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…
…
Mars Attacks
By Aram Saroyan
As a kid through adulthood up to the last year or so, I didn’t like science fiction. I wanted to know more about Planet Earth. There’s no longer room for that opinion. We’re all living inside a terrible Sci Fi serial every night on the network news: the weather report, that cycle of international holocausts; endless wars; endless Trump; endless Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and maybe the smartest except his biggest idea is to go to Mars.
…
The Making of a Counterculture
By Queenie Lawrence
Cadets at Virginia Military Institute, 1991. Photo by Gordon Ball
The first photo was once “fixed in irony” (as Greil Marcus noted back in 2009 when he reviewed a book about Howl‘s legacy, fifty years on). Maybe it’s getting loose now. Americans who aim to be on the side of the people, not money-men, must try to make common cause with America’s career soldiers. Military service offers Americans an alternative to Trumpery. It’s a vector of values where honor means more than a Dollar (or likes/views). John Kelly’s commentary on America’s past has been imperfect. (See General Kelly’s Devolution – First of the Month.) But his recent, careful delineation of Trump’s authoritarianism was undeniable. And then there’s General Milley’s warning that Trump is “fascist to the core.” May the “Marine Corps Hymn” be the new Howl. (Or, per my generation, the flip side of “Stay Free”?)
…
Good Evening. I have an important announcement from one of Donald Trump’s “enemies within.” Me.
By Lucian K. Truscott IV
I assume that Donald Trump is keeping a list, so I want to make sure that my name is on it as one of those he calls the “enemy within.”This is an easy decision. I’ve been what Trump calls “a vermin within the confines of our country” for just over 77 years now. Well, I was born in Japan and lived there for the first year of my life and spent three years living in Germany while my father was stationed there, so I guess I’ve been a vermin for only 72 and a half years, counting the six months I spent reporting on wars overseas.
As a journalist, I am also one of those Trump calls an “enemy of the people” and a “radical left thug,” and I want to make sure my name is on those lists, too. I got my start during the eight years I spent writing for the Village Voice. I was such an enemy of the people and outrageous part of the radical left that I attained a 200-page FBI report and Cointelpro file that included pages from Military Intelligence reporting on my service as a Second Lieutenant in the Army. During part of 1972, after I left the Army, I was assigned my very own personal FBI agent who followed me around New York City and one night followed me home to the barge I lived on in West New York, New Jersey. He parked his car overnight on River Road, and I woke him up in the morning to tell him I was on my way to work at the Voice and that there was usually good parking on East 9th Street between University and Broadway.
Donald Trump has said that people like me are “vermin who will do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.” I just want to make it clear that if it’s Donald Trump’s American dream, yeah, I’ll do pretty much anything to destroy it, so he should make sure I’m on that list.
I want to put myself down as one Trump has called a “grossly incompetent low IQ dummy,” a group that includes Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he has called “dumber than hell.” I want to state that I that, as Trump has also accused Harris, I proudly “laugh like a crazy person,” so that should be recorded on a list somewhere, too.
I have to say that the list I want to be put right at the top of is Trump’s “enemies within.” Trump called Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi “enemies within” the other day, and I want to make sure that my name is right there with theirs on his list. Trump emphasized the danger of the “enemy within” to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo the other day, saying “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics.” He promised that the presence of these terrible people “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
As a veteran who comes from a family with four generations who have served, I want to make certain that I’m on the “enemy within” list so Donald Trump’s “military” can find me. I’ll welcome them into my home and show them the LIFE Magazine with my grandfather, Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., on the cover. I’ll show them my father’s Silver Star, which he was awarded for heroism during the battle of The Gauntlet in what is now North Korea. I’ll show them the medal grandpa was awarded when he retired from 10 years’ service in the Central Intelligence Agency. I’ll even let them take a gander at my West Point class ring as I fix them a nice cup of coffee and offer them some buttered toast.
I am serious about this. I have been a thorn in the side of the United States government and the White House and the Congress and especially the Army for over five decades. I have written extensively advocating the right of gay people to serve in the military when it was still a crime to be gay and serve your country. I have almost three decades of history writing in favor of a sane gun policy in this country. I have written brutal critiques of three or four U.S. presidents and called at least one of them – you know who you are – a fascist. I believe in stuff like the right of women to control their own bodies, and I believe in equal rights under the law for everyone, and I believe that six of our nine Supreme Court justices are fascist fellow travelers.
I am indeed an enemy within if it is the America Donald Trump dreams of. So, Donnie, my boy, you fascist prick, if your minions are assigned to track down people like me and put them on lists, I want my name on every single fucking one of them.
xxx
Editor’s Note: Last week, the author’s son, 2nd Lt. Lucian Truscott V, accepted an award for his great-grandfather, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr., from the Oklahoma Military Heritage Association for having formed the Army Rangers just before World War II.
…
Politicians in Robes
By John Podhorzer
Nearly everything about the 2024 presidential campaign would be unrecognizable to a visitor from 2008 America. How is it possible that an indicted insurrectionist, adjudicated sex offender, and convicted felon could very possibly be elected president for the second time?
The news of this past week gives us a clue. Billionaire newspaper owners Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (LA Times) each killed an already-approved editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris. Billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk – who has top-secret security clearance and “extraordinary” influence over the federal government through his companies (New York Times) – has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin since late 2022 (Wall Street Journal), in addition to having started his own career working in this country illegally (Washington Post) despite his own enthusiasm for Trump’s promises of violent mass deportations. Musk has been donating to the Trump campaign, including creating a legally dubious lottery to pay voters, and has been using the platform he owns to spread election falsehoods favoring Trump.
All of that is just the tip of the iceberg. How did our country get so broken? In short, it broke when the billionaires broke it. Billionaires took over just enough of our legal system, and just enough of our media ecosystem, to give themselves more and more power over our political system while making it harder and harder for the rest of us to take that power back. This presidential campaign is unrecognizable because it bears none of the hallmarks of a functioning democracy, and all the signs of a takeover by a few wealthy elites.
The most consequential takeover has been of the Supreme Court. Over the last year, I have written much about how for the first time in American history, the Court has been captured by outside interests – specifically, the plutocrats and theocrats who fund and organize with the Federalist Society. In “Politicians in Robes: Part I,” I explained why this institutional corruption is far more serious than any individual jurist’s personal corruption scandals, and how this capture has created a ratcheting death spiral for American democracy by shifting ever more electoral power to the pluto-theocratic1 legal movement’s parochial interests.
We are just a week away from a knife’s-edge election that could seal the pluto-theocrats’ victory, as Trump could make Supreme Court appointments that add up to a MAGA majority for at least the next generation. Voters are very alarmed about that possibility once those stakes are made clear to them. It’s long past time to make those stakes clear – and, just as important, to make clear who is responsible for driving us to this brink…
To be clear, we now live in a political system built by the Roberts Court, in which the richest Americans dominate political spending, where rewarding them for their backing is legal, and where insurrectionists are shielded from criminal prosecution by the very judges they appointed to the Supreme Court. And all the while, the billionaire and corporate media have looked the other way.
xxx
Editor’s Note: The author helped organize the campaign during the run-up to the 2020 election that brought the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce together, helping pro-democracy Americans resist Trump et al.’s attempt to trash the transition of power. His latest urgent message is here.
…
Go West
By Leslie Lopez
One way a union leader might have a chance in rural Trump county is to run as an independent. The escalating irrationality and nonstop contradictions are exhausting, so It’s been good to see labor leaders inserting some actual common sense in conservative counties. I’ve been following Dan Osborne’s campaign in Nebraska for a while now, and he appears to be gaining traction.
Over the summer, I went to the annual Crowley County Days in Ordway, Colorado. My in-laws are 3rd generation farmers there, and still farming, so it’s a regular event we all do when visiting family. A bit about the county: in 2016, Trump won 70% of the votes (1,069) and the median household income there is roughly $40,000.
The day began with a parade of mainly rodeo queens on horseback, emergency vehicles with their sirens on, and community floats. July is always sweltering hot, and that day it was well over 100 degrees. The route was lined with children holding empty shopping bags to fill with free candy. As in most parades, during the procession candy is gently tossed to kids sitting on the curb who run out to the hot asphalt to scoop it up. Other community members walk up and down the route passing out ice cold popsicles, or bottled water; it’s a nice hometown event and family get together. Sadly, this year the parade ended with four guys on four-wheelers waving a “Fuck your feelings – Trump 2024” banner. They didn’t have any candy.
As is custom, after the parade, the community gathered in the park for a plate of free bbq beef served with pitchforks from the back of a huge truck bed to four stations of servers. There are four of the largest cauldrons of pinto beans I’ve ever seen, and the cast iron cauldrons hang from tractors at the main park. The free plates include a huge pile of beef, pinto beans, sandwich bread, pickles and mustard. Other fun activities in the park include a car show, and music. The stark contrast between the angry maga behavior at the parade, and neighbors and families at the community bbq lunch was notable to me. I can’t speak for others, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting the kids’ parade to end like that, not even conservative Republicans.
My father-in-law is also running as an independent. He’s an incredibly hard worker who has worked full time while farming his entire life. As a former judge, stockman, and farmer – he really is a “voice of reason”: https://www.richardmedina2024.com.
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My John Deere Problem
By Tom Smucker
Canvassing for Harris/Walz in rural Pennsylvania, we ran across a friendly older guy (younger than me) wearing a John Deere tee shirt who shook my hand and said his whole family were Democrats, don’t worry.
John Deere might be recalled by city and suburban dwellers as one brand of motorized lawn mowers. But when I was a kid during rural midwest summers it was the only brand of tractor on the farms around us. I didn’t have a toy taxi or a toy truck, I had a toy John Deere tractor. In happier times I would have asked that happy rural Democrat about buying a John Deere tee shirt for myself.
Dazed by decades of deindustrialization, I was still astonished to read, during this election season, that John Deere is moving ovet two thousand manufacturing jobs from downstate Illinois to Mexico. In spite of what Trump said about his tariffs. In spite of Bidenomics. In spite of Harris/Walz.
This is a bigger, longer story for after a 47th President is inaugurated. But if the USA can’t find a way to hold onto and create good jobs with believable security it will continue churning out the mass anxieties that can get resolved by fascism. I hope and pray that Harris gets elected, but her personal and regional ties to the lightly regulated gig economy and its silicon valley ideology have me more than worried.
…
Freedom Now!
Kristi Coulter
I’ve been a single-issue voter all my life. Everything—my mental and physical health, my economic prospects, how I spend my time and who I spend it with—rests on my ownership of my own body and my own reproductive choices. Without bodily autonomy, I am closer to a prisoner or a slave than a full American citizen. I understood this from a very young age, and since one party was constantly threatening to bring my body under government control, I knew I would never vote for that party.
“But a woman like you will always be able to get an abortion,” men have argued in an attempt to persuade me to vote for, uh, “smaller government” and “less regulation.” It’s not only about me personally, of course. But what if it was? Maybe I don’t want to have to take a road trip to remove a zygote from my body. Maybe I don’t want my most basic freedom to be contingent on my latitude and longitude points at any given moment. On book tour last year, I remember crossing the state line between Washington and Idaho. “Free,” I said to myself. “Now not free.” I distributed $500 worth of Plan B kits in Idaho public restrooms, thinking it would make me feel better about being there. It did not. I drove like a demon to get out of that place where every week miscarriage patients are airlifted to my state so they don’t die.
Was *I* personally in danger? No. I doubt I can even get pregnant anymore, though the slope is more outright greased than merely slippery—women older than me have been refused chemo and autoimmune drugs that could harm a zygote they are not capable of conceiving in the first place.
But that’s not the point. The question is: am I a full citizen or not? Am I an autonomous human being or not? Do I have freedom of and from religion or not?
And in all cases, the answer is no. I am no longer a full citizen of this country. So until my full citizenship is restored and my humanity recognized once and for all, I will be a single-issue voter. Men can yell “what about the women of Palestine???” at me all day as justification for once again sending reproductive rights to the back of the queue and I will just blink at them, unfazed, because they have always had *some* reason I’m supposed to ignore my own basic needs and humanity at election time, and after Palestine it will be something else, until the Bingo card is the size of a placemat. I won’t ask what the hell they expect to happen to Palestinian women under a *Trump* administration, because I understand that they don’t actually care all that much; what matters most to them is that I—that American women—feel shameful, even monstrous, for caring about our own experience on this earth.
But I’ve had decades to learn how to ignore men’s shame. It’s easy at the point. I can keep it up for the rest of my life, or until my demand is met: restore my citizenship. Codify my autonomous humanity. Maybe then I will consider your special-interest issues.
…
Skin in the Game
By Emily Simon
Well, apparently I know a lot of folks who aren’t voting for Kamala Harris, and I’m not going to try to bully them into it because I remember how it felt when I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Joe Biden.
I eventually did, and I would have eventually voted for him again this time, but this time it would’ve been much much harder. I started training early, months ago, really putting my back into talking myself into it. I think if you’ve never felt that way it’s pretty impossible to imagine how much physical effort it takes. I am not 100% sure I could have sustained it, so I am pretty grateful I didn’t have to.
Meanwhile I encounter Substack after TikTok after Instagram reel in which smug, self-congratulatory activists on the American left peddle the release of surrender, condescendingly lecturing me on “conscience” and gravely murmuring that they simply can’t vote for Harris, because (x).
