Joy ‘Round Midnight
A real-time response to MSNBC’s post-debate roundtable.
I’m giving it up to sat-sun morning Joy — who’s so joyous, so exuberant, so happy to bring up every flaw every silliness every cruelty every mistake she can’t contain her pleasure in the trumpy details — even to the point that Chris Mathews chuckling not unappreciatively (coz for all the horribles of CM he likes The Girls and he’s especially fond of Joy) sez, You’re not gonna let go, you’re going in for the kill. That beaming face (she literally cannot stop her delight and laffing) is irresistible. Happy makes happy. Sleep tight.
An Alternate History Lesson on the Clean Left
Underground Airlines by Ben Winters. Little, Brown and Company, 2016.
“To Free a Family” (Distilled)
Underground Airlines‘ alternate history (see First‘s review above) calls to mind Sydney Nathans’ actual history, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (2012). That journey began when Mary Walker ran away from bondage, leaving three children behind (along with her mother) after her master announced he planned to send his “impudent” slave to a plantation in Alabama, far removed from her family in North Carolina. Once Mary Walker got settled in the North, she spent years trying to free her family and Nathan provides a gripping chronicle of her efforts. (Struck by the drama of the book and its cast of characters, more than one reader has invoked Dickens.)
Trump and the Media
“Let Trump be Trump his aides has always insisted. And let his convention serve as an unapologetic tribute to his singular, erratic, untamed persona. ‘I want,’ the candidate has often said, ‘to be myself.’” (“In Trump’s Voice, It’s a New Nixon,” Michael Barbaro and Alexander Burns NY Times, July 19.) But who is that myself? If one looks to his political identity in the views that he has expressed over the years, one is baffled by their contradictions, incoherence and vacuous expression, unless, that is, one sees them as symptoms of a mental condition.
Like, A Prayer
“To the victor belong the spoils!” That was Camille Paglia’s reaction, reported in a May Salon article, to what she referred to as “the sexiest picture published in the mainstream media in years”—a photo showing a besuited Donald Trump looming possessively over his seated date at a banquet in the early 90s, his pendulous necktie practically tracing the word “phallus” in the air for the benefit of all easily impressed onlookers. Paglia apparently being one of them, although she wasn’t invited to the banquet—for her, the tie is a “phallic tongue” and Trump resembles “a triumphant dragon,” his “spoils” worthy of Rita Hayworth comparisons.
Gabby Douglas (Fifth Goddess from the Sun)
More than a hand
not pressed obediently to a heart.
More even than my muscled ass
still seated when my teammates soared.
My purple-lipsticked pout
My messy (read “Black”) hair.
My face
honest with disappointment.