America’s Bottomley

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This clip from Trump’s Fox interview with Brett Baier is making the rounds…

YOUTUBE.COM

Trump is boasting about how he used his pardon powers to free low-level criminals. He brings up a woman, jailed on a drug dealing charge, that he pardoned. Baier reminds him that under the policy Trump is touting, wherein he would execute drug dealers, this woman would have been killed.

It is a remarkable moment. For a split second the Fool is caught in his folly, and the gears freeze. Even Brett Baier has to laugh.

But what I see in this clip, more than Trump’s childish policy prescriptions, is one of the keys to the man’s success. How quickly the master Bullshitter comes up with, not one, not two, but three half-coherent responses. Responses graded on a bullshit scale of course. The bar is low.

But Trump is not wooing the genius vote. All he needs is to keep his base bamboozled. And I’m struck, watching this clip, at how quickly the stunned hamsters on the wheels in his brain recover and start spinning even faster than before. How manically the gibbons hurl bananas at the wall to see what might stick. And before you can say, Look out for the bull, you’re covered in fresh bullshit.

Would depend on the degree. Not retroactive. My policy would have scared her off. And his base goes, yeah. Makes sense to me. And he lives to play another day.

You almost have to admire it. It gets him from point A to point B. He never gets bogged down in the details or logic of point A. There’s always a point B and then a point C. And if you get to those points quickly enough, no one remembers point A.

Trump lives his life in five- to ten-minute increments. Whatever bullshit gets him through the next ten minutes. Hell, the next ten seconds. He’ll have new bullshit to spew if/when he makes it through the next ten. Trump family motto. “Trust the Bullshit.”

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The $ubmersible $outh $udan

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June 23, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET

From a safe American home…

Our modern media world manufactured a new social equation this last week.  While the exact math is still in dispute, it goes something like this:

Five people dying @ $250,000 per joy-ride to disaster-site = five days of lead stories.

A few fringe mathematicians have expanded the equation so the above formula is socially equal to:

120 people dying @ a day of famine/starvation in South Sudan = zero coverage.

Folks, this ain’t the new math.

The Ambassador (Redux)

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Ambassador Poole from the late great Golden State has been banished to a terrible team, The Washington Wizards. Since he was sucker-punched by an envious Draymond Green, JP has had a Jamesian education in a world of lies. Two days before he was traded, Golden State’s new GM, had assured journalists that Poole and Jonathan Kuminga would remain by the Bay: “We love having those guys here. Jordan, especially with his contract extension, we plan to have him here for 4 more years at least.” (That “at least” is priceless.) Poole is, per his own words, “a child of God.” As a Christian, he’s probably trying not to cultivate his vengeful side, but I’m under no effing obligation. Ca ira to NOT root for a team run by scum. And I’m not talking (chiefly) about the egotist who punched Jordan here. I’m talking about the pale scum, the thickest scum, the scummiest scum who never dared to stand up to Draymond Green.

What follows is the (anxious) tribute to JP I posted earlier this spring. May there be more Poole parties in his/our future!

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Being Republican

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Senator Tommy Tuberville: “The Covid really brought it out how bad our schools are and how bad our teachers are — in the inner city. Most of them in the inner city, I don’t know how they got degrees, to be honest with you. I don’t know whether they can read and write. … They want a raise, they want less time to work, less time in school. We ruined work ethic in this country.”

Tommy would have been right at home on a southern plantation.

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“Structuring Participation”: Class Matters Podcast with Jane McAlevey

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Forget Succession. If you want drama (and spicy talk), listen in to the latest Class Matters podcast. Episode 12 (link below) features Jane McAlevey who is prompted by Katherine Isaac, Gordon Lafer, and Adolph Reed Jr. to explain (1) how the work of organizing jumps off in earnest AFTER a union wins a certification election. (Getting to a first union contract is hard.) (2) how the health of any union depends on constant engagement with workers as a collective body, not as atomized figures in one-on-one grievance proceedings (3) how real democracy in a union or anywhere rests on “structuring participation.”

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Notes on the State of Whiteness

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Truscott wrote this column at the beginning of May, but his piece remains on time. “Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it.” [1]

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Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has, with the recent exposure of an unredacted text message to one of his producers, done the American people a grand favor.  He has unleashed for all to see the truth behind his, and racists’ like him, devotion to white supremacy.

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Empire

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From the parking lot, a view to the harbor.
The sign says: Veterans Enter Here.
A hoisted flag snaps for every shot fired.
For you, Empire. Don’t Walk Here
posted on a scapular of grass.
The bandshell benches painted lumpy blue.
Such innocence, I won’t chastise you.

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Bread and Freedom

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This talk was included in the collection, Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1961), published after Camus’s death. It originally appeared (per the Anarchist Library) as “Restaurer la valeur de la liberté” (“Restoring the value of freedom”) in the September 1953 issue of La Révolution Prolétarienne, a French syndicalist journal. The title was changed when it was reprinted later the same year. “Bread and Freedom,” incidentally, was also the title of the Russian translation of Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.