They tell me that I shouldn’t settle for less, that I too could experience the raw euphoria of being high on my own supply of moral superiority. I’d sleep like a baby. My skin would be AMAZING. It seems that refusing to vote for Harris feels just like giving up gluten.
It’s pretty wild, TBH.
Luckily I’ve only gotten this spiel live and in person once so far. His skin looked amazing, the speech came with a stirring underscore (or at least it seems like it did).
The thing is, I’ve come out as a single-issue voter and I love it. I’m living my truth. I too feel so young, so invigorated! My skin may not be as dewy but there’s a brand new spring in my step.
So I listened to the inspirational speech from the glowing morally pure man while chomping on my abortion bagel, because…I voted for Joe Biden, so thanks, but.
Recently it’s been fashionable on the right to mock younger women for being, like, OBSESSED with abortion, as if it’s a lipstick shade or Chappell Roan song.
Girls, amirite? So shallow. So easily led around by the nose, following influencers and trends. Live, laugh, love! Fall vibes! Not dying of sepsis because your doctor is legally barred from giving you basic, life-saving care during a miscarriage!
Anyway, I vote on abortion rights. Even when it has very little to do with the person‘s actual job on the school board or the city council. All those years I lived in California I studied the chunky books I got in the mail describing every candidate’s position on every single thing, taking it all so seriously.
That was so silly! Once I could sniff out where they stood on abortion, I knew everything I needed to know. I was unnecessarily embarrassed about this, about having a litmus test, so I tried to be different. I worried that I might appear as a less serious, less educated person, because…well, people said so, outright, and for some reason I can no longer fathom I cared what those people thought of me.
I’m not a fan of Harris, for very granular reasons that have to do with being a politically active citizen of California for 21 years, but due to my newly embraced single-issue status it’s less hard to vote for her, and it’s pretty easy to vote for Tim Walz (with whom I’m sure I’d also have granular beef if I lived here a little longer).
My friends have other single issues that they’re voting (or not voting) on this year.
Gaza, climate change, the fate of democracy, grocery prices. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, disability rights, Islamophobia, antisemitism. Gun safety, public school funding, police reform, immigration reform, addiction prevention and treatment. Enlarging the Supreme Court, eliminating the electoral college, ending daylight savings time. Protecting libraries and arts funding and unions and net neutrality, limiting corporate malfeasance and the rise of artificial intelligence. Retracting funding for foreign bombs and investing in domestic healthcare. Universal basic incomes and housing justice. Protecting Medicare and social security. Voter suppression and gerrymandering, separation of church and state, government overreach, animal welfare, infectious disease control. Free speech, a free market, a free press.
I care about all of these things. Any one could be the lens through which I look at any given political candidate. I’m definitely retired from fighting with other people about the proper ranking of ethical concerns.
I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris because in January of 2025, odds are that the earth will still exist and anarchy will not yet successfully reign, meaning that SOMEONE will be President of the United States, and it’ll be one of two people. I know which one will be an unqualified disaster for literally every issue listed above, so I will go fill out the bubble saying as much. It really is that simple for me.
And I will sleep well tonight, clutching my single issue. If you have one too, may it warm you as well.
You don’t have to tell me what it is. Your skin looks amazing.
…
Daddy Issue
By David Aaronovitch
Excerpted from Aaronovitch’s October 27th Substack: “Mad but not a fascist…”
Last week the former Fox News host and current J.D. Vance intimate Tucker Carlson, gave a warmup speech for Donald Trump at a rally of the Turning Point Political Action Committee in Duluth, Georgia. Turning Point is a well-funded PAC associated with support for Donald Trump’s efforts to overthrow the result of the 2020 presidential election.
The most remarkable passage in Carlson’s speech came when he was talking about those who, in his view, had allowed money to be spent on helping migrants to live and work in the US, as well as committing other political sins. It’s worth reading this passage verbatim, partly because I don’t think I’ve heard anything quite like it in my journalistic lifetime. So, Carlson:
If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous; if you allow your two year old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it; if you allow your 14 year old to light joints at the breakfast table; if you allow your hormone addled 15 year old daughter to, like, slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it and those kids are going to end up in rehab.
It’s not good for you and it’s not good for them. There has to be a point at which dad comes home – yeah – dad comes home and he’s pissed. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they’re his children, they live in his house but he’s very disappointed in their behaviour and he’s going to have to let them know. He’s going to have say “to get to your room right now and think about what you did’”. And when dad gets home you know what he says?
“You’ve been a bad girl. A very bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. I’m not gonna lie. This is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me and you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl.”
It has to be this way. It has to be this way ’cause it’s true and you’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did. That’s not said in the spirit of hate, it’s not said in the spirit of vengeance or bigotry far from it. It’s said in the spirit of justice which is the purest and best thing there is and without it things fall apart”.
It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing about this passage (which was loudly applauded by Carlson’s audience), the sexual psychology or the politics. To touch on the former, a “vigorous spanking” for a pubescent girl delivered with some relish by her father is the very stuff of child pornography. Post a picture of that online and you’ll go to jail.
Also you may ask yourself why Carlson chose the girl to get so energetically spanked? What happens to the misbehaving 15-year-old boy? Does he get a vigorous spanking? Or is there a possibility that he might punch Dad right back or go to his closet and get that AR15 Dad bought him for his birthday and take the whole family out? Perhaps that prospect just doesn’t carry the same erotic or misogynistic charge.
What about the politics, though? Who is who in Carlson’s domestic drama? Dad is obviously Donald Trump and his cohorts once they are back in the White House. Mom doesn’t figure anywhere so we don’t need to worry about her. But who is to be “vigorously” chastised, for what transgressions and presuming this is just a metaphor, what form should this corrective punishment take?
Trump himself has this week written in his social media posts about how:
WHEN I WIN those people that CHEATED [In 2020 as well as 2024] will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. Please be aware that this legal exposure extends to lawyers… political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and corrupt election officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behaviour will be sought out, court, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, it never seen before in our Country.
No one in his campaign will have advised him to write this. This is his settled determination (we’ll come to his capacity to deliver such a promise later) and presumably his priority when appointing a new Attorney General will be to find someone willing to try and make this prosecution of entirely non-existent offenders happen.
Carlson’s net seems wider than this. His speech also included the sentiment that “the followers of Donald Trump are the real America”, which suggests that the opponents of Trump are the enemies of the real America. Which is certainly what the Turning Point audience appeared to believe. It is hard to describe such an elision of candidate and country and opponents and national enemies as something other than authoritarian…
Nelson’s telescope
On the same day as Carlson was making his creepy speech the former editor of the Spectator Fraser Nelson will have been penning his column for the Daily Telegraph. Nelson is not a man of the New Right and I would imagine would have far preferred a different Republican to be the presidential nominee in 2024. But his objective here was to reassure his British readers that, contrary to the opinions of leading figures who served in the Trump administration—most notably his former Chief of Staff John Kelly— Trump was not an authoritarian with dictatorial impulses.
Nelson tweeted out his column quoting the drop headlines to his piece, “Trump may be narcissistic and erratic but he’s no fascist – and this race shows American democracy in better health than ever”. He resorts to the bald assertion that, “whether you see Trump as a political antichrist or a necessary corrective to a broken system, it’s hard to find evidence that he is, in any meaningful sense, a fascist.”
Is it?…
This time round if he wins, Trump won’t be seeking re-election at the end of four years. Those around him include people with very definite agendas that go way beyond 2020, all of which seem to include a rough way with opponents, and who believe in a “vigorous spanking” for the naughty little girls who flipped daddy the finger and who daddy loves but must chastise.
But why should we worry? We aren’t Ukrainians, we aren’t Taiwanese, we aren’t Haitian migrants, we aren’t American women, we aren’t our own great grandchildren living on an increasingly uninhabitable planet. Maybe if we suck up to Trump, flatter him, indulge him, he’ll be nice to us and we can make it through the next few years.
You don’t have to dig too much into the past to find out where Nelsonning the Great Man leads you. The Webbs and Shaw Nelsonned Stalin, all kinds of British ruling class figures Nelsonned first Mussolini and then Hitler, Putin has been well Nelsonned in his time.
Meantime back to my biggest personal project. Trying to sleep at night.
…
With Two Weeks to Go, Questions
By Alison Stone
Was Arnold Palmer‘s penis
really so impressive?
How can I make myself
the desirable type of immigrant
Canada would welcome?
Was there ever a time
women were safe?
How can I be most useful?
What would Arnold Palmer’s penis
feel about being a “closing argument”
in a political campaign?
How would Arnold Palmer’s penis move
to “Ave Maria”? “Nothing Compares 2 U”?
“YMCA”?
Would Arnold Palmer’s penis
rather be electrocuted
or eaten by sharks?
…
and, What About Pennsylvania?
Dennis Myers
— 9 Incites into the Election
#1: An elementary school colleague loves the re-post. He recently put up a video of Obama saying something like “fill the streets with sh*t until no one can tell anymore what the facts are, that’s how you win.” The push line on it was something like This is how socialism wins. Oh, the irony, pure. Obama was obviously critiquing MAGA’s political strategy, but, maybe this guy was ultimately right in his assessment on socialism winning. Disgust the people enough with scare tactics and punishing policies and maybe then they will be brave enough to vote in some progressive form of socialism.
#2: Near the center of my home town along Market Street, adorning one of those stately limestone houses with a wide front porch, hangs a gigantic Trump banner. It sways over a short patch of grass mushroomed with Trump lawn signs. His neighbor, a state archivist, countered with sails of Kamala and a trimline of no going back flags.
#3: Further up Market, at the top of the ridge, there’s the familiar washed-out blues and blood reds of the Trump campaign. But look closely: this flag reads Swift / Kelce 2024.
#4: Catty-corner from our house, there’s a lone Trump lawn sign. The family is of Indian heritage and he is one of the litigants who took the town to court when the newly liberal Borough Council deemed that lawn adornments – particularly those of a political nature – should have a limited life span. Christmas lights you were too lazy to take down and 30 foot animated skeletons stumbling into Thanksgiving: those are perfectly fine to stay the lawn. When he and his fellow Trump supports in town won the case (actually the Borough dropped it before certain defeat in front of the US Supreme Court), he put up a homemade Statue of Liberty lawn sign that read: Freedom of Speech. That was quite nice.
#6: We don’t get down often enough to cut the front lawn in a way that would keep the Borough Council (liberal or conversative version) happy. Fortunately, our Egyptian neighbor (the other one is PA Dutch) cuts our front lawn whenever he cuts his. And me? Well, when I’m down I return the favor and cut his. Last time as I reached his driveway and turned around, I got a good look at the bigger than a couple of refrigerators sized Trump flag draping his front porch.
#7: I thought to ask him about it, to find out why, why Trump, after the Muslim ban, the sh*thole countries remark, why after everything. I’ve also thought about all my Republican friends I grew up with, to ask why. But I don’t think that would change people’s minds. I did advise a good friend to vote for Kennedy, but that strategy has been taken off the table. So now I wear my Dick Cheney for President button, which I altered to say I’m with Dick!, while I cut both front lawns.
#8: Finally, there’s the last word from the little girl who packed plums in her sack when she ran away at age six, and, when she grew up, she helped craft the mail-in ballot initiative that got Biden elected…that woman who knows Pennsylvania more than anyone I know…well, this is what she sees, “I did see more Kamala yard signs in NW PA than I expected. I think it’s going to be close, but at the moment, unless something big happens, I think Trump will probably win PA. I think it will be by a smaller margin than Biden own in 2020. Trump will probably win PA, but likely by less than 1% margin; hopefully more than 1/2 of 1%, because 1/2 of 1% triggers automatic recount in PA. That will be an absolute nightmare.”
#9: Prepare for a nightmare.
…
Wolf
By Mark Dudzic (with Katherine Isaac & Adolph Reed)
Mark Dudzic…In 2016, right after Trump was elected, I went up to visit this picket line in upstate New York, this big chemical plant about an hour north of Albany, used to be owned by GE and then it was owned by a series of vulture capitalists who were just gutting the plant, the resources, and cutting benefits and screwing the workers. And they finally were pushed out on strike. They were in this desperate strike in the winter of 2016 into 2017, union leadership was very, you know, sophisticated. They were big Bernie supporters and stuff. But, you know, I’m walking the picket line with these guys, mostly guys, and people are saying, if only Trump knew what was happening to us, he would be down here and he would straighten this guy out. You know, we got to find a way to get Trump to intervene in this case.
And it was this belief that, you know, given how powerless people felt. I mean, these guys have been getting their ass kicked for 20 years, since GE sold it and ran away from the business. They were so powerless that the only thing that they could see that could, you know, give them more control was some strong figure who could somehow act as their substitute to force this company to treat them fairly. And I think that you know that that’s really what you know people are backed into when they know, progress from collective action. And you know, that’s the genius of neoliberalism, right, is there is no alternative, you gotta just surrender to these forces, because you can’t do anything else.
And they see that, and suddenly somebody like Trump shows up, or, you know, Orban in Hungary, or you know, all of these demagogues, and they create the illusion that they can personally intervene in the market in ways that will make life more secure for people. I think that’s why people embrace it. They appeal to the basest qualities in people. You look for scapegoats, all of those things, when movements don’t exist that can provide a comprehensive narrative to people about how the world works. That’s how people begin to look toward these sorts of conspiracies, how different groups are doing these things to them. And so, you know, I think this is what really builds and grows these things.
And, you know, I believe that we haven’t lost those people. We have to, you know, find ways to give them hope. I think that it’s really tied up in dynamic and growing labor movement, because it rebuilds a culture of solidarity that’s so essential for working people. But I think that is the essential issue that we’re facing right now, and why we’ve lost so many people to these kinds of politics. And, you know, on the other side, we’ve lost people to the politics of the issues that aren’t fundamental to their life. You know, whether it’s guns or what pronouns people use, what bathrooms people use, all of these kinds of issues that aren’t really going to change anything for themselves and their families, but because they don’t even think that they can deal with the big weight that’s pushing them down. You know, they become motivated. Some people become motivated by these incidental issues.
Katherine Isaac: Well said, Mark. So, on Class Matters, we always ask some variation of the question, “What would our country look like if it were governed by and for the working class?” Mark, do you want to take a stab at that?
Mark Dudzic: Well, I would like to maybe change it for this discussion and say, “What would smart working class politics look like in the context of this year’s 2024, election cycle?” And I would say that we are facing a situation where it’s extremely possible that mega authoritarianism can take control of all three branches of government. The Supreme Court is a lost cause. And you know, unless we figure out how to reform that court, it’s going to be years before we can think about changing the Supreme Court their intent on repealing, you know, all of the social reforms of the 20th century, and they may very well succeed on that level. The Senate is almost a lost cause. At best case scenario, there’ll be a 50/50 split, which means you need a Democratic vice president even to provide, break the tie in the Senate to prevent it from doing horrendous things. And then the House, if the Democrats don’t take back the house the agenda that the House has and without the Senate being able to stop it, you know, is just horrid.
And then you have a guy who says he’s going to be a dictator, at least on day one. And one thing I think we’ve learned about dictators in modern history is they don’t voluntarily relinquish their power after day one, they stay dictators until they’re forced to stop dictating. So, this is a huge crisis for the working class and really for all people. It’s a major crisis in democracy. So, what, what would politics look like right now? Number one, we’ve got to stop the takeover of our government by a mega right wing, authoritarian government which is going to crush the institutions that sustain the working class and other people in this country. And I don’t think you’re going to do that by just pointing out what a monster Trump is. And I think that that’s the instinct of the Democratic Party operatives to do that.
And I think because, like I told you about these striking chemical workers, that people, you know that sometimes goes past people, and you know, they’re just looking for a solution, a strong solution, to their problems. But I think you can do it by beginning to appeal to the felt concerns that working class people have in this country. And I think it’s up to us. When I say us, I mean the labor movement and all of those who identify with a working-class politics, it’s up to us to make that happen in this election, that we really need to mobilize like we’ve never mobilized before, engage in one-on-one conversations with working class Americans to talk about the real stakes of this election and what their aspirations are and how we can proceed. And we’ve got to figure out a way to do that. We’ve got to mobilize a massive get out the vote operation here, and we’ve got to begin to have these discussions which we can then carry on beyond the election, to move politics forward and to end this crisis that we’d be facing with the possible sweep of all three branches of government.
Katherine Isaac: Well said, thank you. Adolph?
Adolph Reed Jr.: I agree with every jot, line and title of Mark’s analysis. And the good news, I think, is that nobody mobilizes votes like the labor movement does, and that’s a big advantage that our side has. But the one thing I’d add is just in anticipation of progressives, anxieties, I suppose, or whatever, or fixations. I mean, I know, like I was big into Aesop’s fables, like when I was a little kid, and one of them was the boy who cried wolf. And I know like a lot of us have been complaining, or some of us have been complaining, that every four years, going back at least to Bill Clinton, the Democrats have been saying to us that this election is more important than any election ever. If the Republicans win, it’s the end of civilization. And mainly it’s been exaggerated or bullshit, like 2000, right, Al Gore and George W Bush. But the moral, part of the moral of the boy who cried wolf is that eventually there is a wolf at the door. And guess what the wolf is at the door. So, this is like the most important thing for us to do. It’s a necessary precondition for us to fight, to be able to fight for anything else after January 20, 2025.
Note
1 From the Class Matters podcast. Listen here.
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On the Wire
Micah L. Sifry
I am cautiously optimistic that Kamala Harris is going to defeat Donald Trump in this election. Broadly speaking, that’s because she has a higher ceiling on her potential vote, while everyone in America already knows who Trump is and they’ve made up their minds one way or the other about him. And in the last few days, the centerpoint of the election seems to have shifted from a referendum on the last four years to a referendum on Trump, the increasingly unsteady and dangerous wannabe fascist. As Mike Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, has been pointing out for some time, if voters see this as an election about MAGA and what Trump will do if he gets back into power, Democrats have the advantage.
But when she prevails, I don’t think the reason is going to be because the Harris campaign was so much better at getting out its vote than the Trump campaign. It will be because all the independent groups filling in the gaps in the many evident problems with the Harris campaign staved off disaster…
For example, the Working Families Party is steering a coalition that includes One PA, which focuses on empowering Black communities and which says it has knocked more than 600,000 doors in Philly, Pittsburgh and Delaware County; Asian and Pacific Islanders of PA, who in addition to canvassing have tallied more than 4.2 million calls, including 18,000 in languages other than English and Spanish; Make the Road PA, which aims to hit half a million doors by election day, and unions like the SEIU and Unite Here, who together have already knocked over 1.2 million doors. The AFL-CIO’s numerous local labor councils are also coordinating a lot of door-knocking.
These folks are also doing some innovative things. The WFP has more than 20,000 people in its Pennsylvania Reach program. Unlike the DNC and DCCC, they’re using it to match to lots of local voters and then send them personalized postcards with photos from their friends. It’s also working with about 150 precinct captains in Philadelphia–people who live in the neighborhood whose voters they are responsible for engaging. And as in 2020, they’re running a Joy to the Polls program aimed at stimulating the early vote in Philly, as well as sending organizers to barbershops and salons.
But with some important exceptions, like Pennsylvania United’s deep canvass in western PA, most of this voter outreach is focused on quantity over quality. And as I noted in The Nation, people doing the kind of more in-depth conversations that are the heart of deep canvassing tell me that while many people may be telling door-knockers they’ve voting for Harris, enthusiasm levels vary widely and sometimes, perhaps often, these voters are just tired of being pestered and say whatever they think will get a canvasser to check a box and leave them alone. As Kipchoge Spencer, a veteran organizer from California who has spent the last week doing a mix of conventional and deep canvassing in and around Philly, told me, “Almost everyone I speak to in Philly, whether on the street or at the door on a walk list, immediately says that they’re registered and voting. In conventional canvassing, at this point you basically do some variation on making sure they have a way to the polls and thanking them. In deep canvassing, you engage them in story telling anyway and very often find out that they hadn’t been as committed to actually voting as originally expressed but have become substantially more so over the course of the connection.”
This past weekend, Changing the Conversation Together, an independent deep canvassing organization that has been working in Philadelphia and its northern suburbs since the 2020 election, ran 300 volunteer shifts, tallied 900 in-depth one-on-one conversations with voters, and nailed down 800 vote plans with them. (Notice how these metrics are different?) Adam Barbanel-Fried, the group’s founder, told me he often encounters voters who say they’ve been canvassed already by other groups. But often the training those groups give their volunteers leaves gaps.
“Yesterday I ran into a woman named Maria who opened the door saying she’s already spoken to someone, and that she already voted,” Barbanel-Fried told me on Monday. “To which I said: ‘That’s great how’d it go?’ Maria responded that she actually had received a call from the city saying her ballot had been canceled. Over time I sat with her, looked into the issue, figured out she was confused by different mailers she’d received (those from advocacy groups, campaigns she thought were from the city) and ultimately we got one of our volunteer drivers to bring her to the satellite election office where she was able to cure her ballot and vote.”
Barbanel-Fried’s canvassers have also come across group homes where dozens of people weren’t registered to vote; one volunteer focusing on these special projects personally registered over 50 people in three days. “To me what this speaks to is the time, energy, and patience it takes to find and engage with people who are at risk of not voting,” he says, as well as training that emphasizes patience over speed.
Last Saturday, I spent the day in Easton, a working class city of 28,000 hard against the Lehigh and Delaware rivers doing a deep canvass under the tutelage of Kathleen Campisano. The native of Louisville, Kentucky has been building her independent deep canvassing project Canvassing Connectors in eastern PA for the last two years. Dedicated volunteers, many from New York City and its northern suburbs, have been walking Easton’s streets for months–well before Harris was the Democratic candidate. Now Canvassing Connectors are neck deep in the city, aiming to deliver at least 2,000 low-propensity voters to the polls. Campisano teaches her door-knockers to take their time getting to know the voters they are trying to persuade, people who generally do not vote in every election and who feel ignored or exploited by the political process. “Remember we don’t know shit about these voters,” she admonishes her mostly white, middle-class, middle-aged and female volunteers. Meaning, if you approach people with humility and respect, they are more likely to open up and trust you.
Post-deep-canvass review at Canvassing Connectors in Easton, PA, October 19, 2024; Kathleen Campisano standing at the easel. (Photo by Micah L. Sifry)
I was very impressed by their whole operation, from how they onboarded volunteers, to the serious 90-minute training they required everyone to take, to their post-canvass review. With two weeks left to go, they are trying to get volunteers to come back multiple times to the same turf. Who does that? When I raise with Campisano all my concerns about how national Democrats and big outside groups approach getting out the vote, she’s both critical and sanguine. “There is not a built-in ‘train everyone every time’ with the Dems,” she says. But, she adds, “That’s one of the things grassroots groups have – appreciation, respect for time, everyone-is-a-leader thinking.” Since 2016, such grassroots groups have been popping up all across Pennsylvania. “We don’t have to abide by a set of pre-arranged rules,” says Campisano. “We get to invent as we go, based on our years of experience or first-timer ingenuity.”
These groups are Pennsylvania’s silver lining.
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Souls to Polls
Bishop William J Barber II & Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
There’s less than a week left before this year’s crucial elections.
While all eyes are on the race for the White House, we must remember that all sorts of things are on the ballot this year – from deciding whether abortion will be a right in states like Arizona and Florida to whether Missouri will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The only way we can win these rights is by getting out and voting. And let us be clear: not voting is not an option!
If you think your vote doesn’t matter, let’s remember that in each of the nation’s so-called battleground states – where the election is expected to be the closest – poor and low-wage people make up many times the margin of victory. Your vote can shift election outcomes in these and other states across the nation.
Yet in the previous presidential election, millions of poor and low-wage people did not vote. By voting this year, these voters can use the power given to them by the U.S. Constitution to help change the political and economic architecture of this country.
Just listen to Shontya Lawrence, a childcare provider and member of the North Carolina Poor People’s campaign from Raleigh, North Carolina.
She recently spoke at our National Virtual Get Out The Vote Rally about why she’s voting this year.
“We childcare providers love our job. We have to love it – because the money isn’t keeping us here. I hear all the time people saying that our children are the most important resource that we have. Which makes me wonder if that’s true. Why am I still one of 3.5 million poor and low-income North Carolinians?” she asked. “I always vote. It’s not an option. It’s the people we elect who make it so that people like me and my colleagues have to scrape to get by in the richest nation on earth. We are the sleeping giant in this election and we are waking up and waking up our colleagues and communities to vote this year. We know that our votes are demands to pay us what we deserve.”
Wayne Skattum, a member of the Wisconsin Poor People’s Campaign, agreed. This is what he argued.
“If someone thinks that their vote doesn’t count, I ask this question: If our vote doesn’t count then why is the status quo power and moneyed ruling class so intent on passing laws all across this country to disenfranchise whole blocs of voters? My answer is that they know we have power and are afraid of the power we have by voting. So vote! Our vote is power and our voice. Our vote will and is changing the narrative.”
xxx
As a reminder, we’ve put together a voting education page to support you as you make preparations to vote. The page offers a variety of resources to prepare for this year’s elections including.
A Voting Record:
This voting record graphic will help you see where candidates and parties in every state stand on the big issues of the day, from raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour to lowering prescription drug prices. It offers detailed information about how they’ve voted on these issues in the past.
Voter Protection Resources: These resources include voter protection hotlines and websites for help if you face any issues voting. Trained experts will ensure you are able to cast a ballot.
Everything You Need to Vote: This graphic includes clickable links to essential resources, such as important deadlines for voting in your state, registration checks, absentee ballot requests, ballot previews ahead of time, finding local polling place locators, election reminders, and registration to vote.
We encourage you to share this page with your friends, family, and social networks. These resources will help guarantee that we can mobilize many poor and low-income infrequent voters during this year’s elections.
Contact your state Poor People’s Campaign to join our mass mobilization effort.
Click here to visit Vote.org/ppc to check your registration, register to vote, request an absentee ballot, check what’s on your ballot, and get election reminders to make sure you’re where you need to be on election day.
You can also help spread the word among your friends, family, and social networks.
- Send this email to people you know
- Share the Vote.org/ppc link on social media
Forward Together, Not One Step Back.
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One very bad question
By Bruce Jackson
Pretty much everything about Tangerine Turblossom has been said. The rational amongst us know he is the most successful liar in American political history, a greedy grifter devoid of empathy, aliterate, and, au fond, a scrofulous semblance of a human being from topknot to toenail. He will betray and abandon anyone; he has no driving principle other than moi.