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Boners, Interiors, Bourgeois Bonheur & “The Boxer”: Quick and Dirty Angles on Bonnard

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Pierre Bonnard, Nu (Nude, Yellow Screen) 1920

I missed this painting’s tumescent essence when I first saw it in the Bonnard show at the Aquavella gallery. The hard-on architectonics of its straight-up parallel lines didn’t come through to me until I was walking home around the Central Park reservoir. Thin phallic high-rises on the cityscape’s horizon had a Eureka effect. Suddenly I could sense the erection behind Bonnard’s construct.

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You Made Beauty a Monster to Me

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..I took the train to Sacramento. I thought about killers and about their victims, too. I thought about how I must be the only whore and the only romantic (which is to say, the only detective) on the entire train, or at least in my compartment. Did that mean the rest of the train was full of killers, or, at least, of accomplices? I was on my way to spend the weekend with Harvey. We had a small fight before I left, because my top surgery was coming up, and I said that if I couldn’t get the surgery I’d probably kill myself, and they said that was obsessive, they were worried about me, and I said but that’s why I’m getting the surgery, so I don’t have to kill myself, so I can be happy. It took me a long time to realize that I live, more than most people, entirely by instinct, in the murky sea of my instincts (my oceanic body), and that I never weigh the pros and cons of my actions, never think deductively, never imagine the forking paths my life could take, though in retrospect those paths, those labyrinths, become objects of dread and fascination (or is it that, instead of paths, life-in-retrospect becomes nothing but a series of crumbling, hallucinatory towers, a drowned dream, a womb that’s also a grave?) My reality is my body, and the other way around. When I was younger, I thought this meant I didn’t have dreams, since I didn’t have plans, bourgeois plans, but in fact it meant I was a consummate dreamer, that I dreamt with my eyes open. I became an alcoholic for twenty years entirely in an instant, without premeditation, just like I moved to South America for no real reason, or for entirely romantic reasons, just like I let Rebecca move in with me after our first date, just like one day I started taking hormones without thinking about it. I feel bad for people who aren’t like this, like me. I feel closer to a flower, a supernova, a subway schizophrenic, than to a res cogitans, a thinking thing. On the train, I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and watched the sunset.

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“Love…Thy Will Be Done” (& Jody is a Preacher)

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C. Liegh McIness commended a lovely track by Prince that wasn’t released until after his death, Baby You’re a Trip, and that, in turn, led your editor to another amazement on Prince’s posthumous Originals collection. A version of this song, with the Cuban American pop singer, Martika, doing the vocal, was a hit in Australia. Here’s Prince’s version…

Love… Thy Will Be Done – YouTube

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On this and every Memorial Day, my family and I remember Grandpa

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This is the way CNN commemorated Memorial Day in 2015, with a story they called, “The General Who Apologized to the Dead Soldiers on Memorial Day.”

“At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, Memorial Day 1945 was an elegiac occasion. Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., who had led the U. S. Sixth Corps through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy and now commanded the Fifth Army, gave a speech that is particularly relevant for today when the trauma of our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to haunt so many vets.

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Entering War & Coming Home (Viet Nam, Fifty Years on)

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Originally published here in 2020.

Most Army Soldiers came to and from Viet Nam aboard a 707 commercial airliner. Two years ago, I was seated next to a retired flight attendant. Somehow we started a conversation about Viet Nam. She told me she was a stewardess who flew the flights bringing soldiers to and from Viet Nam. I told her how, as we flew to and from the war, the stewardesses looked like angels, especially on the way home after my tour. She told me about the heartbreak she felt flying, “….so many boys to Viet Nam… how young they were… how depressing the flights to Viet Nam were. It was a different experience flying them home.”

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Disney Time With Conner O’Malley

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Since I last wrote about comedian/videomaker Conner O’Malley in 2020, he’s been posting much less frequently to YouTube, as his work has become more ambitious and elaborate. His latest, “Rebranded Mickey Mouse”, went online in March – and it may be his best to date.  O’Malley compresses so much gobsmacking bizarreness – scary-funny-weird narrative surprises, uncanny use of deepfakes and grandiose world-building – into its ten-minute running time that he seems to have assembled all the elements of a totally fresh, satirical aesthetic. It both begs for and beggars analysis.

I won’t ruin it for you by attempting to summarize the story. [Editor’s Note: Watch it below!]  But for starters, know that “Rebranded Mickey Mouse” refers to the video’s protagonist (O’Malley) – a young man who has given up his original human identity to embody a Jokerfied reboot of the Disney character.

O’Malley’s expertly tweaking the empty-headed Hollywood trend of gritty, “adult” adaptations of kiddie IP – like the just-announced TV series depicting Winnie the Pooh’s old pal Christopher Robin as “a disillusioned New Yorker navigating his quarter-life crisis with the help of the weird talking animals who live beyond a drug-induced portal outside his derelict apartment complex.”

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