He is very much a creature of the free American press. On his runup to the 2016 campaign, his every utterance was broadcast in full and discussed at interminable length in the MSNBC, CNN, and FOX bloviaries. His lies found further focus in countless podcasts. All that continues. It was only recently that the Grey Lady, the New York Times, allowed the word “lies” to drop into its news columns about him.
There was one question that no one, so far as I know, ever asked him on camera or for a recorded interview. If he’d been asked it, he’d have waffled, but a good reporter might have (as some sometimes do) kept asking it until he answered or fled the room: “Mr. Trump, why do you lie all the time?” Not just, “Why did you tell this particular lie just now?” but rather, “Why do you do it all the time? Why are you so preternaturally full of shit?”
There is another question that a reporter did ask him during the 2016 campaign that he did answer. The reporter might have been a Trump plant. Or the reporter might simply have been very stupid. Trump’s response, and the continuing presence of both the question and the response, are among our grim problems to this very day.
The question was, “Will you accept the results of the election?”
Trump’s response was like that of a mean mother torturing a preadolescent asking for ice cream or a trip to the zoo: “We’ll see.”
That’s a lousy way to deal with a kid and it’s a smarmy way to deal with a reporter’s question. But the question itself is worse: it assumes that some aspect of the legitimacy of the electoral process resides within the candidate’s opinion.
It doesn’t.
Elections (absent fraud, the presence of which in the past two American presidential elections has been microscopic and almost entirely performed by people voting Republican) are processes that, at the end, are without nuance. They need no interpretations; they need only counting. In the American political system, with only two small exceptions, the candidate getting the majority of votes in a state—even if that state is California and a candidate is only one vote ahead—gets all of the state’s electoral votes. And whoever gets the most electoral votes is the next president. That’s it.
“Acceptance” has no more do with the fact of it than it does with whether or not there is snow on the ground or one is pregnant, or the stock market has gone up or down. “Acceptance” in such situations is about someone’s ability to reality-test; it has nothing to do with reality.
Nonetheless, this past week, both the print press and the bloviasphere have been full of speculation about what Trump will do should he lose the election. Both have moved past asking whether he’ll accept it. He has spent the past four years demonstrating his unwillingness to accept the incontrovertible results of the 2020 election. They are now talking about what effect his non-acceptance will have.
What I fail to understand is the reluctance of the print and bloviasphere to simply say, “Why should we care if this felon with all the makeup, the girdle and the hairdo doesn’t like the vote? Fuck him. If he can’t read the numbers, fuck him. If he wants to pout, fuck him. He lost.”
Why let him, the most mendacious figure in American political history, determine the public discourse? He’s played the press like Liberace played piano: silly, frilly, tickling. And the press has sucked it up, and continues to do so. Failing us the entire time.
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Stolen
By Zuzu Myers
Things which rightfully might be considered stolen:
Time. In the sense of the kisses in the back stairways of high schools. The chips the seagull, ravenous with eternity, stalked to take out of their crinkling bag. Oh—the 80 bucks I still owe my brother for the second tattoo, though that could be more of a loan, still waiting on repayment. My photograph, taken from behind by a stranger when the sun rose. The thumbs, sweat, and breath of a delivery man, carving his way through a New York winter, uncertain if he will live or die from the virus covering the world. His family’s ease. Eric Garner’s breath. Sandra Bland’s life. The lives of children and adults in Gaza. In Lebanon. In Israel. Time, in the sense that these children should have become adults, these adults should have become elderly. May their memories be a blessing, or a revolution, and may their souls find peace. The ice for the polar bears. The Medicaid cut from millions of families without them knowing this summer. Though the bills these families are left with, claiming thousands on thousands, these are not loans waiting to be paid, these are good firestarter for the winter, to be burned for what little warmth they offer. Time, in that there is no finite amount of it and yet it is so often squandered, usually for the promulgation of violence.
In 2016, the voice of the people by means of the electoral college. In this election, the voices contained on ballots in drop boxes set on fire. On January 6th 2021, the lives of 6 people during the insurrection on Capitol Hill. On the Day of the Dead 2024, a collective sense that collective bloodshed on the streets will not occur. This election will not be stolen, not in the sense of Russian espionage, some fool idea of an impossible Democratic plot. What has already happened, the stolen trust in the possibility of democracy, the total erosion of considering another human life, the culture of imminent violence has existed prior to this election, has been inflamed by this election, and will continue long after this election, regardless of who wins. But we do face a tipping point—and the terror of that unites an American identity like nothing else has.
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Letter from Peoria (via L.A.)
By Ty Geltmaker
Dear all,
Whatever policy differences may have marked my own positions vis-a-vis those of one Liz Cheney, let’s all rally to her bipartisan call as evoked in historic Ripon where Republican opposition to slavery was codified and home to a really good liberal arts college.
I’m grateful for having grown up in a truly ecumenical family of Protestants and Catholics with Jewish leanings, absent any dogma, Democrats & Republicans of every type. Among aunts, uncles, and cousins there was a healthy unorthodox mix of all stripes without judgment, allowing even enjoyment of difference and pleasure in argued disagreement. Oh, the Christmas Night card games and July family picnics!
Be it Salvation Army, Roman Catholic, Methodist, and then political parties across the spectrum, there was plenty of room for silent and spoken difference without rancor. We fraternal Geltmakers were solid Dems even while appreciating the maternal Darling side saying they were Repubs since Lincoln was of the party dedicated to freeing the slaves.
In this Lynn Cheney moment of peaceful gratitude I think back to my own — as lifelong Democrat — affinity for the likes of Republicans such as Everett Dirksen, Chuck Percy, and other enlightened Illinois Republicans for whom I would have voted now if facing the likes of Jill Stein/Cornel West.
So, happy to be a bi-partisan constitutionalist lefty.
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Sympathy for the Donald?
By Carol Cooper
To steel myself for 11-5-24, I went to a theatre to see The Apprentice.
It is a much better film than you probably think it is. It has all the grimy visual verisimilitude of classic cop and corruption dramas of the 1970s and ’80s, plus some of the most note-perfect character acting you would ever want to see in a fictionalized bio-pic about Roy Cohn and Donald Trump.
And make no mistake; this movie is as much about Cohen as it is about Trump—as it functions as a Spartan love story between the angry gay Jewish power broker and the young, desperately ambitious Aryan princeling he chose to cultivate in Trump. Directed by Iranian-born filmmaker Ali Abbasi from material meticulously researched by its writers and cast, The Apprentice is arguably far more nuanced than a simple documentary or satire would be.
I left the movie convinced that it should be mandatory viewing for every current print and TV journalist trying to comment on Trump. It reveals all the sad human realities behind the simpleminded mythologizing or demonization of Trump by his fans and detractors. But it also contextualizes former President Trump and his signature mannerisms without the partisan bombast of election politics, and with no self-serving exaggeration. In that sense it becomes a necessary corrective to the endless hyperbole spewed by Fox TV and MSNBC.
In short, I now see America’s upcoming November 5th election differently than I did a year, or even two months ago. Although most candidates for public office (alongside the rabid media chasing them) have deliberately transformed electoral politics into an endless series of tacky game shows, I now think that feature films, with their slower, more structured narratives still have the potential to teach viewers something. “The Apprentice” does not cheapen or burlesque its subject matter. As Jeremy Strong, who portrays Roy Cohen, explained to The New York Times on October 10th: “It’s a humanistic interrogation and investigation of these people. Ali is not making The Great Dictator — it’s not a farce, it’s not a cartoon. We’re trying to hold a mirror up to this world and these individuals and try to understand how we got here.”
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Content of their Characters
By Scott Spencer
If Harris wins I don’t think it will be because people particularly like her, and believe in her policies. She’s actually rather hard to know, and her policies are vague, and often come across as calculating. With Obama, McCain, both Bushes, both Clintons, it was clear why they wanted to put themselves forward and become president. I can’t figure out what is behind Harris’s drive to get that job. Yet I think she will win because she is running against a deeply damaged man. His compulsive grifting in the last 60 days of his chaotic campaign — the Bibles, the shoes, the funky, forged wristwatches — makes him appear like some guy grabbing handfuls of breath mints and toothpicks as he is being hustled out of the restaurant.
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Trouble Comin’
By Greil Marcus
W. Minnehaha Parkway, Minneapolis, October 27
Two predictions: whoever wins, in the Electoral College it will not be close, and it won’t be Kamala. If she loses it will to an uninterpretable degree be because she was, from her debate with that thug through interviews into her Anderson Cooper audience session, unwilling or unable to answer a question with a straight answer, or often any answer at all. Her preparation has been unfathomable. The campaign may have ended when she was asked on ‘The View,’ which to say asked by her friends, if as president she would do anything differently from the Biden administration, and said ‘Nothing comes to mind’ as is she were not a thinking person, but an overpaid flack, instead of saying, as anyone should have for such an inevitable, easy, meaningful question, ‘Of course. All administrations make mistakes. Real leaders, unlike those who call treasonous solicitations of bribery perfect, admit that. We should have done this earlier. We should have done more of that. There were institutions that needed protections the haven’t received, such as, and I will make sure that gets done’—and so on.
People noticed. They were bothered. I was bothered. It’s something that could have been corrected, and instead—as if it were a STRATEGY—it was compounded. If, on election night, she is asked, ‘Why did you lose?’ the same smokescreen will go up, and not a word will be remembered.
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Totally Administered Society
By Jim Rising
This is the only Presidential election cycle in my voting lifetime that included absolutely no pretense of popular or voter participation (much less decision)—prior to the September election!—none. All of the candidates, Trump, Vance, Harris, Walz, even Kennedy & Shanahan (not so “independent” after all) are simply appointed. Democrats didn’t even wait 2 weeks to “announce” Walz during the convention. Perhaps worse, there was neither any attempt (by either party) to decide upon nor present, a ‘party platform’ of issues except negative— “I’m not her” & “I’m not him” & “I really don’t advocate price controls” & “Her crowds are fake.” I understand the anyone-but-Trump ethos &, to a certain extent, subscribe to it. In fairness, he’s proven relatively impotent in his M[E]GA-‘weirdness’ b/c clearly his understanding of high-school civics & makes Woody Allen’s Bananas or Richard Dreyfus’ Moon over Parador look positively Constitutional; but anybody-but-Trump still means that Donald is still powering the the ship of state—not “for” or “against” anything but … TRUMP. Even in a time of reduced qualifications (Clinton, Obama, Trump, Biden, Sanders, Kennedy), Harris sets the Executive bar at a historic low. Seriously, what is a lawyer who was a one-term senator & “border czar” qualified to do but practice law? An electrician knows where the “stack” & the plumbing must go; roofers understand slope & bearing weight; Doctors can improvise in emergencies; & teachers have become the new parents. But lawyers? Gotta go with Dick the Butcher on that one. Wilding, et. al. v. DNC Services (2016) went widely unreported. It upheld, however, that the DNC leadership—Donna Brazille—(as a “private” & “voluntary” organization) was under absolutely no obligation NOT to selectively leak debate questions, NOR pre-appoint superdelegates. Very literally, Wilding found that political parties were under no legal obligation whatsoever to represent their “voluntary” membership. This scares me!
It seems as though both political parties have read the fine print & taken ‘Wilding’ very much to heart: Why even pretend to include the voters & party members in decision-making? Since “Citizens United” [v. FEC :: 558 U.S. 310 (2010)] makes mega-donors the source of party resources, why should registered voters be consulted at all? In other parts of the world we refer to this as the very definition of “Oligarchy.”
I seriously fear that the next step is to cut out not just consumer/member participation, but middle-management entirely. Certainly Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Larry Ellison could arrange more entertaining “Conventions” & “primaries.” I’m not certain that they could possibly provide less substance … & …They’re not Donald Trump either.
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Hard Lessons
Bruce Hartford
Vietnam was the war that profoundly shaped my generation. We’re all octogenarians now, our numbers are dwindling and our living memories are dying with us. But to this day they still sear our souls. More than 60,000 American dead. More than 2,000,000 Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians dead. Uncounted numbers maimed for life, poisoned by chemical warfare, or dead with heroin needles in their arms.
I am proud to say that for more than a decade I was a dedicated anti-war activist. And I confess with deep regret, that born of anguish and rage, for a few of those years some of my extreme, self-righteous, political positions and provocative statements and actions, were ineffective and counter-productive.
When anti-war activists met Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi and Paris, the Vietnamese urged pro-peace Americans to unite everyone who could be united around the most important issue — which at that time was ending the bombing and beginning peace negotiations. Uniting all who could be united meant building broad coalitions and alliances among people whose analyses and interpretation of the war diverged widely. A minority of us in the student left, however, copped an egotistical, “If you’re not with us you’re against us” attitude. We were too pure to make common cause with those we saw as foes, too militant to temper our extreme rhetoric, and too ‘revolutionary’ to curb our provocative actions that alienated potential allies.
So for a few years I was a part of the problem rather than part of the solution. And I was not alone in that. So much so, that SDS leader Todd Gitlin would later note that by the late sixties, “The only thing the American people hated more than the Vietnam War was the anti-war movement.” Which did neither the Vietnamese people nor American draftees any good whatsoever. We were wrong, but it was not we who paid the price.
In the 1968 election, it was self-evident that Nixon would be far worse on Vietnam and racial justice than Humphrey. But we cared not, for we were righteous in our legitimate revulsion against Johnson, his war, his administration, his convention, and his vice-president. We condemned and excoriated both major candidates equally and campaigned for Eldridge Cleaver on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket. Cleaver got less than 1% of the vote and the world got Nixon.
With Nixon we got five more years of war. With Nixon we got an expanded war with the invasion of Cambodia and a massive bombing campaign that dropped twice the explosive tonnage on Indochina than was used in all of World War II. With Nixon we got the Kent State and Jackson State massacres that cast a chilling, crippling pall over anti-war and racial-justice protests across the nation. With Nixon we got an Attorney General and an administration committed to white-backlash politics, courting segregationists, and rolling back civil rights. Which is why I now view my 1968, “plague on all their houses” stand as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
There is no way to know what Humphrey would have done had he won. But we do know that to some extent presidents and their administrations take actions and enact policies favored by their political base. A significant portion of the Democratic base opposed the Vietnam War and supported justice initiatives. The Republican base that Nixon served was quite the opposite, they wanted war, cops, bigotry and Jim Crow.
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Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Progressive Democrats and Community Leaders Statement on Presidential Election
As Democrats and leaders in the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Progressive communities in Arizona, we the undersigned make the following statement, published on 10/24/2024:
This past year has been very difficult for all of us. With over 42,000 Palestinians killed by Israel using American-supplied weapons and no end in sight despite all our struggle for a ceasefire, we approach the presidential election heartbroken and outraged.
We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide. We understand this sentiment. Many of us have felt that way ourselves, even until very recently. Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones.
As we consider the full situation carefully, however, we conclude that voting for Kamala Harris is the best option for the Palestinian cause and all of our communities. We know that some will strongly disagree. We only ask that you consider our case with an open mind and heart, respecting that we are doing what we believe is right in an awful situation where only flawed choices are available.
In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement. It would be an existential threat to our democracy and our whole planet.
When we think of Trump in power again, we recall that even a genocide can get much worse. Trump just said that Netanhahu must “go further” in Gaza while criticizing Biden for “trying to hold him back.” His biggest donor, Miriam Adelson, who demanded in 2016 that Trump move the US embassy to Jerusalem if elected –– which he then did –– is now telling Trump to allow Israel to annex the entire West Bank. Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and the entire far right in Israel want Trump to win and grant Israel total free reign. We cannot give them what they want.
Trump must be defeated. The only way to defeat him is to elect Kamala Harris.
Voting for Harris is not a personal endorsement of her or of the policy decisions of the administration in which she served. It’s an assessment of the best possible option to continue fighting for an end to the genocide, a free Palestine, and all else that we hold dear.
We are deeply frustrated that Harris has not yet met our movement’s demand that she break with Biden, defy the powerful extremists enforcing the status quo, stand with the majority of Americans, and pledge to uphold US law and international law and condition aid to Israel. Still we believe there are clear reasons to hope that we can win positive policy change with a Harris administration and a Democratic Congress.
Multiple media reports state that Harris’s national security advisors are open to re-evaluating policy and conditioning aid to Israel. On October 13th, the same day the administration threatened to re-evaluate military support if Israel did not improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza and reduce civilian casualties in the next 30 days, Harris tweeted: “Israel must urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need. Civilians must be protected and have access to food, water, and medicine. International humanitarian law must be respected.” In Michigan the other day, Harris expressed clear empathy for the suffering of the people of Palestine and Lebanon and the impact of this devastation on Arab Americans. She pledged to do “everything in her power” as President to end the war in Gaza, end the suffering of Palestinians there, and achieve “a future of security and dignity for all people in the region.”
Beyond Harris’s statements, we know that her decisions as President will be shaped by the larger Democratic Party coalition that includes a growing force pushing for Palestinian human rights. Our Arizona Democratic Party passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in January. Every single member of Congress who has publicly called for a ceasefire in Gaza or for an arms embargo is a Democrat. The major national unions, civil rights groups, and progressive organizations that have called for a halt to military aid to Israel are all working to elect Harris.
On the other hand, the Republican Party coalition offers zero opposition to unconditional support for Israel and zero support for Palestinian human rights. Instead Republicans urge the US to join Israel in bombing Iran, call to “bounce the rubble in Gaza” and “kill ‘em all,” and would likely support the Israeli far right’s drive to annex Gaza and the West Bank.
What about a third party? Many in our communities believe this is our best option. Unfortunately, there is not a single third party member of Congress or even state legislator in America. In our electoral system, no third party candidate can win this election. But voting for them could make Trump president.
The polls show the presidential election is extremely close and that it will be decided by 7 swing states, including Arizona. While voting 3rd party may be strategic in non-swing states as a protest of the current US Israel/Palestine policy or as a step to qualifying the Green Party for public funding in future elections by winning at least 5% of the national vote, doing it in Arizona or other swing states in such a close election could bring disaster.
Some argue that if Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voters and our allies vote for a 3rd party candidate and intentionally throw the election to Trump, taking credit for defeating Harris, it will prove our power to decide a close election and “punish Democrats” for complicity in genocide. Unfortunately, this is not how power, politics, or change works in our country. When Ralph Nader helped throw the election to Bush in 2000, he was rejected by millions for whom he was once a hero, banished ever since to the political margins. When Jill Stein helped throw the election to Trump in 2016, she remained relegated to the political fringe, becoming less powerful not more. If our communities ally with the Green Party to defeat Harris, we risk marginalizing ourselves as they did by alienating the tens of millions of voters who support the cause of Palestinian freedom and are fighting to defeat Trump by electing her.
Instead, by helping to elect Kamala Harris, we can say, “Despite it all, we gave you another chance and helped put you in office to defend democracy and uphold our highest American values. Now uphold them: end the genocide and secure Palestinian self-determination. We will fight every day to hold you to it.” If Harris and Democrats win, we will wage that fight with more allies among the American people, Congress, and the White House than ever before. If they don’t deliver, we will have a mandate and mass support to hold them accountable through every nonviolent tool of democracy, including protests, resignations, civil disobedience, primary election challenges, and even potential mass noncooperation. It’s a difficult path, but the one that offers the most hope.
The first step –– and our best choice in this horrible situation — is defeating Trump by electing Harris. We urge you to join us.
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General Strike
By Eric Laursen
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it—that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!—Mario Savio
Writing in the last full week of October, it appears that Donald Trump has the inside track to repeat that favorite trick of Republican presidential candidates, the one he brought off in 2016 but couldn’t manage four years later: losing the popular vote but winning the electoral vote and therefore the White House. This might not happen. But in the few days we have left, it’s worthwhile considering what should be done if he pulls it off.
We can spend our time in the same self-indulgent way American liberals and the Left have done for the past year if not longer, deploring the MAGA people and smirking at Trump’s crudeness, racism, sexism, and general ignorance. But this gets us nowhere and I’m personally sick of it. The MAGA voters are what they are. For them and many other Republicans, Trump is Teflon. We should accept this and move on.
The proper target for our anger is the political system that made Trump possible, even inevitable. The faces one can put on it are legion. On one side are Mitch McConnell, Mike Johnson, Lindsey Graham, Elon Musk, and the many other right-wing politicians and plutocrats who fully understand how dangerous Trump is, but who persist in sane-washing him because of the many goodies he promises them if returned to office, starting with locking in place the outrageously skewed 2017 tax cuts.
On the other side are the center-right Democratic establishment, who can be relied upon to do nothing substantial to stop Trump should he claim he won. They will appeal to the courts. They will call upon the people to go out in the streets and wave signs. But in the end, just as the Gore campaign did in 2000, they will be more concerned to make sure the system runs smoothly and the succession goes off without a hiccup (“See? The system works!”) than to protect the country against a neo-fascist takeover. Don’t dawdle, don’t rubberneck. Trust the judicial system to bring the guilty to justice—eventually. And don’t forget to give generously to your 2026 and 2028 Democratic candidates.
Can you really see Kamala Harris, former prosecutor, behaving in any other way?
This is essentially what happened in January 2021, when the pussy-grabber first took office. The Women’s March in Washington on the 21st drew over 470,000 people; across the country, as many as 5 million-plus marched. The star-studded event featured speakers ranging from Scarlett Johansson and America Ferrara to then-Sen. Kamala Harris. Four days earlier, when Trump was actually sworn in, was a different story. At the ceremony, lawmakers from John McCain to Bernie Sanders smiled and snapped selfies.
In the streets, DisruptJ20 and the DC Welcoming Committee collective brought together activists from all over, some of whom linked arms at security check-points in an attempt to shut down the inaugural. A photo of a burning police squad car was ubiquitous in national media, for a time. “We want to undermine Trump’s presidency from the get-go,” an organizer said bluntly. “There has been a lot of talk of peaceful transition of power as being a core element in a democracy and we want to reject that entirely and really undermine the peaceful transition.”
Thousands of activists participated. More than 230 people were arrested and charged with rioting, of whom 21 pled guilty; all the others were either acquitted or had charges dropped. Not a single defendant was tried and found guilty. No celebrities were among the defendants, few if any—outside the movement—spoke up for them, and the media circus moved on.
Do we want the same thing to happen this time? Should Trump take the electoral vote again, we will still be two months away from the Senate’s certification of the vote and an additional two weeks to the Inauguration. There’s still time to plan something different.
That something should be a national general strike.
The American political system is no longer able to apply any check on a figure like Trump. We can’t look to either party to hold him in line, or to the judiciary—and certainly not the Supreme Court—to stop the rules from being bent and the electoral machinery from being gamed. Abolishing the Electoral College would be a nice idea, but that would involve amending the Constitution, which as a practical matter, is now virtually impossible.
Beyond that, the political system’s ability to reform itself has been exhausted. No “New” New Deal is on the way in Washington to resolve the vast crises we face: global warming, economic inequality and impoverishment, and massive population movements, among others. If we are serious about tackling these problems, and about retrieving some form of democracy, we have to recognize that nothing will change unless the system changes.
A general strike—a mass cessation of all economic activity, in order to achieve an economic or political goal—is the most potent tool that working people have to demand change.
It’s been around for thousands of years; in early Rome, it was called the secessio plebis, in which the plebs would abandon the city, leaving the patrician class to fend for themselves. The general strike (hartal) was one of Gandhi’s most effective tactics in the movement for Indian independence, drawing out millions of ordinary people from the country’s workplaces, offices, shops, and courts of law. The West Coast Waterfront Strike of 1934, culminating in the San Francisco General Strike the same year, shut down the city’s port for four days, resulting in the unionization of all West Coast ports and giving an enormous boost to labor organizing around the country. The biggest general strike of all time took place in France in 1968 and nearly toppled the de Gaulle government; in 2011, a general strike succeeded in overthrowing the dictatorial Saleh regime in Yemen.
General strikes don’t always work, but often, they are the only thing that can. To succeed, more often than not they have to overcome deep institutional opposition, including within the political and union leaderships that claim to represent working people but are too afraid to rock the boat. The more people who get involved, and the clearer and more absolute the set of demands, the better the chances of success.
At a bare minimum, a post-election general strike should demand the un-seating of Trump and Vance as president and vice-president and the immediate calling of a constitutional convention to abolish the Electoral College and reform the electoral process. But why not go farther? Why not use the ad hoc organizing capability that drives the strike to move toward direct democracy?
A possible model is the German revolution of 1918. Contrary to what we are often taught, World War I didn’t end on the battlefield, but as the result of a general strike and naval mutiny. In January, 400,000 workers went on strike in Berlin and around a million nationwide, demanding an end to the war. Months later, sailors at the port of Kiel mutinied, refusing to sail against the British Fleet. Almost instantly, local workers’ and soldiers’ councils took over government and the military. Within weeks, Kaiser Wilhelm II fled the country and Germany surrendered.
The revolution was betrayed. Moderate Socialist leaders allied themselves with right-wing parties to suppress the left, restore much of the old government apparatus and military brass, and write a constitution that gave the president emergency powers, paving the way for the rise of Hitler.
A general strike, then, is high-wire act that can produce either liberation or a new repression. A gamble that mass rejection of the old boss doesn’t have to end in acceptance of the new boss. The kind of gamble we’re left with when a society has reached an impasse—which this one has. If what I’m suggesting sounds like something an anarchist would propose, that’s because I am one; I’m only too happy to take the chance to tear the state/capitalist edifice down.
But if you’re inclined to dismiss my immodest proposal on these grounds, consider again how intractable the present system has become. Consider too that millions of Americans agree on this point. In a May New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll, almost 70% of respondents in electoral battleground states said the country’s political and economic systems needed major changes or to be completely torn down. A general strike is an opportunity to shake the system to its foundations: something we will desperately need the morning after November 5, if we find ourselves contemplating a new Trumpian Regime of Retribution.
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Sand in the Gears
By Bob Levin
My basic optimism for happy endings is warring with my equally basic cynicism about human beings. The question occurs can I go four years without looking at TV news or reading the paper.
Ostriches may have the right idea.
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Cultural Heroin
By Addy Malinowski
I figured this might be my last chance to see Trump Live — or alive — before the November election. Maybe it’s because I’ve been missing the Americana of the Midwest or bummed for missing Dylan and Nelson up at Woodstock in July, eager to see a stadium show.
Parking was a nightmare, I mean you couldn’t even get close to the Coliseum and I was reminded of how my dad drove out to Nassau County from Detroit in 1981 to catch Pink Floyd I don’t think he ever got in and I almost turned around myself before refueling at the local Taco Bell and parking the car about a mile away on some suburban road. Nearing the Hempstead Turnpike on foot I see scores of Haitian protestors cordoned off into one of Long Island’s “Free Speech Zones” and plenty of “Jews for Trump” waving the Zionist flag. Walking past this scene felt like crossing the picket line and my heart began to race. I mean I’m no Hunter S. Thompson but there’s this sense you’re walking into enemy territory sober and unarmed and it’s all a bit weird walking into that sea of bright red hats — it’s the hats which unsettle me the most — still coded as some granola liberal on assignment from the nation’s largest urban public university. Feeling all alone I gravitate toward the vendors, mostly dudes in from the city looking to make a quick buck selling someone else’s gear. I asked my comrade wearing a blacked-out Trump 2024 hat what he’s got though I don’t have it in me to put red on and then there it is: Let’s Go Brandon emblazoned on the front of a dark blue cap. Now this I can live with since I, too, agree: Fuck Joe Biden. My costume was now infallible — big plastic rimmed tortoise shell glasses notwithstanding — you never would have guessed this kid voted for Barack Obama not once but twice.
Fredric Jameson, in the long introduction to The Political Unconscious, introduces an idea central to Marxist literary criticism that within the capitalist mode of production, cultural products provide imaginary solutions to real social contradictions. I quickly realize the truth of this insight while standing in a mile long line snaking around the Coliseum’s parking lot, starting with what I heard a father saying to his son behind me. “All these people here are proof that not everyone’s been brainwashed,” the man said to his son — yet isn’t it true liberals speak the same way about the half of the country that, as Barack Obama eloquently put it, clings to their guns and religion? I was with the deplorables now, and they were proud of their basket, too. “The Jews they’re waking up” the man said again to his son (the Jews for Trump faction now filing in line behind us). He went on: “All they care about are having men in the girl’s bathroom.” The text I sent out to half a dozen friends that night was simple: our elites are happy for us to hate each other, denigrate each other, shoot each other, even, as long as they are left out of the picture and free to accumulate even vaster sums of wealth for themselves and their reptilian cronies. Trump himself is at best an egotistical opportunist who seized on the historical moment to gain the validation of tens of millions of people, a validation never equal to that he lacked from his own father. I was here to read Trump as a “text” — as cultural phenomenon [1] — an aesthetic experience no amount of fact-checking or reasoned argument could penetrate. Trump as cipher for a system whose structural features produce mass inequality, immiseration [2] and indigence; Trump as “figure” through which coheres 500 years of genocide, enslavement, and empire that laid the bedrock of the “democracy” Democrats would like you to believe is now at stake. Trump as alibi for capital.
Furthermore, Jameson writes presciently concerning the question of nationalism, stating “a Left which cannot grasp the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism (any more than it can grasp that of religion or of fascism) can scarcely hope to reappropriate such collective energies and must effectively doom itself to political impotence” (Political Unconscious 298). Those on the liberal left today might scoff at such an assertion to take nationalism seriously, let alone a dialectical reading of nationalism as containing the seeds of a utopian reconfiguration, however they are woe to do so. The collective in front of me in Uniondale, New York — and it is for sure a collective, no matter how vitriolic or disagreeable — produces a sense of solidarity, understanding, and trust amongst its ranks, a feeling that we’re all in this together, up against the deep state and its pedophilic cabal — and the libtards sure won’t stop us.
The potential for Utopian transformation all around me, I lean into the vibes, which were part county fair part classic rock concert. The stadium having reached capacity, I join my brothers and sisters in overflow on the lawn, where elephant ears are for sale, “loaded” fries, and corn dogs (I had a Sprite, which somehow hit the spot). Over the PA Elton John (Trump’s personal favorite) was followed by Elvis Presley, ‘Suspicious Minds’ to be precise, fitting track for the occasion, the jam paired with signs that read “Kamala is Hamas” and “Fake News is the Virus.” I’m not gonna lie, the playlist was alright, and it wasn’t a bad scene out on the lawn. You have Jews for Trump, Blacks for Trump, and plenty of Latinos and Indians for Trump too, though not by name. This is fascism doing multiculturalism, and doing it well (I’ve seen college classrooms whiter than this). If I had the cash, I might have bought myself a Pet Lives Matter shirt (my personal favorite) or a White Privilege Card from the vendors, just to show off back home.
This all comes to a halt as Lee Greenwood is blasted through the PA signaling the Big Man’s entrance. The guy really knows how to work a crowd and I couldn’t help but smile a bit myself when he comes out. The speech itself was standard-fare Trump — attacks on New York as a “Third World” city, ranting ad infinitum about “migrant crime”, and a shoutout to special guest Rudy Giuliani — but one set of lines caught my attention, and I had to pull my head up from the shrimp teriyaki bowl I bought to listen in. “I’m the greatest of all time! Maybe greater than Elvis” — I burst out laughing — he goes on: “but Elvis had a guitar. I don’t have a guitar. I don’t have the privilege of a guitar,” implying I, Trump, is really, actually, greater than the King himself. This is kind of like Lennon saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus (he wasn’t wrong), but still, bigger than the King of Rock N Roll? How can you be greater than the “the greatest person that has ever walked the face of the earth”? After all, this isn’t Honolulu 1973, it’s fucking Long Island and the year is 2024, and man, you’re speaking to a crowd full of elephant ear eaters and Sprite drinkers. Eric Lott, in his reading of Elvis impersonators, writes that the “function” of Elvis impersonation is to provide “‘magical’ resolutions to social pressures confronting white working class masculinity”[3]. In other words, impersonators can be read as “figures” for the social and historical conditions that produce them — the shift from a high-wage Fordist industrial economy to a postindustrial one, for example — and tellingly, one of the states with the highest number of Elvis impersonators is Michigan, where the auto industry once reigned supreme, and which Trump won handily in 2016 and may do so again this November. Lott writes, “to reclaim and embody Elvis is to recall the moment in US history when auto workers drove an American prosperity and an empowered masculinity that they believed would shortly be their own” [4]. I mean if this doesn’t map on perfectly to describe working class attachment to Trump I don’t know what does. Trump as Elvis or Trump as Elvis impersonator? Maybe it’s not all so far off! Liberals may be dumbfounded by white working class attachment to maybe-billionaire Trump, yet fail to grasp how the Big Guy, much like Elvis impersonation, provides an “imaginary triumph over the working class circumstances” for which both are stand-ins [5]. I could feel this antiquated structure of feeling in Trump’s rhetoric — the promise to return to a bygone era, the return of industrial manufacturing to the heartland that is central to his economic messaging, and most grotesquely the promise to deport 20 million immigrants, to usher in a return to an “old school” White USA — but also in the artifacts around me, from ‘Proud To Be An American’ to the seas of red, white and blue, to my White Privilege Card.
After repeated claims about cannibalistic migrants in Springfield, Ohio (“I’ll be in Springfield next week, you may never hear from me again!”) and so-called “migrant crime” (which is entirely fake), I had enough. Driving home in the Long Island dark, I stop at Ralph’s Italian Ice for a peanut butter parfait, and the dream — the reversed utopian image of fascist collectivity — began to fade away, and History began to hurt again [6].
Notes
1 J.D. Vance (before he sold his soul to MAGA to win his Senate seat) once understood the power of Trump as a cultural object when he described Trumpism as “cultural heroin,” hence the title of this reflection.
2 “It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker […] must grow worse. […] The [general law] necessitates an accumulation of misery equivalent to the accumulation of capital” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, ch. 25).
3 Eric Lott. “All the King’s Men.” Black Mirror. 2017.
4 ibid.
5 ibid.
6 “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their own intention.” (Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 102).
Wi…
Witness
By William Svelmoe
Well America, never let it be said you weren’t forewarned. Never let it be said you didn’t go into your local polling station knowing exactly what you were voting for. Knowing what you want America to become.
In 1939, Nazis held a rally at Madison Square Garden, billed at the time as a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism.”
Last night, Donald Trump and MAGA world held a rally at Madison Square Garden which, as Notre Dame fans like to intone, “woke up the echoes.”
Last night, Donald Trump and the world of MAGA opened its mind and heart to the nation. They invited the world to inspect the soul of the movement. They asked us to endorse their vision of the future of America. They asked us to, in religious language, become one with them.
And it sure was an ugly sight.
The evening also functioned as the symbol of Donald Trump’s final triumph over the Republican party and over white American Christianity. If I were a comic strip artist, my image would be of Donald Trump on the stage spewing his filth with one foot on the neck of the Republican elephant and the other foot on the neck of white Jesus. Well, maybe not white Jesus. Maybe Mike Johnson’s beaming “I support racism for Jesus” round moon-pie face gazing adoringly up at Trump as Trump mashes his foot onto Johnson’s neck.
The point is that the Republican party has now been recreated as the party of racism, misogyny, and a devotion to what is false over what is true.
And the term Christianity? Perhaps we should refashion Twain’s invocation of the Gilded Age, and refer to Gilded Christianity. A thin veneer of spiritual-sounding talk overlaying a deep core of rot and the will to power. Nietzsche would be proud of these folks.
Let us review the “highlights.” While doing so, remember that this was Trump’s big show, his closing argument for his candidacy. Every speaker was chosen and vetted by the campaign. Their remarks were loaded into the teleprompter. This is the vision for America Trump wanted every American to see. And embrace.
Tony Hinchcliffe, comedian. Before we get to his remarks, note that he had written into the comments he submitted to the campaign a “joke” referring to Kamala Harris as a “cunt.” The campaign thought that was a bridge too far. He took it out. This is what he left in. This is the bridge the campaign endorsed.
Hinchcliffe: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Hinchcliffe: “Latinos love making babies because there’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”
Hinchcliffe also said he “carved watermelons” with a Black audience member, and made a joke about Jewish people that suggested they are stingy with money, thereby revealing that Tony is well-versed in two, at least, of the oldest of racist stereotypes.
When called on his racism by Tim Walz, Hinchcliffe responded, “These people have no sense of humor. I’m a comedian Tim. Might be time to change your tampon.” Cuz, you know, women are always overreacting and hysterical. Tony knows misogyny as well as racism. As such, he’s the perfect spokesman for MAGA world.
The evening was just getting started.
Grant Cardone, businessman: “Kamala Harris and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.” O.k. I get it. She’s not a “cunt.” She’s a “whore.”
David Rem, Trump friend, waving a cross at the assembled multitudes: “Kamala Harris is the devil! She is the Antichrist!” If she’s anti Mr. Rem’s Christ, she’s got my vote.
Tucker Carlson: “She’s just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
Some talk radio guy called Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a bitch” and Democrats “a bunch of degenerates. Lowlifes. Jew-haters and lowlifes. Every one of them.”
Stephen Miller, that cross between a vampire and a salamander, frothed with nativist hate: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
Trump, of course, was not to be outdone. He nattered on about Congo, you know, one of those black countries, opening its prisons to send its worst to America. And there was the usual talk of “the enemy within, the most sinister and corrupt force on earth.” You know. You and me.
And then, without a hint of irony, self-reflection, intelligence, Trump concluded, “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion.” Somewhere Inigo Montoya said, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
Last night we witnessed the profound sickness that has spread from Donald Trump throughout MAGA world. Next week we found out if the cancer has metastasized.
Wi…
Ain’t if funny how the world’ll set you free
Various Authors
Vincent Neil Emerson’s “Learnin’ to Drown” has picked up new meanings as Americans mull over how Trump might sink our fuct democracy…
“Learnin’ to Drown” might’ve come through to the late George Trow who could hear a country song. (“Merle Haggard is a very great American.”) Trow’s books (see, in particular, My Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studes, 1950-1998) tell how the country’s WASP patriarchy faded out—replaced after the 60s not by the counterculture but by a new class of symbolic capitalists presiding over a brave new world of aggregations. Trow saw that America’s new social structure was pretty shaky in part because it failed to address the needs of “non-patrician descendants of the tradition of Washington”:
I’m thinking of a breakfast I had in West Virginia about three years ago. There was a West Virginian man—and I could tell from his face that this family had been here for three hundred years, and that his lineage was spread with war dead—and there had been a surprise snow storm (it was already mid-spring), and the man I’m speaking of was ecstatic, no other word can be used, because on account of that snowstorm he’s earned seventy-five dollars plowing people’s driveways. He had it in his pocket, and he showed it to me. This is the man, whatever his sins, who is deeply cultured, in American terms. He belongs to Washington. He lives in his own traditional freedom until such moment as he is told to fight for his country, and then he does, and often he dies. That’s the deal he’s made with the country. This man gives no reverence to any assumed dominant mind. As far as he’s concerned, there’s only one dominant mind in America, the one that belongs to him and Washington. Should our system of assumed dominant mind after assumed dominant mind, right on down to Real Life, which is itself based on assumed dominance of rock-and-roll, and Buddy Holly down to the Butthole Surfers—should this system of assumed dominant mind, run by people who are probably sick of the dominant mind they’re assuming, should this system run into trouble, we’re in trouble, on account of this West Virginia man.
No doubt. That’s why J.D. Vance is feeling frisky now. But perhaps we can find solace and inspiration in the music of Vincent Neil Emerson—a native American whose history stretches back beyond Washington. Emerson is an East Texan who’s proud of his Choctaw-Apache roots.
He sounds like he’s been off the grid when he sings about “stealing all my meals…living in my car…
I’m barely a man and livin’ hard
My father killed himself
My mother hit the bar
Yet his “sad bastard’s song” is also a song of the open road:
Well ain’t it funny
Ain’t it funny how
The world’ll set you free
The sound of freedom isn’t in his blue bayou voice, but it’s there in the lyrics’ double-Nelson. And most of all in the melodious spray of notes at the top of “Learning to Drown.” The beautiful piano/guitar/bass intro isn’t exactly country; the music seems to come from another jazzy region of Emerson’s large talent.
“Learnin’ to Drown” is just a song—not a substitute for candid democratic discourse that might help distinguish an American citizen from the idolatrous fool, the sucker, the clueless consumer, the ad person’s delight, the Trumper. Yet “Learnin’ to Drown” hints ordinary people can show and tell the truth about themselves, even if they no longer trust voices that once carried (what Trow termed) “the authority of News Delivery.” And “Learnin’ to Drown” isn’t a one-off. Emerson will never be a topical songwriter, but he can sing like a citizen. His “The Man from Uvalde” images a father haunted by a school shooting:
But it just now makes no sense
Hung up on self-defense
Easier than a driver’s test
And the ammunition’s cheap
I don’t trust no talkin’ head
I don’t care if you’re blue or red
I just wanna keep my child
From dyin’ at his desk
“Gun control crap.” According to one Youtube respondent (who admitted he liked the beat). Emerson didn’t sing “The Man from Uvalde” or “Learnin’ to Drown” when he played in Brooklyn last month. He took it pretty light—he and his band were the opening act, not headliners. But there was still something bracing about his amused on-stage patter—“New York City…ho-ly shit.” He seemed impressed yet unawed by the metropolis. Then he rock ‘n’ rolled right into a new song about crawfishing in Louisiana. The sun ain’t going down on America as long as there are new Emersons out there.
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On the forthcoming election
By Stanley Corngold
A colleague, the poet Patrick Walsh, proposed this question: “Who are the people who support Trump?” And answered:
Sure, many are fat cats looking for another tax break, like the one he delivered in 2017 (the only campaign “promise” on which he came through) and far more are racists who see in him the agent for advancing their agendas. But most disturbingly, there are some good people who support him—they’re not among the super-rich and they’re not bigots. A good many of them have been fed lies and have swallowed them. Pride is also a factor: most people have a lot of trouble admitting that they were wrong. But it’s a maddening phenomenon: saints voting for the devil.
What prompts them? Recall Richard Evans’ thesis about the ranking Nazi perpetrators (October 1, “Hitler’s Loathsome Paladins”): those “good people” were hurt by economic hardships just as they were all set to advance on normal career tracks. So, thinking that a change of government would be just the thing to put some pride and marks in their pockets, they became Nazis or voted Nazis into power. Ring a bell? Here, now, we have a great many citizens who have not been doing well and who, once again, on grounds of pride and $$$, will vote a pack of shadow Nazis into our government. General Mark Milley, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, declared that “Trump is fascist to the core.” After Trump put up a video forecasting his victory in 2024 and “the creation of a unified Reich,” David Graham of The Atlantic cited Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman: ‘This man [Trump] is a stain, a Nazi, a pure a [sic] simple garbage of a human being. Flush Trump down the toilet.’” A chorus of other voice have said the same thing. But “the bizarre thing,” Graham concludes, “is that many voters may hear about the controversy and assume that it reveals Trump’s sympathy for the Third Reich, and then vote for him anyway.” [1]
“They”? They are in and out of the cohort of the semi-educated whom, at the end of the 19th century, Thomas Masaryk (founder and president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia) denounced as the political curse.[2] Masaryk spoke of a national network of “paper”: his network is now our Web. In his words, it is
the modern milieu of that “dangerous” “middle education or, more properly, semi-education,” which is “identical with an inharmonious, disunified, and unmethodical organization of the mind.” Semi-education stands in an unmediated relation with suicidal impulses, for “knowledge which cannot be used makes its possessor a victim of fantasy, of hypercritical nonsense, destroying the desire for useful labor, creating needs that cannot be satisfied, and leading in the end to boredom with life.”[3]
This association is not just pertinent to 1880: in 2022, “13.2 million people [in the US] thought seriously about suicide.” [4] And this figure leaves out hundreds of thousands of opioid deaths.
What, then, is the culture and cast of mind of the semi-educated who, with their November votes, may very well destroy our country? They might be intellectually ambitious enough to tune into Fox News and “X” and leave it at that. They do not compare sources: the impulse to compare requires a disinterested “search for truth” (Lessing), not at home in the “inharmonious, disunified, and unmethodically organized mind.” Their vanished superior is the Web-displaced mind of the “uneducated,” where, as Adorno wrote, “mere naivety, mere ignorance, allowed a direct relationship to the objects and could be heightened to critical consciousness by virtue of their potential of skepticism, wit and irony.”[5] They have been superseded by another type: the complacent, digitally adroit semi-educated. “Political betting sites are the best at predicting the wisdom of the crowd. …Contract prices currently forecast a landslide victory for Trump.”[6] The Republican commentator Peter Wehner cites Trump’s “vileness, lawlessness, and malevolence. At this point, it is reasonable to conclude that those qualities are a central part of Trump’s appeal to many of the roughly 75 million people who will vote for him in three weeks. They revel in his vices; they are vivified by them. Folie à millions.”[7] The outcome is the gift of Prof. Darko Suvin: “When the sun of culture is low, even dwarves cast long shadows.”
— Sun Zi, Bingfa (Art of War), C6 BCE:
Notes
[1] David A. Graham, “The Real Meaning of Trump’s ‘Unified Reich’ Post, The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/trump-unified-reich-truth-social/678443/
[2] Thomas G. Masaryk, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization (1881), trans. William B. Weist and Robert G. Batson, intro. Anthony Giddens (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), 67. Interpolated phrases re by Benno Wagner.
[3] Ibid., 68.
[4] CDC: Suicide Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
[5] Theodor W. Adorno, Theorie der Halbbildung (1959), in: T. W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 8: Soziologische Schriften 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 95, 104f. Cited in the German Wikipedia piece on “Halbbildung,” semi-education.
[6] Thomas Miller, a professor of data science at Northwestern, cited in the NY Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/15/business/dealbook/prediction-markets-trump-harris.html
[7] Peter Wehner, “This Election Is Different,” The Atlantic. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/this-election-is-different/ar-AA1sj2PI
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The Sun isn’t Yellow…
Bob Ingram
Donald Trump is the sick spawn of a diseased economic system that vastly prefers profits over people. I will be eternally stunned that 77 million Americans voted for him – but not surprised. Since the first slave set manacled feet on American shores to become the bedrock of the Southern agricultural economy, terror capitalism in its various other forms like the industrial revolution has thrived to the point where it now in the person of Trump nakedly seeks the end of the democratic system that has tolerated and indeed fostered it to this crucial point.
And in the most tragic of ironies, the base of Trump’s power is those millions who have devoured the unattainable treasures – the sleek new cars and faraway places – of capitalism on its own media and are aggrieved at being eternal outsiders to this fabled American Dream. Trump vows he will bring them their deserved vengeance despite his being the obvious champion of the ruling class. Stunning.
November fifth will determine whether the rest of Malcolm X’s chickens have indeed come home to roost.
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Reprieve
By Ron Primeau
Four years ago in the election campaign issue I suggested that as a nation we might one day thank Trumpists for alerting us to the slippage (always there but not always noted) in our democracy. In his moments of cynical clarity, Trump saw through our mythos. Maybe we were never as “exceptional” as we claimed to be? Perhaps Trump’s rise would enable us to break with the lies we inherited and rededicate ourselves to becoming a more genuinely democratic republic.
Eventually that will happen. But instead, this season Trump is about to be defeated by a campaign that’s revived fantasies we grew up with, flawed as they are. We are, after all, exceptional. American history, Candidate Kamala affirms, is the greatest story ever told. So, maybe we will flush out some misogyny, racism, and jingoism as we raise a few probing questions. Under new leadership we can return to the old civic religion. Having survived the threat of homegrown autocracy, we will be grateful.
And then I get stuck. Really stuck.
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The Day After Trump Won
By Dennis Kaplan
Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, I put out an email to a number of friends expressing my immediate feelings. What I wrote is below.
Friends,
A couple of days before the election a friend of mine asked: “If Trump wins, how do you think you’ll feel the next day?”
At the time, I considered the question little more than a fanciful exercise, a little like, “What if we’re attacked by Mars, or mutant sharks come flying out of the bay?”
I believe I made a good faith effort to visit my friend’s posed future, but whatever I came up with fell far short of what I am feeling now – that sourness in the pit of the stomach, that bone-deep festering, right up there in a class of emotional response normally reserved for death, breakups, betrayals.
President Trump: I’ll bet I’m not the first person who finds it impossible to join those words without a conscious alignment of breath. It’s as if the words, themselves, possess an inherent resistance, like flipper ice cream, bile soufflé.
To me, the worst thing he said was that we should kill the family members of people we believe to be related to terrorists.
Second on my list was his suggestion that we follow the lead of the most vile governments on earth and return to torture – not just the Bush/Cheney brand, but a version that would be torture on steroids.
Imagine being the soldier who gets those orders. Imagine training your crosshairs on the forehead of an uncomprehending child. Imagine pulling the torture chords and taking in the subsequent screams. Is this our shining example?
Even if Trump does not do these things, he said them. He normalized them. He disseminated them into millions of minds—minds that are right now churning, loosening shackles on their darkest angels.
When I was in grade school, I remember sitting in class watching one of those American civics reels, clattering on a noisy projector. In the film – set in the 1700’s – a huffy, self‑important foreign ambassador struts up to his American counterpart and demands, “I must speak to your Minister of War.” At first the American looks confused, but then he smiles beatifically, “Why, we have no Minister of War.”
At that age I was not going to parse out that the Secretary of Defense was exactly the same thing. I swallowed the message exactly as it was intended, and along the way I must have internalized some other notions – malice toward none; it can’t happen here. And even if that America existed only in my mind, I now find myself grieving its loss. It is a little like that suburban Missouri teenager who committed suicide upon discovering that that boy on the internet – the first person who really understood her – was the cyber-creation of a spying and intrusive mother.
I’ve spoken with people who have been unable to get beyond two sentences without bursting into tears. Others have told me that they can’t sleep, or that they feel they have been walking in a daze.
Here’s the worst part: it’s not just Trump. It’s the sixty million amongst us who drank in his dark message and enabled him. It’s the members of the new House of Representatives, ready to train their sights on reproductive rights, healthcare, marriage equality, environmental protections, Social Security, Medicare, organized labor, Planned Parenthood, free speech, taxes on the 1%….
Checks and balances? Forget them.
The Supreme Court will soon be wearing the same name that crowns those towering hotels.
Free speech: He’s already intimated a preference for the British system of libel laws, where the burden of proof is on the accused. (Think how that would play out for the thirteen women who reported his assaults, immediately branded as liars.)
Free Press: He’s made it plain that he wouldn’t mind seeing the demise of entities such as the New York Times and MSNBC. That’s one thing when stated by some fatuous windbag in a bar, quite another when put forth by someone with a demonstrated appetite for vengeance, now equipped with all the powers of government at his fingertips.
And speaking of fingertips, how have I proceeded so far without mentioning the nuclear codes? Let’s focus on that a bit. In the past, even to go there was considered the ultimate cheap shot of politics. When Lyndon Johnson’s campaign ran those infamous daisy-girl/mushroom cloud ads against Barry Goldwater, they were so roundly reviled that no one repeated that ploy for decades.
So how do we regard that taboo now? Can anyone who watched his comportment during the campaign – “Little Marco…Fiorina’s face…blood coming out of her whatever” – honestly say it hasn’t occurred to them that the psyche in question may not be the safest repository for powers that could destroy the earth?
I’d like to close on a hopeful note, but to do so would be disingenuous. Under the current cloud every bright spot I conjure quickly flickers away. I can only think of the title to that old Elton John song: “Candle in the Wind.”
How can it have come to this?
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What Just Happened
By Benj DeMott
The late Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Falling in Love (2012) was originally titled “The End,” which would’ve underscored the final scene’s go-to-smash upending of viewers’ presumptions. The film, set in Japan, works like a gently penetrative Ozu-y character study until it’s transformed utterly by a sudden act of violence in the last second(s). That end is beyond any expectancy, though it’s not exactly confounding. The moment of violence isn’t an unmotivated malignity—the film’s flow of images and intensities make sense (in retrospect). Yet when the movie came out, its unnerving conclusion seemed to flummox some viewers. A critic in The Guardian complained Kiarostami had “failed to come up with an ending:” “Abbas Kiarostami’s new film is a strange, unfinished spectacle whose ending simply looks amputated.” Maybe this reviewer simply stopped thinking too soon. World crises have since clarified the mystery of “that ‘missing reel’ effect.” Like Falling in Love’s shock ending now seems prophetic. Kiarostami’s film was a projection that managed to capture what Reaction would feel like to all us modern fantasts who’d assumed (like a 21rst Century Ike) things would continue to be more like they are now than they ever were before. [Continued here.]
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Tryst with a Trumper
By Leila Zalokar
Excerpt from Fly Me to You…
…The client arrives. He’s a tall, lurching, well-built man in his mid-fifties with a reddish face, a potbelly, a Southern accent. She goes in to kiss his cheek and immediately he sticks his tongue down her throat. The money first, she says. He pays the remaining fifty percent, in cash: two months rent, she thinks. He’s clearly revved up, one of those clients who wants to “get his money’s worth.” She steels herself for a long afternoon. To put it bluntly, she finds this man physically repulsive. Usually she can work herself into some state of arousal with a client, some simulated eroticism, even through the pure degradation of it, but she knows right away that’s not going to be possible, so she prepares to disassociate. He has that hobbyist smell of performative, not actual, hygiene, as if not smelling like literal shit sets him above other men, confers on him an aura of desirability. There’s some chit chat in between making out, but not much. He doesn’t remark on how hot she is, tell her she’s beautiful, the way most clients do, who feel on some level genuinely lucky to be in the company of a girl they could never fuck without paying for it. To tell the truth, he takes her body, her presence, for granted. That’s one way of dealing with the shame, for them. She starts to suck his dick. Her stomach turns when she sees how massive it is. Usually a big dick turns her on, but now it’s just an extra imposition. He doesn’t moan, doesn’t shiver, as if he’s impervious to pleasure, as if a girl sucking his dick registers to him as the actualization of a purely mental desire, a check next to a picture on a foreign website in his mind. Now he wants to fuck her. She sits down on his dick and looks into his eyes, which are completely dead. A man kills pleasure in himself, she thinks, in order to kill off the specter of the other (a woman, the ocean, communism, the body, its obscure death, etc.). Heidi said every sex worker needs to learn some form of incantation, ritual, dance, in order not to assimilate the toxic energy of the client. But this hotel room is devoid of magic, it’s a place that lurks in one of the many hallucinatory trapdoors of reality, you can enter and you can leave, but it’ll still be there, room 203. The depressed whore thinks about random things, like tattoos she wants to get, the names of different streets she’s lived on, what year it is, the title of a Polish movie she once saw called Never Gonna Snow Again, how she never remembers any client’s name, even when his dick is inside her, you want this big dick?, the client keeps asking, yes Daddy, give me that big dick, etc., she grabs her own tits, squeezes them, hoping he’ll cum soon, but clients like this always delay cumming as long as possible, the point isn’t the orgasm but the prolongation of her own performance, luckily her own pornographic stream of consciousness, pornographic subconscious, is endless, inexhaustible, she always has a different way to moan, another whore face beneath her face, a way of emptying herself of all meaning, of the illusion of belonging to the human species, every year I become less human, more woman, she thinks, until finally his dick slips out of her. Now he wants her to fuck him. She puts on a condom, does for awhile. Cum for Daddy, he says. He slipped up, she thinks, made a mistake, she counts down from ten and fakes an orgasm, rolls over onto her back, sighs with fake dreaminess. Now he’ll have to give me a break for a while, she thinks. She looks discreetly at the time on the hotel alarm clock: four more hours to kill. Luckily, though, the client seems to have lost all interest in fucking. For the next four hours, they lie in bed together while he talks at her, a different kind of horror. He shows her various trans porn stars and escorts on his phone, remarks with taxonomic obsession on their bodies, their surgeries, their attractive qualities and aesthetic failures, which ones he’s fucked, which ones scammed him out of money (she fucked me, if I saw her I’d slit her throat, a long story about an escort who pretended to be in the hotel room while he stood in the lobby, arguing with her on the phone, how he figured out she was actually in England, the depressed whore laughs internally, to herself, takes notes in case she wants to start scamming herself), this one’s a man now, he said, meaning she detransitioned, he likes playing this game where he’ll show a picture of a girl and say, girl or boy?, by which he means cis or trans woman?, and she plays along, except she doesn’t say “boy” obviously, she says “trans woman,” wave after wave of dysphoria washes over her, to cope with it she starts to masturbate, especially to the porn videos, ooh I bet you’d like to take her cock, he coos, yes, she says, though of course she’s imagining herself as the porn star, thinking about how to make that a reality in the coming years, a couple of the girls are so blindingly beautiful, minor trans sex worker celebrities whom she already follows on Instagram, that she can’t help but feel jealous, he tells a long story about this girl in Florida who he kept trying to get to come visit him for a week at a time every month, but she says she gets too depressed staying in the hotel for that long, I don’t get it?, he says, she’d rather tour for the same amount of time, make $15,000 fucking a bunch of random guys, when she could make the same money with me for an entire week, when I don’t even have that much time to see her, between work and taking care of my mom, the depressed whore tries to explain how it’s not the fucking that’s the hardest part of this job, but she gives up, there’s no use even trying with some people, finally he puts down his phone and tells a more personal story, some jumbled concatenation of events that amounted to a tragic obscurity, intimate sorrow, that led to him losing the most successful gun store in his part of the state due to the machinations of a business rival and a corrupt judge, several years in prison, the boredom, missing his mom, getting out but no longer being able to own a gun, a supreme emasculation in his life, as if his life could be divided between the time when he was able to own a gun and the time after, the dark tedium of it all, there was even a pardon waiting to be signed by Trump, it was sitting on his desk, but guess what day it was?, he says, January 6, and so Trump never got to sign it, funny thing, how you think that was bad for the country but it fucked up my life way worse, he talks about the futility of the American prison system, then goes on to rant about illegal immigrants for awhile, finally says, I’ll jump in the shower and be out of your hair. When he’s out of the shower he asks how she likes the city they’re in. Well, I’ve only seen this hotel, she says. But I think I stick out here. How come?, he says. Well, I’m a whore, for one, and also I’m a Jewish trans girl with a bunch of tattoos. Oh we shoot Jewish people and trans girls on sight around these parts, he says, and bursts into a disturbing fit of laughter. He repeats the joke, cracks up harder. It’s only once he’s getting dressed that she realizes how blind he is, stumbling around the room, God I hate driving in the dark, he says, she realizes she wouldn’t care at all if he drove himself off the road and wrapped his car around a tree, it’s not that she hates him, men like him aren’t even worth it, it’s just that she doesn’t think his life matters, in anyway, at all.
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Stay off the Pipe
By George Scialabba
All presidential elections—especially this one—are important from one point of view and unimportant from another. One party is always the lesser evil, and this year the other party is evil indeed. The dreadful prospect of a Republican victory can be expressed in three words: “Trump’s first term”; or even more economically, in two: “Project 2025.” The consequences of a Republican victory for the unemployed, the uninsured, the indigent, the indebted, those seeking refuge from poverty or violence, and those trying to stay in control of their lives despite an unanticipated pregnancy, will be life-degrading, and in some cases, life-threatening. A Democratic administration will be, as every Democratic administration since Johnson’s has been, a routine misfortune: tepid, unimaginative, deferential to corporate and financial elites, and at least as willing to use force internationally—illegally, as all American use of force has been since the outset of the Korean War—as the Republicans. Still, the Democratic Party today is, as it has been for the last hundred years, very much the lesser evil.
But whoever occupies the White House, America is a plutocracy. That does not mean only that wealth distribution is wildly uneven. It means also that nearly every major institution or process in our society is, if not directly for sale, then subject to financial constraints that make the influence of rich individuals and corporations difficult, and often impossible, to resist. Politicians at every level, who must begin, immediately upon taking office, to devote roughly half of their time to fundraising for the next campaign; university presidents and deans browbeaten by billionaire donors; public-television executives desperate to sell prestige for pennies; federal regulators who hope to exchange their meager salaries for more generous ones from some company their agency now regulates; newspaper editors badgered by their publishers because some corporation has threatened to sue, even with no hope of winning, in the knowledge that the newspaper cannot afford a suit; gigantic asset-management funds that now control an astounding 40 percent of the world’s wealth, including a large share of the physical and social infrastructure on which modern life depends; predatory private-equity funds, which use tailor-made tax laws to profitably destroy functioning companies, including hospitals and nursing homes, at great cost to employees, customers, and patients—these are just a few of the pressure points. The methods of social control through financial power in America are exceedingly numerous and intricate. The result is that very little gets done that the plutocracy—big business and the very rich—does not want done.
Imagining that this state of affairs can be changed by electing a Democratic president—or a Green, Rainbow, or socialist president—is a pipe dream. It can only be changed by a sustained, society-wide, well-resourced and well-coordinated effort by a large and determined anti-plutocratic majority. Those who wish to escape our present cycle of alternating rule by mediocrities and barbarians should keep their eyes on that prize.
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Stranded and Muzzled
By Sue Bergeron
Here’s how I got stranded: Suffering serious burn-out from all my previous phone bank work, I’d skipped working for Joe Biden’s campaign this time. Emerging from my Summer of Discontent, I felt energized by the newfound enthusiasm of the Harris Campaign and decided to sign up for an overnight campaign bus trip to do some fall door-knocking in Scranton, PA. Maybe I’d finally get a chance for quality face time with some of the Keystone voters I’d spoken with on the phone over the years. Beautiful weather was expected in my favorite battleground state that weekend. Alas, it was not to be. Harris organizers informed the hundreds of assembled volunteers that three of the four busses cancelled at the last minute. The campaign had set up a carpool chain and asked us not to bring our cars. So, thirty minutes after kissing my husband goodbye and sending him home I found myself stranded in a parking lot in 38° weather in Boston 65 miles from home. No explanations or apologies were ever given. It’s been suggested to me that the bus business in Boston is inherently corrupt (mob connected) and some questioned if Trump sympathizers threatened the bus executives with vandalism unless they pulled out. This theory is a little too “conspiracy theory” for me, but on the other hand, the stakes are huge in Pennsylvania. The Nate Silver lining? I witnessed hundreds of volunteers fighting (nicely) for those 55 seats available on the lone bus that showed up. I can report there was some frantic wheeling and dealing going on. Things would be very different right now had Scranton’s most famous native son not turned the race over to VP Harris; Lefties like me would more likely be busy boarding busses to Canada, not Scranton. At least we now have hope, even if there is still fear.
How I got muzzled: Blame it on the ghost of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who surely haunts the halls of the Washington Post. Billionaire owner of WAPO, Jeff Bezos has refused to endorse either candidate. Trump’s administration did nothing to avenge the murder of Khashoggi, a journalist at WAPO—one of the largest news outlets in our country. The hit on this legal American resident was alleged to be ordered by Crown Prince Salman of Saudi Arabia. Was it revenge for the sin of criticizing the infamous human rights violator? Who knew writing could be such a fatal occupation? As I write this it’s also being reported that 14 journalists have been killed in the Middle East just this year. The Committee to Protect Journalists has reported no less than an astonishing 67 journalists have been killed worldwide in 2024.
If you are a writer, make no mistake about the very distinct possibility that if you ever wrote anything derogatory about Trump you’re a part of “the enemy within.” When fascists come into power the first thing they do is dismantle The Fourth Estate and replace it with a state run propaganda bureau. The shameful scribblers of the corporate media (I’m talking to you, New York Times) have spent a lot of time bending the knee to Trump and propping him up during this latest election cycle. I think we should all be asking ourselves why that is. Are they auditioning?
The night Trump got a chunk of his ear blown off by an automatic rifle in Butler, PA I was listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast in my car. I envisioned Tim Miller clutching his pearls in horror when Democrat-whisperer Klein spilled the tea on how Democratic heavy hitters had already given up on Joe Biden’s candidacy and were declaring, “Trump’s not really that bad. He’s not really an existential threat to democracy.
Not on my list of sycophants and cowards is The Philadelphia Inquirer. Their editorial board gets my vote for heroism in journalism by breaking from the pack and boldly keeping up their due diligence with a steady stream of articles outing Trump’s political malpractice; the “Inky” also furnished stark reminders about the truth concerning the horrors that actually occurred during Trump’s first term.
I find it hard to respect anyone who supports him no matter their reason. It’s personal with me. Family of mine were stiffed by Trump going back to the days when he beclowned himself while running Atlantic City into the ground.
Would I change anything I ever said about Trump? Hell no! But I do spend a lot of time these days worrying about an angry mob of marauding MAGA militia coming for us. Anyone Trump thinks has wronged him will be a stop on his Revenge Tour. I feel trapped in a dystopian dreamscape. I can hear the glass breaking throughout the land as they swing their chains and toss bricks through the windows of the Democratic Campaign Headquarters everywhere. “Round them up!” goes the rally cry as they drag us through the town square on our way to being jailed by Trump’s own personal enforcer-turned-Nosferatu Stephan Miller. Miller is the architect of the planned concentration camps. The camps Trump has often talked about during his dull hypnotic weaves are not just for undocumented immigrants.
This week at the CNN Town Hall (that the coward Trump skipped out on) VP Harris declared, “Trump has an enemies list…I have a to-do list.” The crowd erupted. Today I finally “grew a pair” and put standing up to Trump back on my own to-do list. With a heart full of hope I proudly cast my ballot for the first female President of the United States. Hope is a dangerous thing. But living in fear is much worse.
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Election Harvest
By Ty Geltmaker
What are we waiting for?
The cows coming in for the winter?
The corn taken down from the stalk?
How many times can a scarecrow pretend to talk?
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The End
By Richard Meltzer
Hey, I’m just hoping against all odds that my fucking life doesn’t end up FRAMED BY HITLER. I was born a couple days after he offed himself (or split for Argentina) — and now he’s back to spit/puke/shit POISON on the remainder of my weary days. Jesus fuck….